Homeworld, one of last year's winners of The Wargamer Excellence award, was an epic saga of heritage lost and re-discovered. The game told the story of an exiled people who find evidence that their true planet of origin lies half-way across the galaxy. The player commands the fleet that sets out to make the difficult trek through hostile space with enemies who try their best to stop the fleet from reaching its goal.

In Homeworld: Cataclysm, the player finds that fifteen years have passed since the end of Homeworld. The colonists have been busy building cities and repopulating their new home. Unfortunately, clan politics have not been generous to all of the various clans. The clan the players find themselves in is one of several that got the short end of the stick. They have to mine asteroids and buy most technology from other races.

The player starts out with a new class of mother ship. It does not have hyperspace capability, but it can be upgraded with modules that can be changed to suit the player's desires. It takes the place of the mother ship from the original game. The player can add several types of modules such as hangars and research modules. There are also new weapons and armor, as well as some new technology to play with.


New mothership with no pods.	Ramming Speed! The new Ramming Frigate moves in for the kill.

The player quickly finds that space is still not that friendly, and has to worry about raiders and remnants of the old empire that the people toppled when they reclaimed their home world. There is a new kid on the block however, one much nastier than was encountered in Homeworld.

The player quickly gets pressed into service to help fend off various attacks, and the player's mining operation slowly gets turned into a military one. The new kid on the block is "The Beast," which is something like the Borg of Star Trek fame. It has the ability to "infect" ships and take them over, thus learning any new technology the ship might contain. This should prove interesting when trying to figure out what new technology to research. Now the player has to decide if it's too risky for it to fall into the hands of The Beast.

Graphically, the game is as good as ever, with new ships and more animation on many of them. In Homeworld, players had salvage corvettes, repair corvettes and resource gatherers. In Homeworld: Cataclysm, these roles have been merged into the "worker" ship. This may or may not be a good thing. Players only need to build one class of ship to fill all three jobs, but now they have to decide where to use them. Should they have the worker ships collecting resources or repairing damaged ships? This could prove to be an interesting tactical problem

The designers listened to some of the complaints about the interface of Homeworld, and updated the sensor screen to allow the player to issue just about any command available on the tactical screen. This greatly improves gameplay. The sensor screen has also been updated with new information. It now shows exactly what sections of space the player's fleet has explored by placing a wire frame outlining explored areas.

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