I feel guilty about repeatedly comparing Nebulous: Fleet Command to Homeworld, inasmuch as it’s an appalling bait-and-switch. It’s like offering somebody a cake that is actually a cunningly painted hunk of torpedo fuselage. It’s like offering to shake hands while wearing one of those comedy hand buzzers – except that the hand buzzer is an intricate simulation of zero-G physics, missile behaviours and comms jamming, featuring spacecraft with proper internal layouts that require you to think hard about attitude control if you don’t want, say, your engines to become Swiss cheese about 90 seconds before you need to retreat from combat.
Being a “true” 3D real-time space strategy game, Nebulous looks and sounds a lot like Homeworld on the surface, but it’s nothing like as straightforward. It is systems within systems. It is a game in which you can, theoretically, plot the path of a single guided munition through an asteroid field, so as to catch an enemy cruiser in the back. I barely understand how to make a ship fire on another ship, using plain old armour-piercing shells, and now they’re threatening to add carriers, fighters and bombers. Customisable ones! The humanity. Here’s a trailer.
