Homeworld: Vast Reaches

Homeworld: Vast Reaches
Information
VR/AR	VR, Mixed Reality
Developer	FarBridge
Publisher	FarBridge
Platform	Meta Quest, SteamVR
Device	Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3, Valve Index, HTC Vive, Pimax, Oculus Rift S
Operating System	Meta Horizon OS, Windows
Type	Game
Genre	Strategy, Simulation
Input Device	Tracked motion controllers
Game Mode	Single-player
Release Date	2 May 2024 (Meta Quest); 7 November 2025 (SteamVR)
Price	US$29.99 (Meta Horizon Store and Steam list price, October 2026)
App Store	Meta Horizon Store, Steam
Website	https://farbridge.com/homeworldvastreaches/

See also: VR Apps and VR Games

Homeworld: Vast Reaches is a virtual reality and mixed reality real-time strategy game set in the Homeworld universe. It was developed and published by FarBridge, a game studio from Austin, Texas founded in 2017, in partnership with Gearbox Entertainment, which held the rights to the Homeworld series at the time of the announcement. The game was released for Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest 3 on 2 May 2024 and for SteamVR on 7 November 2025.

The story takes place between the original Homeworld (1999) and Homeworld 2. The player takes the role of Fleet Command in a single-player campaign and can play either in a deep-space environment or in mixed reality with the battle placed in the room around them. FarBridge calls it an original game designed for VR rather than a port or remaster, and has said it has no plans for a non-VR version.

Reviewed 6 October 2026. Release dates, developer and publisher roles, story, development, Steam requirements, prices and IGN, Metacritic and OpenCritic reception checked against FarBridge, Steam, Meta, IGN, UploadVR, Road to VR, GamesBeat and Digital Trends sources. About review dates.

Gameplay

The player takes the role of Fleet Command and directs ships to attack, defend and capture resources, which are used to build more ships. Units are built from a virtual command module on the player's wrist, and ships can be ordered and viewed from any angle in a 360-degree battlefield. Ships are organized into Strike Groups, whose formations the player shapes by hand; FarBridge creative director Richard Rouse III wrote that the team wanted this to "feel like arranging miniatures in a tabletop gaming session."

In his IGN review, Dan Stapleton described the system as between three and six control groups into which the player places ships. All ships in a group are controlled together, and new units appear in the group wherever it is on the map. Unwanted ships can be scrapped for resources by dragging them out of a group. Strike groups have active abilities such as increased firepower, shields and repair, and later unlocks include Ion Frigates and Ballistic Destroyers with long-range attacks. The game can be paused, but during a pause the player can only move the camera and call in new ships. Rouse named Concentrated Fire, Barricade Frigate shields and Ballistic Destroyer missiles among the special abilities that matter most at higher difficulty levels.

According to IGN, the campaign has 11 missions and took about six to eight hours, with two difficulty levels above the default medium setting. The Quest release had no multiplayer and no skirmish mode against the AI. Three Challenge Levels for experienced players were added with the SteamVR release, each with several difficulty settings, and they came to the Quest version as a free update.

Mixed reality mode

An optional mixed reality mode uses the headset's passthrough cameras to replace the space background with the player's surroundings, so the ships appear in the room. The battlefield can be scaled from the size of a room down to a tabletop. IGN noted that the mode also works with the Quest 2's black-and-white passthrough, but looks much better with the Quest 3's color cameras.

Story

At the end of the first Homeworld, Fleet Command Karan S'jet disconnects from the Mothership, and she returns to command it a century later in Homeworld 2. Vast Reaches takes place during that gap. The player character is Tyrra Soban, a new Fleet Command from the militaristic Kiith Soban, with the retired Karan S'jet as her adviser. The original Kushan Mothership is pulled from retirement to serve as the flagship of a new fleet. The enemy is the Radaa, whom FarBridge describes as "duplicitous interstellar traders" seeking the fleet's hyperspace core. The story is told through animatic cutscenes and narration in the style of the earlier games.

