![]() ![]() While I don't know this as a fact it feels like Deserts of Kharak was rushed during its final stretch in development because the moment the story starts picking up and getting you invested in the characters it enters a downward spiral and ends soon after. Throughout the entire story your mission is set up as a desperate attempt, after each victory you get a statistic of how much water your meager supplies have lost that day and your actual progress is a series of small hops with the final destination so far away it doesn't even fit on the map.Īnd then in the final stretch you speed across half of the map unimpeded, water is no longer an issue and you have a super-weapon on your side to conveniently fight the main baddy with. You can really feel the pain and desperation behind each character as they attempt to salvage their situation and push onward to certain doom against an overwhelming enemy.īut then the game throws a deus ex machina your way, you cross incredible swaths of desert in a single cinematic and the whole campaign ends shortly after. Around mission 9 there is a very memorable moment where all hope seems lost as your plan fails and the crew is stuck in a scorching desert with dwindling water supplies. On the topic of the story itself it doesn't have the same scope or grandeur as Homeworld did and I found it difficult to get myself invested but over time the characters were the ones that won me over. Despite there being a menu option to tone down random chatter there is unfortunately nothing to stop unit responses when you select them, which if you're a player like me and use 6 control groups starts to sound like someone's performing an exorcism in the middle of a battle. Voice acting in general, besides a few oddballs, is top notch which is great given how much your units can blabber on in the middle of a fight. There are only a few main characters in the campaign but they deliver a great performance and feel like actual people with doubts, anger and desperation. Its hard to explain the style in words but its rather fetching and sadly not as frequently used as I hoped it would be. ![]() This is where you come in to the picture as an unnamed commander who needs to ensure that the Carrier Kapisi makes it to its destination.Įach mission starts and ends with a short cinematic which is either done through in-game cutscenes or through a beautiful blend of hand drawn art and 3D (or actual actors). This doesn't go over well with the Coalition's neighbors, the Gaalsien Kith who believe their god Sajuuk has forbidden them from ever entering space and if they did so despite his wishes he would bring Kharak to a fiery end and so war inevitably breaks out. The events in Deserts of Kharak take place a hundred years before Homeworld 1 and are centered around the search for the prime anomaly, a mysterious artifact that suddenly spiked with energy from deep within the constantly expanding desert. With Kharak slowly becoming uninhabitable and food riots springing all over the globe the Coalition of Kiith, or clans if you will, decides to send a single massive Carrier in to the desert with the hope of retrieving the artifact. ![]() So where does Deserts of Kharak stand when it comes to storytelling?Ī small war band but a large amount of detail on the models I still vividly remember those first few missions in Homeworld 1 and how shocked I was with the scope of the devastation. Some people equate the Homeworld series with great multiplayer battles but to me it always about the story and the characters. The same goes for the gameplay, it should be easily recognizable to anyone that played Homeworld as some units are essentially a more rudimentary version of the ones in the future and serve the same exact role. ![]() While you don't need to play through Homeworld 1 to enjoy Deserts of Kharak long time fans of the series will find plenty of small details and story points that gain immense significance when you know what will happen a hundred years in the future. Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak is a prequel to the excellent Homeworld 1 which released back in 1999 and redefined the RTS genre with a focus on large scale conflicts, compelling storytelling and persistence between missions.ĭeserts of Kharak set out to continue that legacy and despite the fact that the cool darkness of space has been replaced with the ever-encroaching desert it does an excellent job of embodying everything Homeworld stood for. ![]()
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