Yes the transport is smoking upwards.
No we don't know why either, it just is 'kay?

When last we left them we had helped guide them from the tragic sacking of Kharak, the barren desert planet to which they had been exiled millennia ago, through to reclaiming their rightful home of Hiigara from the despotic Taiidan Emperor Reisstu. Under the watchful gaze of the Angel Moon the newly returned Hiigarans began the arduous process of restoring their civilisation from the brink of extinction and learning the truth behind their exile. They had hoped that peace would prevail giving them a respite. Sadly for them fate has in store a cruel irony. The very thing that made their epic journey possible in the first place is coveted by the Vaygr Warlord Makaan - the great Hyperspace Core. With it and the two other great cores he aims to fulfil the prophecy of the end times and become the Sajuuk-khar or chosen of Sajuuk. To that end a great crusade has been rampaging across the eastern rim of the galaxy, it's armies intent on one thing - to reach Hiigara and claim the great core.

He isn't getting it without a fight though, the Hiigarans have constructed a second mothership. One designed to be the core of a self-sufficient fleet that will use the core to seek out precisely how Makaan intends to use the three cores and stop him. Time is precious, the Vaygr threaten everything that has been achieved. Your task is to guide that fleet and teach the Vaygr precisely why the Hiigarans have a reputation for resilience. It isn't just Hiigara that stands to fall though. With the three cores the Vaygr are set to herald in a new dark age of conquest across the entire galaxy with no one to stop them. These are dark times indeed.

A Vaygr shipyard. Vaygr ships have a vertical
Chris Foss styling to them. Compared to the horizontal
Peter Elson lines and arms of the Hiigarans.

That's the setup and what a corker it is too. Although it brings us to the first major problem this game has - it's manual is too short. The original Homeworld came with a detailed manual that explained the history of Kharak and it's peoples, why they chose to build the mothership and gave you much needed context into the universe. It meant when, as part of the third mission, you returned to find Kharak reduced to a lifeless husk and the same vicious fleet is now attacking the cryo-pod trays containing literally the last of your people you understood it on an emotional level. The story resonated as the Khushan weren't just a funny named bunch of people, they had a history and hopes for a bright future as they discovered their true origins in the cosmos. For the sake of an ancient treaty they didn't even remember 300 million of them had been slaughtered mercilessly. It was a wonderful hook that invested the player in the game and compelled them to complete it.

Shipyard suffering reactor failiure.
You hear the metallic groans of it breaking apart too.

Homeworld 2's manual devotes a whole two pages to back history. Certainly you can play the game without knowing the back history, but various events in the story simply will fall flat as you have no context to understand what it means. For instance one event of fleet control talking about a particular ship carrying the last of certain species simply will be a ho hum affair if you don't know the history behind these people and why their near extinction is a very very bad sign for the future. We have heard that the decision to have such a light manual was made by the publisher to allow a consistent manual for all the markets including the European one which has moved to stocking games in DVD boxes of late. All we can say is - bad publisher, no biscuit!

Fortunately not all is lost. We recommend you either acquire the Prima Strategy Guide and read Appendix C before playing the game, or visit the Homeworld Shipyards which has an online transcript of the history. Indeed both sources will also give you a better run down on the ship capabilities and uses than the manual does which newcomers to the Homeworld series will need. Just be sure to avoid looking at anything other than the history and Hiigaran ship summaries or you will spoil chunks of the storyline for yourself. Which would be a shame because a large part of the fun is the unknown of what is coming after each jump and what you will be asked to do. While we agree that it is a bad thing to have to buy another product above the game cost to get the full story at least the story is available.

A resource collector at work. The arms do
indeed articulate and move, a nifty detail.

So how does it play? Lets start with the easy bit - the graphics. Jaw dropping. With decent hardware this game produces images that rival the effects work done for TV series. Energy weapons blast ravening beams across space, missiles twist wildly homing in on a target and cannon fire darts across the battlefield. Weapon fire, engines and explosions light up the surrounding ships. Scorch marks persist on the hulls till repaired and the ships cast shadows across their own hulls as they move (sadly not on each other yet, the hardware isn't quite up to that even now.) Exploding capital ships not only blast into a cloud of debris and gas but as their powerplant overloads produce an intense burst of white light obscuring the battlefield. This is a vast improvement over the original game and it is one of a growing number of games that demands DirectX 9 because it actually wants to use DirectX 9 features.

Graphical touches abound from 'window lights' to give a sense of scale to the common texture sizing for every unit. No more fuzzy resource controllers next to pin sharp resource collectors! Ships have running lights, or light their own engine cowls with the glow of the drives. It all gives a nice sense of scale as you watch a fighter crawl past some of the more behemoth ships in your arsenal like the Destroyer or Battlecruiser. At least it does, if you remember to turn NLIPS (Non-Linear Inverse Proportional Scaling) off. This option effectively 'scales up' the smaller craft in the game as a game aid to allow you to find them easily on the battlefield. While we can understand it being defaulted to on for the newcomers to the series we do wish that a little more emphasis was made on what it does in the manual. Without it your strike craft seem only mildly smaller than the frigates which in turn are not that much smaller than the carriers etc etc... Indeed it breaks suspension of disbelief slightly as you often end up wondering just how they squeeze all those fighters into the launch bays given that it looks like three barely fit. All screenshots shown in this review are with NLIPS turned firmly off.

Vaygr Carrier beginning to break apart. Debris is
left behind from larger ships that can be collected too.

Of course these frills do have a tradeoff - to get a really spectacular view you are going to need fairly beefy hardware to do the game justice. Even on fairly grunty cards like ATi's 9700 family you can easily configure matters to require more memory than 128 Mbs of on card RAM allows. Again the engine is bleeding edge enough to justifiably want a 256 Mb card if you want anti-aliasing, shadows, high ansiotropic filtering and high quality textures. Certainly playing at 1024x768 with 4xFSAA and 8xAF required a 128 Mb 9700 to turn shadows off or watch the game crawl as the card uses the AGP bus to hold textures a bit more than is comfortable. There is another curl too in that the game is using features that are sufficiently new that drivers still haven't entirely got the kinks out of them yet. Fortunately the game engine is configurable through the command line to turn off advanced features. Sadly the manual doesn't detail how to do this - in fairness to Vivendi this is likely to become less of an issue now that driver teams have a game using those features to test their drivers with. If you are experiencing graphical corruption effects than we highly recommend a quick visit to Relic News, a fan site for all games Relic made, and visit the forums. Quite a few helpful and handy guides are available in the technical support sections detailing how to get around driver issues. Please note both ATi and nVidia users will need to visit there as both driver sets have various issues.

Part of the moody black and white cutscene movies.
These do the bulk of storytelling within the game and
can be replayed seperately from the main menu
after completing a mission.