It’s in the small touches: The way your little dune buggies whirl around enemy troops, a deadly cloud of interweaving ships looking for an angle. Making what you need, when you need it-hopefully. Sure, you can jump back to the main menu and start any mission with the Default Fleet if you’ve dug yourself into a hole, but playing the “right way” means you’re alone, a bastion of science and order crawling through canyons and skirting sand dunes. Protect your units, because you’ll start each mission with whatever survived. It preserved the idea of a ship alone in space, no magical supply lines to replenish you after a Pyrrhic victory.ĭeserts of Kharak retains this concept. A unique mechanic, yes, but it was also thematically appropriate. Whatever survived a mission, that’s how you’d start the next. Part of Homeworld’s appeal was that your units stayed with you throughout the game.
The journey is an order of magnitude smaller, but the result is the same: Persistent fleets. Here, you lead your people into the desert in search of an ancient relic, the Jaraci Object or Primary Anomaly. In Homeworld, you set off across the galaxy in search of a new home. Right away, you set up an obvious parallel to the original series. It helps that Deserts of Kharak deals in exodus.
