Entry No.86e

IT Writers Awards

This game opens to the scene of the Kushan civilisation still rebuilding their homeworld Higaara, years after the entire surface was razed in the Taiidan war. This once pernicious enemy, the Taiidan Empire, is now fragmented by civil war and no longer a major threat. However war vessels are still docked in orbit around the world in order to respond to sniping attacks from the rising Turanic Raiders and the occasional vengeful strike by the genocidal Taiidans. Minor political struggles characterise the gradual reconstruction of the Kushan world and the transition from the military authority system to one based on the opinions of the populace.

Yet something very sinister threatens the hard-won tentative peace that the Kushans have achieved. Despite their fundamental foes the Taiidan Empire slipping into a self-inflicted funk, the Kushans are soon confronted by a terrifying biological entity known as the Beast. This nefarious space being can control the minds and behaviour of any spacecraft crew it can "infect". The hapless crew is then utterly converted to the Beast cause and will work tirelessly to aid its proliferation. The Beast acquisitions to date are so numerous that the captured fleet it controls is large enough to threaten entire civilisations. The author of the inspiring narrative for Homeworld, Marcus Skyler has written the continuing storyline for Cataclysm, and once again it is a plausible and intriguing window into an alternative universe.

Homeworld took the rather dried-and-preserved 2D isometric strategy game and blasted it into three dimensions, throwing away the anchoring surfaces of planets completely. Not only did they pull off the engine and mechanics required to drive such a game very well, they also pioneered a impressively fast, simple, and effective camera control system that works by locking itself down to contexts - such as a mothership or a fleet of units on the move, making navigation and manipulation of the game view incredibly easy. On top of this they still retained the familiar procedure of box-dragging to select units, yet in Homeworld your "drag envelope" is actually a vastly complex expanding 3D cone based on your point of view and shifting camera angles. Yet Relic Entertainment managed it. It functions just as quickly and simply as it does in the comparatively primeval 2D environments of old. On top of that, they created an ingenius 3-space location setting tool based on relative planes of orientation set by the attitude and orientation of your mothership, which is the game's only constant. Couple this with seamless local scale and galaxy scale frame of reference switching, and its easy to admire their efforts.

A follow up to Homeworld was utterly inevitable. Yet where mission packs are prone to simply adding units and missions to the existing game creating a painfully similar (and often tiresome) landscape, Cataclysm, forged by the development outfit responsible for Half-Life: Counterstrike, is a complete re-working of the tech tree, races and storyline. Cataclysm continues beyond the events played out in the original game, with a significant time passage in between allowing for major restructuring of the technology and political situation facing the Kushan race as you begin the game.

Barking Dog have totally stretched the traditional realtime strategy mould, designing the units in the game as if one was a paranoid Kushan engineer in wartime, facing complete extermination at every turn. As a result the units in Cataclysm are almost never cut and dried in terms of their capabilities. Most of them have multiple upgrades that can be researched to adjust their performance, resistance or combat role. Several units can even "pair" with another of their own type, creating a new unit with different characteristics, whilst in the field, long after manufacture. The result of this mentality is an extremely flexible and survival-oriented force, that can respond adequately to a wide variety of assault forces or defences.

This opens up the options available to the player, especially at the end of a game where their resources are for the most part committed into tangible units. It is a laudable approach that allows a player to retain lingering shreds of hope in the most oppressive circumstances. Even the chilling realisation that you have spent all your resources creating a particular kind of force while the enemy was shrewdly formulating one perfectly suited to annihilate it. In traditional games this almost certainly spells doom. In Cataclysm the player can combine units together, research some upgrades to their unit force, upgrade the units by docking them with the mothership and viola, they have a significantly different kind of fleet, hopefully more suited to tackling the invaders. Naturally this opens up a new layer of post-production strategy, as the enemy is then invited to retool his or her fleet to better oppose the changes enacted by their enemy.

As a basic example, the basic "worker" units can harvest resources straight out of the hangar, then with upgrades they can acquire the ability to repair friendly units, and eventually salvage damaged enemy units, which basically amounts to capturing them and replacing the crew with one of your own. Each upgrade must be researched, and once complete each new unit will be able to use all researched upgrades, while existing units in the field can briefly return to base to receive a quick patching. This gives the worker units some of the qualities of the most valuable units from the original Homeworld, putting them within easy reach for all players at the beginning of the game.

The graphics in Cataclysm are still gorgeous, they still hold a certain quality of rendering that never ceases to impress. The new ship designs and new backgrounds are equally superb, with a little more extravagant flair and attitude expressed in the units designs. Naturally Cataclysm still flies at 1024x768 on an average machine with a TNT2 accelerator or better. This game is one of the few platforms that gains particular benefit from the application of ultra-high resolutions. Also, the weapons effects and animations have been revamped, and the new effects are truly jaw-dropping.

Playing Cataclysm is quite a refreshing experience on the whole. However if you found the pace of the original a little too slow, Cataclysm offers the option of an 8x time compression function that allows you to accelerate harvesting and other mundane processes, or shorten lengthy flights. Cataclysm does offer at least the same level of complexity as the first game, which is mostly a good thing, yet players who found the original game brain-taxing may short out while playing Cataclysm. However it is worth pointing out that the niggling maintenance issues that sometimes detracted from Homeworld's gameflow have been savagely streamlined in Cataclysm.

Overall, Homeworld: Cataclysm is a very well planned augmentation of the original game. Taking bold strides into uncharted strategy territory, the game brings a new flexibility and "grunge" to the previously white-collared world of the Kushan and the quest to defend their planet of origin. Highly recommended.

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