Man im really interested to see impressions from noobs to this game that never played it. Wonder how well its held up. Game looks pretty good now. Music has always been incredible. The storytelling was always great. Gameplay is really the only iffy thing.
Watch a YouTube Let's Play of the original. Graphically, it holds up well. I mean, the game was set in space so most of the backdrop is going to be black with the occasional colorful gases here and there. Spaceships are usually modelled in simple polygons. The only thing that really stands out are the low res textures and some of the dated looking effects which the HD remaster cleans up well.
As for the gameplay itself, that should be interesting to see. The thing about Homeworld is that it's a pretty unique RTS. It wasn't a product of its time because when it was released, it was the only game of its kind on the market. It spawned two copycats (that I know of) Hegemonia and ORB - both games that you can find on Steam sold for as low as $1 during sales) but the Z-Axis RTS never really took off. The genre itself is a bit of an evolutionary dead end on the RTS family tree. We have nothing to compare it to today because no other games have built on the legacy of Homeworld and we have nothing to compare it too in the past because Homeworld was the first of it's kind.
What I can say about the game however is that I thought the way it approached Z-Axis movement was very well done and the campaign and story was amazing. Multiplayer battles were also really cool since you had to think about flanking positions in a 3D plane and ship formations could make or break you.
The game is difficult like others have pointed out though but I always felt like the difficulty added to the storyline. The story of Homeworld takes a lot of inspiration from Battlestar Galactica and a bit from Star Trek Voyager. A civilization in its last throes of survival should not be able to send wave after wave of ships on an enemy and should have to think of new and resourceful ways to defeat the odds.