Development

In a May 2024 studio blog post, Rouse wrote that Gearbox contacted FarBridge about making a VR game in the Homeworld franchise. Within a couple of weeks of those talks, Damon Chandler, one of FarBridge's tech leads and XR designers, built a prototype during one of the studio's jam days, and the team then committed to the project. Rouse told Meta that "our goal from the beginning was to build a game explicitly for VR/MR, and that meant completely reimagining the controls." FarBridge first worked on adapting strategy controls to grip-and-trigger VR controllers, using the position and rotation of the controllers for fine control over how ships are ordered and oriented.

The mixed reality mode came after the Meta Quest 3 launched. Because scale turned out to matter so much in mixed reality, the team added much larger zoom ranges for that mode, so the battlefield could be shrunk to fit on a desk or enlarged to fill a room.

Under the partnership, FarBridge handled development and publishing, while Gearbox Entertainment focused on keeping the story, characters and lore consistent with the franchise. The music is by Paul Ruskay, who according to FarBridge has worked on every entry in the Homeworld franchise. He also put FarBridge in touch with returning cast members, including Heidi Ernest as Karan S'jet. FarBridge developed the game separately from Homeworld 3, which was made by Blackbird Interactive.

FarBridge described the 2025 Steam launch as a continuation of its collaboration with "2K Games / Gearbox".

Release

FarBridge and Gearbox Entertainment announced the game on 3 April 2024 and opened wishlists on the Meta Quest Store. On 23 April 2024 FarBridge set the Quest release for 2 May 2024 and said a SteamVR version would follow later that year. The Quest version launched on 2 May 2024, eleven days before Homeworld 3 came out on PC on 13 May 2024.

The PC version was delayed twice. In June 2024 FarBridge announced a SteamVR release for 14 November 2024. By December 2024 the studio said it was committed to bringing the game to SteamVR in 2025. On 3 October 2025 it announced a 23 October 2025 SteamVR launch with upgraded visuals and the new Challenge Levels. The release instead arrived on 7 November 2025. A free demo went live on Steam the same day.

Platform	Release date	Notes
Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3	2 May 2024	Meta Horizon Store; Challenge Levels added later as a free update
SteamVR (Windows)	7 November 2025	Originally announced for 14 November 2024, then for 23 October 2025; free demo released the same day

FarBridge's SteamVR announcement listed support for HTC Vive, Valve Index, Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3 and Pimax headsets. The Steam store lists the game as VR only with tracked controller support. Its minimum PC requirements are Windows 10, an Intel i5-4590 or equivalent, 4 GB of RAM, an NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 290 graphics card and 4 GB of storage, with OpenXR support for the Valve Index, Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3 and Oculus Rift S. The game is available in English only. As of 6 October 2026 the list price is US$29.99 on both the Meta Horizon Store and Steam.

Reception

As of 6 October 2026, Metacritic lists one critic review for the game, IGN's, scored 50, and shows no Metascore ("tbd"); the site says a Metascore is available after four critic reviews. OpenCritic lists two reviews, from IGN and Duuro Magazine, and does not display a Top Critic Average.

Publication	Score	Platform
IGN	5/10	Meta Quest

IGN's Dan Stapleton gave the game 5 out of 10 and called it "less a virtual reality reinvention of this legendary space RTS than it is an unsatisfying lite version for the Meta Quest 2 and 3". He wrote that the story and music captured the Homeworld atmosphere. His criticisms were that ships were destroyed within seconds, ship models lacked detail, the control-group system removed much of the series' tactical nuance, and the six-to-eight-hour campaign was followed by nothing else to play.

Tomas Franzese of Digital Trends was more positive in an impressions piece. He wrote that the game is "simpler than the PC games but still hits all their core gameplay tenets," and agreed with critics who found it too easy, but argued that the lower difficulty suited VR play and made it an approachable introduction before Homeworld 3. In a June 2024 feature, UploadVR called it "a standout title in the VR RTS genre". UploadVR later included it in its list of the best mixed reality games and experiences for Quest 3 and Quest 3S.

According to FarBridge, the Challenge Levels were added because some strategy players said after the Quest launch that they had mastered the game and wanted harder missions.

See also

• Meta Quest 3
• Mixed Reality
• SteamVR