When there are dozens of expendable units on screen, often presented from a bird’s-eye view, how do you ensure that the player feels invested in the stories they have to tell? 1999’s Homeworld solved this problem by making the central character equivalent to the largest unit in the game – Karan S’jet became Fleet Command for the now-iconic Mothership, effectively erasing the boundaries between her and her vessel. Karan’s arc was likewise elevated to a galactic scale. The Mothership discovered her home planet Kharak burning, the majority of the population dead, the only hope of survival an exodus to find the survivors’ ancestral homeworld Hiigara. It’s a bold move, then, to go in the opposite direction in Homeworld 3.
The threat of The Anomaly, a phenomenon disrupting hyperspace travel, is as large as anything the Hiigarans have ever faced. But Homeworld 3’s story is a more intimate examination of the relationship between Fleet Command Imogen S’jet (Karan’s descendant) and her Intel Officer Isaac Paktu, her burden as the new Mothership’s navigator, and later the fraught bond with their main antagonist.
Crammed into just 13 missions, several of them extremely short, Homeworld 3’s story beats are never given quite enough runway. Imogen begins to settle in as Fleet Command just as attention is drawn to Isaac, which is equally swiftly replaced by the reveal of the villain – the queen of the new Incarnate faction. There is a hint of tragic loneliness in the latter’s backstory, but her naïvety mostly leaves us puzzled about her ability to command such a vast and unified force. The contrast between the Hiigarans’ scientific rationalism and their enemies’ religious zealotry has long been a mainstay of the series, yet there is little exploration of how this particular brand of fanaticism works beyond the Queen’s supernatural command of hyperspace.
As a consequence, the story is also inconsistent in how well it motivates the action. At its best, Homeworld 3’s mission design is sublime, underpinned by a tense game of cat-and-mouse between Imogen and the Incarnate Queen. The Buran Ice Shelf, in particular, stands out as an instant classic: hiding the Mothership in icy depths while smaller craft attempt to take out sensors and distract a growing enemy force is nail-biting; failure results in a battle against overwhelming odds. But at its worst, Homeworld 3 pays questionable homage to the original with a cover-based slog through an asteroid field. Nonetheless, Blackbird must be commended for the variety of missions and level design, from a tower defence of sorts to a hit-and-run on an enemy base involving just a few squadrons of strikecraft.
This diversity is, at least in part, a result of this game’s headline feature: the introduction of terrain. Asteroids, hyperspace gates, space stations, megaliths and debris transform once-barren spaces into complex arrangements
