I understand the game has a few performance hiccups for a lot of users and objectively, the game from the perspective of someone who works in Tech... Bad. And thats putting it lightly. Now I dont really recommend this game but nor do I not recommend it- infact I would say I am more inbetween.

My view is that one should get the game to test it out and if it fails within the 2 hours you are playing- refund the game and wait until some performance fix to be released.

For me so far, I have experienced 3 crashes. One due to a mini-boss shield failing to spawn in the 3rd piece I needed to destroy to actually take it down and thus after a while of being stuck the game crashed for me. The 2nd when I simply got downed while using a repkit at the same time and the 3rd froze my entire PC when I turned my steam status from invisible to online mode- probably not the cause and it was just some failure in the GPU to load things back to memory after an alt-tab, but who knows.

Despite this, it is still playable but the game does have clear stuttering during cutscenes even if gameplay runs smoothly. I even decided to find a way to let my self move so fast and seems even at insane movement speeds- the game renders everything fine at high settings- though still requires one to enable DLSS and FrameGen to get 100+ FPS, with it off I was sitting in the range of 60-70. Now part of this I think I can at least see that I expect Denuvo is causing a good chunk of loss of performance given its notorious reputation and every game I played that had it and then removed it, I noticed a massive performance increase after its removal.

Pros:
- It is extremely fun and enjoyable
- Gunplay feels nice
- Movement feels good and a good dopamine hit for me
- Game feels reliatvely fair and it does feel a bit harder than BL3 and BL2 but not as punishing as BL1
- Balance is a bit funky but overall fair.
- Characters seem good
- Story actually seems interesting unlike BL3

Cons:
- Another UE5 game that keeps showing that UE5 may not be as stable as it once claimed.
- Devs seem to have missed the mark on performance. I can partly blame the engine, but as we seen with other games, these performance issues shouldn't be this bad.
- Game can crash and in worst case, freeze your whole pc requiring a reboot (Hardware soft error lock)
- There is a few soft locking bugs that require you to restart the game or quit to menu to fix
- Sometimes enemies fail to spawn
- Sometimes objectives break if you do accidentally do something that wasn't supposed to happen.
- Cutscenes are spoiled by running at decent frames but are super stuttery.

In short gameplay an story is good, but the optimization of the game is where it falls off. Still fun and runs stable for me- but still worth noting the issues regardless.

Specs:
CPU - AMD Ryzen 9 7950X
GPU - RTX 4070 TI
Game installed on a M.2 SSD: Samsung 970 EVO
RAM - I forgor but know its a DDR5 32GB (4x8)
Motherboard: ROG Strix X670E-F Gaming Wifi

I want to open up and state first I spent quite a lot for this game and brought it almost 2 years ago in hopes it would be another great entry to the series, going as far as to get the collectors package, however, upon this game dropping it has raised some eyebrows and came across as quite lacking.

Compared to previous games in the series like HW1, HW2, HW:DoK and even the Remastered version of the 1&2 entries felt far more polished than whatever this is. While I understand this game has just released and all, unlike its predecessors feels far more incomplete for reasons not yet known. The first sign I felt something was off was a while ago when the old creators of the Homeworld games were strangely fired sometime within the games development which I always find it odd when Companies choose to rid themselves of the people who made their games great- of course there is plenty of speculation around why, some of it political- I am not going to bother jumping into such since I feel its far too off topic.

But it does lead me into questioning why the game has come out as it did given the feel of HW3 is... just wrong compared to its older entries. They could of made a different design choice, that I know, but nothing about it really feels like Homeworld. Breaking this down as summarised as possible:

Campaign:
I felt the campaign and story was lackluster compared to the older entries and generally just felt as if someone had slapped it together without knowing jack about the past games, the lore of Homeworld and everything that happened. Not only does it leave unanswered questions, but also introduces some odd concepts which to be frank... shouldn't exist. I preferred it a lot more and made much more sense when Karen Sjet and the lot were REGULAR humans and not a special race of "navigators" which this game pulled out of the blue. The ship designs also feel like Hiigarians managed to travel backwards in progress terms rather than forwards with their ships becoming worse. It feels as if a HW1 and HW2 ship could come in and wipe the current collective factions out without a sweat due to an over specialisation the current era has oddly gone with along with reducing their weapons for no good reason.

Not to mention ship designs look meh compared to the original designs... sorry, I am getting side tracked, but plays a part in lore/story given they all directly interconnect.

I also want to mention the Antagonist of this game is bland. Feels like I am watching a generic disney villian and the ending makes it 10x worse with her suddenly choosing to die with Karen for good knows why and hyperspace not really being an option this whole time without their cores. Like excuse me, Hyperspace wasn't limited by a requirement of the Hyperspace cores as seen by many ships including the Taiidan, Vagyr and a few other species being perfectly capable of Hyperspace without having a ship nearby with said cores. Those cores being more or less keys to special progenitor tech including the development of hyperspace and their ability to make a ship like the Mothership capable of travelling far distances with them compared to without them.

This to me is one giant plothole that I am trying to word as best I can since I have so many things in my head to rant about.

Though again, the antag is my biggest issue with her character being so pathetically boring I found more interest in that captain that showed up for 1 chapter before his instantaneous death and showed more characteristics of a villain than whoever the pathetic excuse of a queen was with her only notably line... notably as in negatively notably was "Vicious Girl". Like who the hell wrote this? Who reviewed this? Godawful story with a bad character. At least lets explore another universe or something with the gates now all opened up rather than whoever she was, and next time promote that one captain to the main antagonist.

