Homeworld - Final Rating

Written by Reiko

It's been a bumpy ride with Gateway II: Homeworld, including some technical issues, but I'm finally able to put together my thoughts on what made this game fun and where it surpassed or fell short of its predecessor. You might remember that I really enjoyed the original Gateway for a number of reasons. I enjoyed this one too, but I suspect that the overall result may not be quite as high as the first. Sequels are hard: providing everything that made the first installment good while creating new but similar content is a very delicate balance. Let's see how Homeworld compares.

Puzzles and Solvability

I found the puzzles to generally be fair and logical. There are only a few places where points seem optional, most notably when saving Diana. I may have been helped by remembering some bits of the puzzles, but even so, I think the pieces fit together well. I had very few issues solving anything. The puzzles are clever in a way that makes the player feel smart for figuring them out.

The puzzle with the magnetic clamps is one of my favorites.

I enjoyed mapping the ice maze even though it wasn't necessary, but it's good that there was an interesting non-mapping solution to finding the way through as well. While mazes are cliche in text adventures now, that is a maze done right.

Score: 7

Interface and Inventory

As before, Homeworld uses the same Legend interface as earlier games. The game is fully playable with either keyboard or mouse, but I find keyboard to be far easier. I play in half screen mode to see more text and hide the mouse menus since I hardly ever use them. In Gateway, I occasionally encountered items that are neither visible in the illustration nor mentioned in the description, so I had to check the menus once in a while if I thought I'd missed something. I didn't have this issue in Homeworld: I don't think I used the menus at all.

Also, Homeworld used more full-screen replacement mouse interfaces for various devices and such. Most of these were quite similar to ones in the first game, such as the Heechee number interface for the ship, but there were one or two strange decisions about making certain interactions graphical that may have been better in text.

This textual description with this close-up illustration...

...is hard to match to this busy image.

I'm thinking in particular of the interface for turning the discs in the Heechee temple. Not only was there a bit of guess the verb to activate the graphical interface to start, the images were less clear than the textual descriptions had been. So, it's a bit of a mixed bag, but I'm not going to dock the game for this, as I think the positives and negatives balance out, making it overall not any worse than Gateway.

Score: 6

Story and Setting

As I said before, the setting is brilliant, because it's based on Frederik Pohl's books, and even focuses on the better parts of them. We get to explore alien technology and save the universe from an alien threat without getting bogged down in the psychological meanderings and existential crisis of Pohl's main character the way he wrote about him. The first game had some psychological evaluation, which then later fed directly into the AI crisis at the end. Homeworld has none of that, which actually is less realistic because you might think that a man stranded in an utterly alien culture impossibly far from home would have some kind of a psychological breakdown, however temporary. In the interests of keeping the story moving, this game never addresses that aspect of the main character. On the other hand, while we don't deal with human psychology much, we do have to learn about Heechee psychology in order to effectively deal with the Heechee characters we encounter.

Still, it's a fun sci-fi adventure with, if anything, rather more twists and turns to the plot, especially when we get into the whole sequence of what happened with Convergence, Solifluction, Fogram, and Raphide. We have to be a bit of a detective and keep poking around and talking to everyone multiple times to get the whole story and decide what to do about it.

We just see this guy's face for a large portion of the late game.

The story was good, but it was rather a contrast to the action in earlier sections. We're really stranded, so we have nothing better to do but go back and forth between people and have lengthy conversations, but it could have been better with just a bit more to do in between. Compare that to the time-limited sequences when dealing with the terrorists, for instance. Multiple times I thought I was reaching the end of the Solifluction plot, but then I had to summarize yet another lengthy conversation with Convergence or Raphide.

Score: 7

Sound and Graphics

As I said about Gateway: "I tend not to pay much attention to sounds in text adventures and often play games without sound on at all, but Gateway has a cheerful 80s cyberpunk soundtrack that I rather enjoyed." Overall, the music for Homeworld was very similar; nothing particularly stood out, but the tracks fit the mood of their corresponding locations or scenes.

Iconic blue Heechee metal at the entrance to a zoo area.

Graphics are on par with Gateway as well with detailed pixel art: the blue Heechee metal made a return on the Artifact, but this time we also see the Heechee themselves. Their city was oddly a bit bland except for the tram line, though. On the other hand, the zoo areas and the fantastical ice planet were well-realized. The ice planet was also notable for being efficient about graphics because it was maze-like: many locations had the same basic snowy image, but with a variety of environmental objects like icicles layered over it.

