The gameplay advances were also highly praised by critics: Lopez claimed that "Relic not only tackled space, but may have just changed strategy games forever." Reviewers praised the full 3D nature of the game as elevating it from its otherwise standard real-time strategy gameplay systems; Levine said that the 3D was what made the game unique, and Ryan explicitly termed the base gameplay as "fairly similar to any tried-and-true real-time strategy game" but said that the 3D elements and connected mission structure turned it into a "different breed" of game. Fortune, however, focused instead on the difficulty of the missions themselves, praising the challenge and variety of tactics needed to complete the game and lauding it for having "some of the best fleet battles ever seen in a computer game". Levine, Ryan, Keefer, and Lopez all noted the connected mission structure as an innovation in the genre: by limiting the resources to build ships and pulling the same fleet through the missions, "Homeworld" converted what would usually be a set of disconnected missions into "chapters" of a continuous game. They felt this connected the player to their fleet as more than disposable units, and added a level of strategy to the game. Keefer and Levine did note, however, that this added a great deal of difficulty to the game, especially for more casual players, as the player could make decisions in earlier levels that rendered later ones very difficult to complete without an explicit difficulty level to counteract it. Ryan and Keefer also considered the 3D movement disorienting at first, though Levine and Samuel said the controls were "as easy as possible".