Anything else of note?
A bit like Civilization, Homeworld has a technology tree. You build space laboratories and then set them to work on developing new weapons and ship designs. Each individual laboratory can work on something, or you can link them all up into a giant lab and work on one advance even quicker.

Sounds lovely. But what’s the interface like? How do you control a 3D RTS game?
Right. Now this was never going to be easy. But the tutorial and early missions help you get the hang of it quite quickly. Basically the camera is controlled with a combination of mouse movement and Control and Shift keys. If you’ve got a wheel on your mouse you can change the zoom using that, which makes life a bit easier. Then the mouse buttons act just like C&C - left for selection or dragging out a selection, right for bringing up short cuts or default commands.

The graphics look gorgeous, but we’re talking heavy duty PC hardware to run it, right?
Not if developers Relic have anything to do with it. While the screenshot you see was done on a fancy PC, Homeworld, we are assured, will run at 30 frames a second on a P166 without a 3D card. But it don’t look so great then.


*It’s got the looks
*Challenging but never impossible
*The 3D engine is fast, even when there’s loads on-screen
*The narrative drives the single-player missions
*Some interesting looking multiplayer games in there too