Homeworld Remastered was released in 2015, so unless you're much younger than I think and went through very quick aging, you probably didn't pre-order it as a foolish teenager
Sorry for the confusion in my post. What I meant to say was I preordered Homeworld Remastered, which was the first game I had preordered in a very long time. The last game I preordered prior to Homeworld Remastered was, I think Metal Gear Solid 2 back when I was a teenager.
I just loved Homeworld so much that once the remaster was announced, I knew I was buying it no matter what which is why I had no qualms about preordering it.
What did you think of Deserts of Kharak? I received it as a gift but haven't played beyond the tutorials.
I like it. In fact, I'm playing through it again right now.
In terms of gameplay, it's pretty much a ground combat version of Homeworld, with the exception that your "mothership" actually turns into a formidable warship in its own right by the end of the campaign instead of being a giant vulnerable target that you always have to worry about.
One thing I really liked about it is how the game forces you to actually preserve your units instead of sending them to their deaths. It does this by making resources extremely scarce in each mission, forcing you to carefully plan out what upgrades and units you want since you'll never have enough to build everything you want. The scarcity of resources also makes it extremely painful to see one of your units die, even the little LAVs that serve the same role as fighters in Homeworld. This helps with immersion as well since it really makes you feel like you are fighting on a dying world where you have to scrape and scrounge for every last bit if raw materials you can just to survive.
Combat, like in Homeworld, is very rock-paper-scissors with each unit countering another. LAVs are countered by assault vehicles, which are countered by rail guns, which are countered by LAVs, etc. Your carrier pretty much serves the role you would expect a carrier to serve on the battlefield, providing air support to your ground forces by launching very powerful fighters and bombers.
The main drawback of the game in my opinion, is that the campaign keeps the scaling difficulty mechanic from Homeworld 2, with the number and composition of the enemy forces in a given mission being determined by the size and composition of your army at the end of the previous mission. It's a good idea on paper, but in practice, I hate it here just as much as I hated it in Homeworld 2.
