Recent reviews by blackguard

Well written, well executed, dripping with atmosphere.

Overall a 6.5/10. There's a lot of game here and it's competently put together, but I'm here to tell you the bad stuff. You can read about the good stuff (like the bosses!) everywhere else.

The combat:
- As long as this game is, somehow there's only one light combo in the entire game. You do get one spear weapon with a slightly different combo as part of a hidden midgame quest, but it gets quickly outclassed even if you do like its combo because it's not upgradable. You also get another spear from the secret true end boss in case you want to put yourself through a NG+. No hold or timing combo variations of any sort. Games from 2005 like God of War and Devil May Cry 3 had more combat variety in the first couple hours than this game has after 50.
- In contrast to the lack of light attack variation, you have three stances that all modify the heavy attack. In theory you're supposed to tailor your combat style to the enemy, but in practice all of them take a lot of skill points that are much better put to use buffing up your stats. In addition, they seem fairly useless, as even the basic Smash stance that you get for free is serviceable. Realistically you only really use the heavy attack to 1- or 2-shot basic mobs because the heavy attack is unreliable vs bosses - see the next point.
- Enemy hitboxes (the ones where THEY take damage) are OK for the light attack, but completely unreliable for the heavy smash attack - things that look like they connect, frequently and reliably seem to do no damage. And I'm excluding instances where enemies visibly move out of the way or dodge the hit. No issues with your own hitbox - I've never been hit by something that didn't look like it connected.
- Basic enemies are extremely uninteresting to fight and tend to die from either a charged attack + 1 light hit, or in one full light combo.
- You get a few different spells and transformations to work with, and the game facilitates builds for them. While the transformations are fine, the spells are unfortunately poorly implemented. Your mana doesn't replenish at all except with a couple rare items that restore a very very small amount, which they do at the cost of crippling your healing. This on its own would be fair enough, since that scarcity is something you can balance around. However, the instance you tap the spell button, three things happen: the game puts you in a casting animation, takes your mana, and the spell goes on cooldown. Meaning if you get interrupted at any point before casting is complete, you not only took damage and didn't cast the spell, but you also lost mana that you're not getting back AND the spell is now on cooldown.
- Unskippable cutscenes. This includes those at the start of the boss fights, and any boss phase change cutscenes. Suffice to say, the more you struggle with bosses, the more of a problem this will be.

The level design:
- Each level has pretty much one unchanging colour palette. The green one. The yellow one. The white one. The grey one. And so on. 95% of the environments are one note and uninteresting to look at. Not something you'd notice if you saw some screenshots or just clicked around the progress bar while watching gameplay videos, but the problem starts as soon as the first chapter and doesn't really go away.
- The environmental design isn't just artistically bankrupt, it's also functionally bankrupt. The levels, despite looking pretty on a technical level, have no interesting features, and I found myself lost a lot of the time due to how samey everything looks. In many places you can just do a 180 and won't be able to tell that anything's changed. There's very few landmarks to aid navigation, and no map of any sort to help with this problem.
- The game won't let you fall off ledges, which I have no particular problem with - until it decides out of nowhere that you're in one of the <1% of areas in the game where ledges are a falling hazard. These instances are only good for a couple surprise deaths and pointless to the extent that I don't see why they're a thing to begin with. The inconsistency is jarring when it happens.
- Invisible walls everywhere like they never went out of style. These are ubiquitous and frequently break the immersion. This is further aggravated by the invisible walls massively mismatching the geometry, especially if you have the audacity to want to explore, and are a problem even in some boss arenas whose play spaces don't match the visuals.
- Between the above level design issues and the non-boss enemies being uninteresting to fight, the exploration quality is somewhere between mostly boring and aggressively annoying, and on some level I think this game would've been improved by just being a boss rush.

This all to say that, aside from the fantastic bosses and the refreshing lack of cringe, preachy or brain-dead writing, the game is mostly amateur hour.
Not bad for the developer's first game in this genre, and I look forward to better games from them in the future.

Bigger and better than the first one.

One of the best games of all time got one of the best DLCs of all time.
Except for the last boss, whose phase 2 is one of the worst I've ever played.

In their efforts to polish the game and make it more approachable, they sandblasted all the personality of the PS2 version.
It's still a good game if you've never played the original though.

Nothing to write home about, but it's a pretty decent metroidvania.

Best way I can describe it is kind of a twin peaks / twilight zone take on Hotel Dusk: Room 215.
One of my favorite games of 2024 so far.

Games with great writing are few and far between. This is one of them.

Although I didn't resonate with some of the topics and themes, and occasionally felt like it outstayed its welcome, it remained compelling throughout and succeeded at making me cry at multiple points throughout the narrative.

Outstanding.

EDIT: And my 2024 GOTY nominee.

I read the negative reviews about the writing and I thought they were bogus. Deserts of Kharak was fine. No way they would screw it up that badly.

They did screw it up that badly.
The writing is generic Netflix trash. The story focuses too much on poorly written characters that I not only find it hard to care about, but that have no place in a Homeworld narrative.

And the missions constantly interrupt the gameplay with cutscenes that contain the aforementioned trash writing and characters.
I'm 4 missions in at the time of this review and I've spent more time in cutscenes than in gameplay. I truly, madly, deeply wish this was hyperbole - but it's not.

Easily the worst Homeworld game ever made. You have been warned.

Closest we've ever gotten to a Freelancer sequel.

The story and writing are the weakest part, and even that's better than most of the games that release these days.
Everything else is on point.