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13. Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak (PC, 2016) - 12:18
Completed the campaign on Normal difficulty.
The original Homeworld's greatest strength has always been its purity of vision: a race of castoffs, consigned to live and die on a desert planet, rediscovering their ancestry and plotting a journey back home. Throughout the game's many missions, two things remained constant: the sense of undertaking a long, arduous pilgrimage, and the constant oppression of having to fight against mysterious forces with dwindling resources. At a time when the real-time strategy genre was all about amassing huge forces faster than your enemies, Homeworld asked you to think of every ship, from the mightiest battlecruiser to the smallest single-person fighter, as precious.
Though the setting is far removed from the interstellar journey of the first Homeworld, Deserts of Kharak evokes very much the same atmosphere. Telling the story of the original expedition that, a century later, would eventually lead to the construction of the Mothership, Deserts of Kharak is all about a long, arduous pilgrimage in the face of fierce opposition on the one hand and limited resources on the other. Like the first Homeworld, Deserts of Kharak feels like a very lonely game; help is sometimes too distant to be of much use, but more often is simply non-existent. You are, for all intents and purposes, on your own for much of the campaign.
So Deserts of Kharak gets a lot of the important atmospherics right. As a game, though, it has a few problems. First and foremost, resources. Maps will often be filled with plenty of resources to see you through the fight, but often the missions end before you can recover them all. Earlier Homeworld games would automatically collect those resources for you; here, you must gather them yourself before triggering specific events. What this means in practice is that mission progress often gets put on hold just so you can build up your resource banks. At its worst, mining can kill the momentum of a mission.
If you're a better person than I, this won't matter very much because you'll just pass on the extra resources and power through the game anyways. Many people report a campaign that was a touch too easy. I, on the other hand, got stuck on several missions. One conceit the game doesn't shy away from in order to up the difficulty is to throw endless waves of enemies at you, which reinforces the feeling of overwhelming odds but also makes it seem like the computer is cheating pretty badly. This can get ridiculous in later levels, as Deserts of Kharak throw multiple cruisers at you. Meanwhile, if your force ever gets wiped out even once, rebuilding can be arduous at best, and impossible at worst.
Unfortunately for me, this is enough to sour my impression of Deserts of Kharak somewhat. It also makes me wonder if my experience with the original Homeworld is coloured less by the difficulty of later stages, and more by that one mission where I stole fifty ion cannon frigates and broke the fleet supply cap. But that's at least as much my problem as it is Deserts of Kharak. Whatever its flaws, it does a great job of building upon the Homeworld legacy, something that seemed unimaginable just a few short years ago.