Video Game Review: ‘Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak’

Sand clogs up everything; it’s gritty and coarse.

“Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak” might just be the sandiest game ever. It’s a distant prequel to the decade-old “Homeworld” and “Homeworld 2,” and transplants the series from space to the vast expanse of the desert.

Players control a huge land-carrier and an attendant army of dune buggies, rovers and tanks on an expedition across the alien planet’s deserts and derelict spaceships. They’re looking for a big, MacGuffin-like anomaly, deep in the equatorial region, against a vast clan of technologically advanced religious zealots dead-set against space travel.

The personal stories – with only one major character worth a name, the scientist hero Rachel S’jet – comes across as a halfhearted melodrama. But the broader plot, the one where a giant landship is the main character, is compelling. The individuals are secondary to the overall history of the expedition.

The designs for both factions are industrial punk aesthetic at its best. The vaguely European-ish Coalition has angular, mechanical cars that often resemble mining and construction equipment as much as military hardware or, for the fundamentalist Gaalsiens, jet-black plastic hovercraft appropriate to their advanced technology. Everyone wears environment suits to keep out the heat. It looks practical and tiny against the landscape, which helps sell the harsh environment of the setting and engrosses the player.

Even the game interface is justified as the control scheme for the carrier in-world. In fact, the first thing players see is their carrier – the Kapisi – starting up, running diagnostics and loading up menus that will be used throughout the game.

Dune buggies spin to a stop and bombers launch precision strikes on their targets. The army grows and persists over the course of the campaign rather than starting over between each mission as in most games of the genre. Players get attached to the units by seeing the same ones from the beginning of the game to the end. Since losing that carefully-built force is suboptimal, I felt pressured to reload when I really screwed up. Maybe it’s bad to punish the player for attachment to their army, but owning it is worth it.

The game is tense, but not frantic; the areas are large and battles take time to resolve, giving players enough time to consider options, but not enough to delay.

The enemy, artificial intelligence, doesn’t hold up to the expectation of a smart foe. Foes are idiots who overcome with superior numbers, and the game makes up for the lack of intelligence with force. More than a few times, I found it easy to trick the AI into waiting outside of range. A pack of enemies will sit on the edge of visible range waiting for a timer to run out or for the player to attack, giving the player time to harvest resources and build up forces. The enemy forces compensate fairly well with scripted attacks, but it feels like facing a clever game designer instead of facing a clever foe.

The missions themselves are plenty varied with twists like sandstorms and unexpected reinforcements, changing up the scenarios midway through. The surprises force the players to change up their tactics.

“Deserts of Kharak” is original because of its large-scale, real-time strategy game in a market dominated by single-character battle arenas like “League of Legends.” It follows that up with a strong single-player mode and a refreshing design sense. And while the campaign wasn’t the longest, I never felt deserted by the game.

Following up a main course of “Deserts of Kharak” with the first two games, the recent space-themed “Homeworld Remastered” makes for an excellent dessert to the meal.

– Joshua Greenberg