Gameplay / Design
General gameplay can be fun for a short time... until you realize its a numbers game. Spam units, attack, lose your forces, rebuild and repeat until resources run out or you make a mistake big enough to be swarmed and die. Wargames is no better with the game swarming you plenty of times and spams 200k hp destroyers which they could'e just left a 100k HP instead and also provide some units capable of properly countering Destroyers in a far quicker time span. (Also beam fighters are complete crap)

It doesn't feel fun and as I mentioned in the campaign section, the ship designs don't help. Each ship has been specialised into set roles unlike the previous game where each ship was capable of differing functions both offensives and defensive. All ships were balanced and could be used for multi-purpose operations whereas in HW3 it seems like that was thrown out of a window for you must have X ship to do X activity. Want to kill a destroyer? Gone are the days of using your fighters and bombers to distract it and wear it down because now they barely do anything and your frigates and also crap. Solution? Spam Railgun corvettes or throw your own destroyers at it. Alternatively spam it to death with everything you have... battleships even worse and the mothership/titanships are laughably too easy to kill unlike past games.

The balance feels wrong, the maps feel smaller and more closed off. 3D movement is nice touch but in exchange for map size is REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. The general design is honestly boring and gameplay just ain't it chief. Doesn't feel like a homeworld game but another generic space RTS.

My time is limited, so won't go on... but the balancing is off, the gameplay boring, the story feels like it was written by someone who gave 0 ♥♥♥♥♥ about the past games and overall design decisions are questionable at best.

But its not all bad... mods can save it, but so too can the devs as they continue to add factions and the like into the game. I will keep my negative review until the game changes for the better. We all know HW2 wasn't beloved at the start nor was DoK nor was Remastered, but still, it can become great over time like all the games before it. SO i have some hope left. Don't Disappoint any further... please.

I played both this version of the game and the old early access edition of the game and I can say it is quite fun, most of the fun however comes from actually having friends to play with. If you are not:
A) In the RoN Discord
B) Have a group of friends with the game

Then you will not be having as much of a great time at this moment. I have noticed a few people go into this game alone and found it extremely tough and boring since the constant finding of nothing but bots, for a game being in the state that its in is understandable and thus one must also understand that without others already around to play with, enjoying the game is possible, just not as much.

Anyway, this game can be both fun and annoying. Since it is an Early access, one may find quite a lot of missing features compared to a game like SWAT 4 but it is still in a playable state, more playable than the old early edition of the game anyway.

After doing a few games now with a whole 4-5 man group for the last 3 days, there is many things to note:
Pros:
- Good design
- Generally fun gameplay
- Feels like you actually do need to be quiet sneaky to not mess up
- General slow paced gameplay which adds to the realism of these situations

Cons:
- AI is somewhat intelligent, however, they are also Aim Gods. They will kill you before you can even tell you team you see them or before your character shouts "your" when trying to say "Put your hands up!" or something similar. You will be dead in a timed record of 0.33 seconds
- Some textures are unfinished
- Some maps have so many paths that you will get flanked... constantly and with the current state of the AI, it becomes really annoying.
- Citizens love pairing up with terrorists more than the Swat team? Why are they more scared of swat vs the bad guys?
- C2, Flashbangs, Stingers kill far too easily. Want to clear a room tactically? Well too bad, you just killed 3 civs in the process despite using something which is by all means "Non-lethal" and designed to stun more than kill... but oh well.

Bugs:
- Did you can that on Farmhouse, you can jump near one of the balcony railings and be sent flying at over 10,000 MPH
- No trap on door? Well it will blow up anyway, rare but can happen
- Citizens and Suspects have learnt to teleport
- Suspect sometimes drops their gun into the void
- Door wedges magically disappear
- Breaching shotgun certainly can breach another door you're not aiming at
- Get killed at the start of the round by an enemy who spawned right next to you? Indeed
- Be warned, the suspects do indeed have wallhack and will shoot you through the walls, floors and even across the map.
- Ever want to confiscate your own teams shields? Well guess what... you can.
- Tell your team to move in? Ah... well pathfinding will take them the long way round
- Breach & Clear? No lets breach and then wait 5 seconds to throw the grenade as we get killed... then go in.
- Ever wanted to go to space? Now you can. Be warned that one may send you upwards instantly for no reason
- For the opposite, you can also be sent into the shadow realm know as "Under the map" where you will fall.... till the end of time itself.
- Any friendly with a shield can sometimes literally become GOD and walk past a bunch of enemies without a care.
- We have developed invisible guns
- It seems I left my kevlar in the van, sorry guys.
- Did all the terrorists leave or something? They left all the bombs undefended... wait where is everyone for that matter?

And many more I could list but just a few to mention

Right... I am hugely disappointed of this port. SO far I have experienced a mixture or good and bad, to stop myself from going on a huge rant, I will instead break it down into points:

PROS:
- Love how they enhanced the visuals, good job there
- SP plays quite well

CONS:
- Noticeable input lag
- Lag spikes in some areas, even with a high end PC. (Note: I have a RTX 2070, i7 7900k, SSD, etc)
- One of my friends experienced a 'black texture' bug
- Covenant weapons feel... weaker than the original.
- Weapon sounds for UNSC like the assault rifle sound like... airsoft rifles. OKAY THEN
- Season points? What is this Fortnite? PUBG?

Conclusion: I would recommend waiting for updates for this game to be optimised for the PC before buying, at the moment, SP is really the only... respectable thing.