Gateway 2: Homeworld

In your previous Gateway adventure, you saved Earth from the Assassins out of pure altruism. That you also got a gazillion space-dollars for it means that you can now afford comfortably lounging in one of your penthouses on the 300th floor of a San Francisco skyscraper, living the easy life.
But what's this? Suddenly you get a call from the chief of the Corporation. A starship has been sighted on the far edges of the solar system. Because of your previous alien experiences, they want you to train the ambassador for a diplomatic mission.
And what's this? You get a second call warning you that a religious sect has sent a squad to kill you, hoping to sabotage the diplomatic mission and travel to the Artifact (as the alien starship is known) themselves.
From this moment on, you are sucked into a fast and thrilling adventure to save Earth once more, from multiple enemies at the same time.

Gateway 2 - Homeworld is extremely well paced. The first chapter is a race against time and against the terrorists who want to claim the FTL-ship. You have to get your sequence of actions just right while you hear the sect members closing in on your radio. Very gripping.

In the next chapters, the tempo goes down a bit, leaving more breathing space for exploration and wonderment. The driving force of the story remains strong though. I found myself solving puzzles not just "to read/ find out what will happen next", but to genuinely solve a problem and help the NPCs in-game. The motivation came less from being an interested reader and more from being involved in the events in the game-world.

On the surface, the story is an action and adventure-packed SciFi romp. You fly different spacecraft to various alien worlds, solving the problems at hand with a variety of futuristic tech-gadgets.
Somewhat deeper in the game though, through dialogues with and lectures to Heechee NPCs, thoughtprovoking themes come up. There is a philosophical/theological debate about death, resurrection and personhood with a learned alien priest. At a certain point, you are asked to give lectures about Earth to the aliens, and these go into ecological issues like overpopulation and depletion of resources. In another lecture, your character talks about human tribe mentality and nationalism as an obstacle to solving societal problems. All pretty deep.

Don't let this spook you though. The dialogues are all menu-based and the different options mostly don't matter much, making room for some comic relief in your choice of responses. The lectures are cutscenes, so if you get bored, just spacebar them away. Still, I liked the depth of themes and it had me pondering the issues after the play-session.

The core of the game still consists of the "simple" task of exploring strange new worlds and defeating the bad guys by overcoming the obstacles.

Gateway 2 goes even further than the first game in putting you in many different settings: a huge spaceship/zoo (yes, i said "zoo"), an ice world and the Heechee homeworld. While the settings are very diverse, each one of them has a rather small map. This is a great design choice. It helps keep the fast pace of the story going, and it makes for straightforward and tight puzzle spaces.

The puzzles and obstacles all fall on the easier side. They are more entertaining and involving than frustrating. They don't take you out of the story while you're thinking and reasoning about possible solutions. They are all well clued, or as I like to put it: because of the limited number of available objects and the smallish settings, the possibillity-tree is well trimmed.

As in part 1, the pixel art is great and adds a lot to the playing experience. In this part, gameplay does depend a bit more on using the mouse to interact with different keypads, locks, and menus. (Or, if you want, you can busy yourself moving a mouse-cursor with the arrow-buttons on your keyboard. Just saying, the option is there...)

Gateway 2 - Homeworld had me really involved in its SF story for a week. A magnificent otherworldly adventure.

A direct sequel to Gateway, I was psyched to finally sit down and play one of the more heralded games by Legend about Frederick Pohl’s Heechee Saga. While it’s a well built game and has several high moments, I was overall disappointed, only because it failed to be as excellent as its predecessor.

Following the events of the first game, you’ve retired wealthy from your collection of Heechee technology. The game begins with you watching television when you get a video call from your previous employer, letting you know there’s an artifact outside of Pluto that they believe is an active Heechee ship. He asks that you consider joining an expedition given your expertise. However, you quickly realize this is a set-up and you’re a marked man.


The last game by Legend to employ a text parser, Gateway II does an excellent job with its implementation. While a noun and verb list are available, the parser understands quite a bit and I rarely found myself trying to guess the correct phrasing. This is proven right away with a tense chase scene, a rarity with text adventures. While pressed for time, I wasted no turns battling with the parser and felt a rush of satisfaction when I solved some clever puzzles and escaped alive on my first try.

The graphics engine is identical to its predecessor. Each scene has a hand-drawn still graphic that helps capture the environment. Conversations happen on another screen with a better detailed image of who you’re talking to. And there are several animated cut-scenes that are low-res but still pretty. The music, on the other hand, is a disappointment, with repetitive digitized tracks that began to wear on me after a while.


Your adventure takes you to the Heechee ship and beyond as you learn significantly more about this race. Without spoiling the details, I didn’t find this an entertaining this time around, perhaps because a lot of the mystery was resolved and, while powerful and technologically advanced, the race just isn’t different enough from humans to be interesting. On the other hand, my favorite part of the game sees you on an ice planet with a crystalline species called Kords, capable of telepathic imagery and exceptional mimicry skills. Their history and societal structure is significantly more compelling than the race the game is about. There’s also a spot where you can talk to several people who don’t realize they’re dead but whose personalities are stored in a computer; there’s no puzzles involved, but I found the conversations entertaining.

The game is also disappointingly linear. The first game was relatively open world for a good majority, allowing you to travel to different planets at will and work on several puzzles at a time. Here, if you get stuck, you’re pretty much stuck. While this isn’t a huge problem at the beginning, the game’s final section has many puzzles that stretch credibility, and I began to seek out hints frequently due to exhaustion. At least the game shipped with a hint book, a rarity in 1993. One nice feature is the game often advising you to undo your last move if you’ve put yourself in an unwinnable situation (of which there are few).


Conversations (text only) are also underwhelming. There is little to do other than exhaust topics. You can return to conversations repeatedly, but few characters ever have anything more to say, and continuity is ruined as they almost never update their responses based on subsequent actions you’ve taken.

While I was a but underwhelmed by the ending and a little tired at the end, I raced through the game rather quickly, a testament to its entertainment value, especially early on. If you enjoyed the first game, then Gateway II is definitely worth a play.