Conclusion

Finally! A new Homeworld. Twenty-one years after the release of Homeworld 2, and nine years after the release of Homeworld 2 Remastered, Blackbird Interactive/Gearbox Publishing have released the long-anticipated sequel. While the basic "real-time strategy in space" concept is still around, many things have changed. Homeworld 3 introduces fully 3D space terrain, which adds depth, because battles happen in 3D, you can use terrain to your advantage, which expands the strategic options. Each mission presents unique challenges, from navigating nebulae, circumventing asteroids to sabotaging production facilities. While the gameplay mechanics are engaging overall, the AI is quite predictable and following the basic rock-paper-scissors concept makes it easy to win encounters. The game is completely linear and the story surprisingly forgettable. I'm also not a big fan of the 3D environments, because the UI makes it difficult to manage multiple ships and navigate them in the battlefield. I still enjoyed my playthrough of around eight hours, which is a bit short, but there's additional replay value in skirmishes and multiplayer.

The graphics look great for the genre. Most textures are highly detailed, contributing to a visually rich and immersive gaming experience. The ship models are of excellent geometric quality and look really nice. The cutscenes on the other hand look dated and are fairly low-res (1920x816), which makes them appear blurry on modern high-res screens.

Unreal Engine 4 has been plagued with "compiling shaders" screens and stuttering—none of that is present in Homeworld 3, it's a really seamless gameplay experience. You will find plenty of options for fine-tuning in the settings menu and there's support for all the popular upscalers, too: NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS. Frame generation is not supported though.

Homeworld 3 is highly CPU-bound, in some fights I got only 25 FPS with the GPU sitting mostly idle at sub-30% load. This seems to be inherent to the engine, even running at lower details doesn't help, which suggests that graphics calculations are not the reason for the slowdowns. While I would have loved to get you some CPU performance comparisons, the Denuvo software protection system makes that complicated, because there's a limit of five activations each day, which always get triggered by CPU changes. Given the CPU-limited nature of the game, some sort of frame generation technology would be extremely useful to ensure stable framerates.

Hardware requirements of the game are pretty reasonable. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p with the highest settings you only need a RTX 3060, RX 7600 or RTX 4060. Got a 1440p monitor? Then you need a RX 6800 XT, RTX 3070 or RTX 4060 Ti. 4K60? Radeon RX 6900 XT, RX 7900 GRE, RTX 4070 Super and RTX 3080 are required—not exactly mid-range, but still pretty manageable. As always we opted for our own custom test scene, despite the game offering a benchmark test, which is some kind of Unreal Engine flyby that's not really representative of actual gameplay performance. Both AMD and NVIDIA cards are positioned roughly where we usually see them in our performance charts. Intel GPUs fall a bit behind though.

The performance scaling is excellent. You can gain more than double the FPS with just settings, and the game is still extremely playable at "Low." Reaching 60 FPS is quite easy if you are willing to dial the details back a little bit. If that's still not enough you have three upscalers to use. Enabling ray tracing comes with an additional performance hit that's not a big deal, because you'll be running CPU-limited most of the time. The RT effects only apply to shadows, and while these definitely look better in screenshots, I don't think you'll notice much of a difference in actual gameplay, so you're not missing out on much if you don't enable RT.

Our VRAM testing shows that Homeworld 3 is fairly reasonable with its memory requirements. 4K at highest settings uses a little bit over 8 GB, but as our RTX 4060 8 GB vs 16 GB results show, there's no significant loss of performance due to 8 GB VRAM size, not even with RT enabled which allocates around 11 GB, but doesn't use all of it in every frame. Lowest settings should be fine with a 6 GB class card.

Overall, Homeworld 3 is a good new strategy option, but be aware of the short campaign and the relatively high price. While the introduction of real 3D terrain promises interesting things for the RTS genre the current implementation doesn't impress me too much, because it feels difficult to reach maximum precision with the clunky controls.