The Kord's image is layered over the background ice.

Fully animated cutscenes and graphical device interfaces also provide additional graphical enhancement outside of the regular text-based gameplay. Multiple flights through Tau-space or inside the black hole were a highlight.

Score: 6

Environment and Atmosphere

Homeworld has fewer environments than Gateway: first we get the apartment and the chase through the spaceport on Earth, and then we have the Heechee Artifact or science ship, and then we're stranded first on the ice planet and later in Heechee space. We don't see much on Earth, but what we do see is effective for what it needs to be. The Artifact is rather stark, especially at first, but later the zoo areas are quite varied and interesting, arguably the most interesting part of the game. Instead of going to various planets, we just get small recreated parts of them.

The ice planet feels nearly monochrome except for the area near the hot spring.

On the other hand, while the ice planet is certainly exotic, and the Kords are fascinatingly alien, it's also rather repetitive when nearly every location is just covered in snow and ice. Sadly, the Heechee homeworld is also rather bland. No blue Heechee metal there: terrestrial construction seems rather more mundane than in space. The fact that it's an entire civilization stuffed inside a black hole is incredibly exotic, but it's only shown with a single image.

This is a tiny view of what ought to be a huge, technological world.

Probably a third of the gametime is spent on the Heechee homeworld, but instead of seeing more of the wonders that such an advanced civilization should have been capable of constructing, given that they did construct the Gateway station and the Artifact, we find a stagnant people mired in deception and internal politics. It's rather disappointing, really.

Score: 6

Dialog and Acting

The text descriptively illustrated what was going on in the story, from cutscene descriptions to item interactions to dialogue. I didn't generally have any trouble with the parser except for trying to engage with the discs in the temple through text when I needed to find the right command to trigger the graphical interface instead.

NPCs were very limited in their responses. Most of the time the game expected that we would just "talk to" a character in order to trigger either a static conversation, or a graphically-controlled conversation with some given choices. I never had to ask a character about something separately from these limited conversations. Many conversations were really info-dumps, carefully controlled so that the programmers only had to write a certain number of responses.

Diana stays out of the way when you return to the Artifact.

Diana was particularly disappointing because she had absolutely nothing new to say even when really relevant events were happening, like finding the stored personality of her boyfriend. Given that her survival is not guaranteed, this makes a little sense, but since she can be saved, it would be far more realistic to at least give her some brief reaction to these events, or add a dialogue option to tell her about what's going on.

At least she reappeared briefly when we arrived at the Artifact the second time, but only long enough to tell us about what had been happening while we had been solving problems with the Heechee. Then she informed us that she would be staying out of the way while we finish dealing with the terrorists, and promptly disappeared again.

Score: 5

That adds up to a final score of 7+6+7+6+6+5 = 37/60*100 = 61. Sixteen people made guesses ranging from 46 to 72. Andy Panthro managed to guess the exact score this time. He seems to have a feel for these games, since he was one of the closest with Gateway as well!

CAP Distribution

100 CAPs to Reiko

• Blogger Award - 100 CAPs - for blogging through Gateway II: Homeworld for our enjoyment

    

40 CAPs to Alex Romanov

• Straight from the Coffin Award (X2) - 20 CAPs for answering a request for assistance for Veil of Darkness.
  

20 CAPs to Agrivar

• Straight from the Coffin Award - 20 CAPs - 20 CAPs for answering a request for assistance for Veil of Darkness.

20 CAPs to Aleste Auvryrahel 

• Straight from the Coffin Award - 20 CAPs for answering a request for assistance for Veil of Darkness.

20 CAPs to Morpheus Kitami 

• Straight from the Coffin Award - 20 CAPs for answering a request for assistance for Veil of Darkness.

15 CAPs to Vetinari

• Extra Credit Award - 5 CAPs - for finding the reason for the 15 extra credit points

• Solution Sniper Award - 5 CAPs - for pointing out the intended solution for disabling the tram

• Science Fiction Philosophy Award - 5 CAPs - for philosophical musings on what a person is

10 CAPs to Andy Panthro

• Psychic Prediction Award - 10 CAPs - for guessing the score for Homeworld

5 CAPs to Ross

• News History Award - 5 CAPs - for describing real-life subscription fax services

5 CAPs to ShaddamIVth

• Metric Proofreader Award - 5 CAPs - for finding the metric error in the explosive description

5 CAPs to zxcvb

• Genre Awareness Award - 5 CAPs - for comparing the Artifact section of the game to Starcross