Recent reviews by ArxCA

SANDS AND SINNERS //// Slight spoilers below:

After a very LONG 21 year wait since the last Homeworld game, we finally have Homeworld 3

I wish there was more of a middle ground button, and i've wrestled with nostalgia and concluded i can't recommend it. The story is ok, they seem to miss the concept of why Karan was cool back in the day. She was so separated from her humanity and was more the mothership than she was Karan. Imogen seems more Imogen than ship, but i still like her character.
Be warned that in the campaign, if you finish the objective, the game ends. There is no gathering time, no button to press, no time to rebuild, you're just thrusted into the next mission immediately

The graphics, soundtrack, battle chatter, and scale are all here and it feels so good. However there are a few snags:
Every single ship now has its own ability. This can be extremely difficult to micromanage in the middle of combat. Especially as most of the abilities only last a few seconds and have a cooldown of 1-2 minutes.
The abilities are also the only research in the game outside of researching the unit itself. Upgrades and ship modules have disappeared with the exception of upgrading strikecraft health
The pathfinding is still a bit atrocious. Being on passive or neutral stances should force ships to fly through cover, but they ignore that half the time and get shredded by turrets.

Multiplayer only comes with a disappointing handful of maps, and those are limited based on player count. If you want more than a 1v1 or 2v2, you're limited to a single map of the pool.
There are also no maps that resemble the old Homeworld games. Every single map is coated in mega-structure debris to fly ships through that take up the entire map. It would have been nice to see some older style maps with huge scale, asteroid fields, dust clouds etc.
Probes and recon are nearly meaningless as you fly a few seconds and you can immediately see the enemy fleet, and there is also NO hyperspace ability in multiplayer, which is bizarre in a Homeworld game. The first game was primarily based around hyperspace, that's the entire reason Kharak got destroyed, why is it missing? Let me hyperspace a carrier full of bombers behind enemy lines and nuke their resource collectors and harass the Mothership. I know why from a campaign point of view, but in multiplayer there's not really a reason.
There's also no way to change unit cap in skirmishes, so default only it is. I get why, but i'd still like the option of doubling or tripling the fleet capacity for a good 1v1 game

However, i really cannot stress just how fun it is to watch the fights. Most of my enjoyment really does come from getting up into the combat, hearing the chatter, seeing the battle scars on ships, hearing the astounding audio, and watching the visuals. Blackbird really did do a good job, it's optimised quite well, and there is more content coming, so we know it won't be left in the dust. I can only hope that there will be things more reminiscent of Homeworld 1/2 with maps and ship design.

Side note: I still hate the meteor shower mission, Blackbird. It wasn't fun in 1, and it's not fun here either. Especially with the awkward pathfinding where ships seemingly have no self-preservation instinct and fly into the side of the asteroids

Overall: 5/10

I jumped straight into TR3 as that's the game I played most as a kid. After being flooded with nostalgia during the India level, a warm feeling of enjoyment during Nevada, I started the London missions and immediately remembered something I had sealed away in the back of my mind. Tomb raider is an extremely frustrating game, and I think we were all blinded by nostalgia. You WILL need a walkthrough to get through this - and if you say you finished the London levels without looking anything up, I simply don't believe you; Parts of the wall you can shimmy across with no discernible texture difference to any other part of the wall, extremely precise pixel perfect jumping puzzles which only get worse in Antarctica which usually result in instant death if you fail. Save after every single step of progress kids, it's the 90s again. Autosaves are for losers. And let's not forget the buttons that flip your camera to some entirely unknown segment of the map that you'll be stumbling around looking for and backtracking for 20 minutes before realising you CAN shimmy past those cracks in the wall that look like they seal together and wouldn't let you do that

However, despite my gripes with the game mechanics and level design that have made me lose my ♥♥♥♥ since i was about 4, this is an extremely faithful and well made remake. I can only give it a thumbs up for how nice it has been to go through TR3 without it looking like it's running on powerpoint. Although, I found i was playing it in the classic graphics to remember textures so i knew where to go as it was more familiar
I'd still recommend tank controls though, it really is the only way to experience this authentically, and the modern controls are kind of terrible