Homeworld 2

Homeworld 2 is one of the few strategy games to genuinely pull off combat in three full dimensions. The fleet moves through open space where there is no up or down, and the player has to think about attacks from above, flanking from behind, and which direction the guns of large ships are actually facing. The camera can be freely rotated around the entire battle, a tactical map reduces the whole engagement to a legible grid of icons, and a special formation-spacing system lets you move even large fleets while keeping them in fixed formations. Controls that could easily have become a nightmare instead remain surprisingly manageable.

The campaign continues the story of the Hiigaran people, who face an invasion by the Vaygr fleet, carried in a similarly grave, almost meditative tone as the first game. Crucially, your ships carry over from mission to mission: whatever you lose stays lost, and whatever you preserve, you bring into the next engagement. Every battle therefore carries a double cost, since winning at a heavy price means fighting the next fight with half-empty hangars. New here are the subsystems of large ships, which can be targeted and destroyed individually, so instead of a long, grinding bombardment, a giant cruiser can be blinded by knocking out its sensors or slowed by disabling its engines. Visually it's an impressive study in light, nebulae, and scale: tiny fighters vanish against the flanks of mothership hulls like insects.

The music, combining ambient textures, choral themes, and silence in between, ranks among the best space games have ever offered, and together with hand-drawn interludes it creates an unmistakable mood of a lonely journey. Reviews were very positive, though some players regretted the shorter campaign compared to the first game. Relic later released modding tools that spawned extensive mods, including ones set in other science-fiction universes, and the game also received a modern remastered version. Today, Homeworld 2 remains the best argument that a space strategy game doesn't have to be just a chessboard laid flat.