Spacial cockups aside, Homeworld 2 is an excellent game - the game is absorbing, and beautiful from the first moments to the last. The game opens up with a neatly presented piece of FMV - no flashy action, just a downbeat slideshow of images with sparse animation, whilst an emotionless voice narrates over the top. The style feels very heavily influenced by Japanese sci-fi anime, and does an absolutely wonderful job in setting the tone for the game, as do the other scenes throughout - a lot of developers could and should take their cues from Relic in how to use FMV in a modern game. The style is carried over as best as possible into the game, with the use of a very quiet, classical score, and other unemotional, detached voices that instruct and inform you. Along with the back history and plot, it all comes together to form a quite unique game atmosphere.

   

As I said earlier, H2 is a 3D RTS - you can move units in any direction, however, you will be mostly moving in the usual 2 dimensions in the single player game. On each mission, you take your mothership, and use as a base from which to kick the ass of whatever is in its vicinity. The mothership has a set of modules within it, into which you can place different types of ship building facilities, as well as other facilities for resource collection, automated defence, and research. It's the heart of your every operation, but it's very slow to move. However, you can build other ships to house the various facilities, meaning that you can spread your operations to more than one place at a time.

I don't really have the space to explain the control system here, save to say it works very well to provide a 2D interface for such a '3D' game. However, tasks such as setting up units to form an all round defence to your mothership are quite fiddly, and whilst you won't often have to do something like this in the single player campaign, you don't have the luxury of such an assumption in multiplayer, which means that the multiplayer play is far from the game's strongest point.

The strongest point of this game is probably the graphics - they are gorgeous. From your little squadrons of fighters and bombers, to the heeeuuuge bases and capital ships you'll see, to the blinding eruptions of said bases. You can take your viewpoint from any angle, and focus on ships a long way out - so that each fighter is little more than a couple of pixels, or right up close - so that the squadron fills the screen, or anywhere in between. You can see each ship's weapon turrets turn and aim at the enemies, you can see the little trails left behind each ship, you can see the damage caused to the ships... the game is beautiful, there's no doubt about it. If you want real time shadows though, you're going to need a top of the line games machine (I was on an Athlon 2500+ with a Radeon 9500 Pro, and it was a little stuttery with shadows on) - for the most part, you won't notice them, and as the framerate will double without them, I was more than happy to live without them.

But the graphical praise doesn't just end there... the tactical overlays are well thought out, with each class of ship being represented by a different shape. Not only that, but you have a tactical 'sensors' view, which shows all the available information for the current map. The transfer between this and the 'live action' view is completely seamless, and allows you to jump around the vast maps quickly and easily.

   

The gameplay itself almost lives up to the flawless graphics and presentation... but a couple of rather obvious flaws just pull it back from being a classic. The missions are varied enough to keep you interested, and the later of the 15 missions are big - they may take hours to play. However, the missions are often too reliant on scripted events - you complete an objective, and the next event appears, quite often giving a tactical swing to the mission. Sadly, the events aren't varied at all, so on a second play of a mission, you can move and build your units to the most advantageous position if you so wish - it kind of takes the strategy out of the game when you know the enemy's next move. Also, despite your units being quite intelligent as to what they go after when sent after an enemy group, the enemies are far too easy to distract - quite often, you just have to fly a couple of interesting units past a group of enemies, and they will follow, abandoning whatever they were guarding, or letting you lead them in circles, repeatedly past a line of your torpedo frigates for a full broadside.

However, despite these faults, the game is still a corker, and certainly the best RTS to appear in the year so far.