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The plot is yet another way in which Deserts is basically Homeworld all over again.
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Unfortunately the inhabitants of the desert - the religious Gaalsien, who see spaceflight as a mortal sin that will bring destruction down on Kharak 1 - don’t take tremendously kindly to any of this and launch an all-out war against the North, which means that the Kapisi now has to battle hordes of bloodthirsty desert warriors on their way to the Anomaly. Said shipwreck is located in the middle of the inhospitable planet-spanning desert, so the pole-dwelling Northern Coalition outfit and dispatch an expedition force centered around a huge aircraft carrier on tank treads called the Kapisi. Deserts is set on the Homeworld prison planet of Kharak shortly after its inhabitants achieve basic spaceflight, and follows the search for the shipwreck containing the hyperspace core (here referred to as the Primary Anomaly) that kicks off the events of Homeworld 1. I should back this up a little bit, though.
#Homeworld deserts of kharak series#
That sense of attrition has always been part of Homeworld a key feature of the series is that your fleet and your mined resources persists from mission to mission, which promotes a keen sense of efficiency on the part of the player, and something that is especially heightened in Deserts of Kharak thanks to the comparatively small set of assets you have to play with. This means you gain a healthy appreciation for the innovations Deserts does bring to the Homeworld formula: the use of tactics, terrain, positioning and special abilities to bring the pain down on the overwhelming enemy forces without losing too many of your own.
#Homeworld deserts of kharak plus#
There’s an enforced supply cap restricting the number of units you can build that starts out low and gradually increases as the campaign wears on, so for the first 6-7 missions you’re tooling around with no more than fifty units plus your command carrier – and most of those are the fighter-esque LAVs. It seems a bit weird to be saying that making Homeworld two-dimensional makes it better, and I don’t necessarily think that it does, but it’s definitely different, not to mention much more appropriate for the sort of tightly-focused game Deserts of Kharak is. I can’t remember many levels that took great advantage of the added Z axis, and interacting with it yourself by trying to issue move orders above or below your units’ current position was always a bit awkward. The original Homeworld games were lauded more for their setting, atmosphere and combat mechanics than they were their use of the third dimension. The list goes on and on, but make no mistake: this game is Homeworld, just with the third dimension stripped out. There’s a main mothership unit that builds all of your stuff, from which you can send salvage craft out to gather RUs from resource points scattered across the map. The sensor manager returns, with identical icons for denoting fighters, frigates and capital ships. Your biggest units are called cruisers rather than crawlers or tanks or whatever. The basic minigun-equipped LAV unit is referred to as a “Strike craft” by the fleet personnel, and function exactly like fighters would in a real Homeworld game. You don’t have an army, you have a fleet. And I mean literally transplanted, word-for-word and concept-for-concept, almost to the point of absurdity in places. What I got, and what ended up being a bit of a surprise, was something that transplanted the classic Homeworld space-based gameplay down onto a planetary surface. I went into this expecting a desert-set RTS with a strong Homeworld flavouring. I’m not even being all that churlish by describing it that way. Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak is Homeworld, in a desert, on Kharak.