Homeworld: Cataclysm

This game was an excellent expansion of the original concept within Homeworld - You command a mothership, harvest resources in space and build / research your way out of tricky situations.

This stand alone entry in the Homeworld universe added some nice features :-

- Command ships now have a superweapon
- Wormholes were added to multiplayer games, which does change the strategy of battle

The biggest change for me was the addition of a 2nd race - The Beast. This race had a viral infection at the core of the gameplay mechanic, resulting in a re-think on how you conquest the galaxy.

Overall it's a very good expansion on the Homeworld franchise.

This would be more enjoyable if the graphics weren't horrid. The original Homeworld had much better visuals in many things (explosions notably).

The gameplay is good since there's a lot of added dimension over the original game. Useless/redundant ships from the original didn't carry onto Cataclysm, but were replaced by more specialized ships that can be used for special use. Yeah you won't make an assault force with any of them, but that's not the point.

Definitely not as good as Homeworld2, but I think this has more improvement than disappointements over the original. (if you don't count the story...lol)

Ultimately I think Homeworld Cataclysm will be remembered as an interesting diversion that failed to be as great as its predecessor.

It did make many interesting gameplay changes. instead of big none/slow moving motherships you get commandships that have decent speed and firepower. you also can add various modules onto them (engineering, support etc) to improve your population cap, and allow research etc. But these changes are not necessarily for the better.

A lot of the changes are more interesting than they are useful. 2 standard fighter ships can combine together with eachother to form 1 corvette. There are ships that can halographically mimic enemy ships. Again, these are interesting changes, but not necesarily for the better.

Nothing is that straight forward anymore. Some ships now do extreme multi tasking, like the workers, which now are workers, salvagers, and repairers, which I guess is useful since the population cap, even after building as many support modules as possible is extremely low.

Other ships are painfully 1 dimmensional. There is a frigate that just rams into things. It's called a ramming frigate. Neat?

They were definitely trying to change things in this game, which is admirable, and even with all the changes it's unmistakably Homeworld, but... Ultimately the original homeworld remains the superior game.

However, it supplied a nice diversion and an interesting story line in the single player campaign while waiting for homeworld 2 to come out.