Homefront (2011)

[ This is a review of the Singleplayer campaign of Homefront. ]

Homefront is definitely an ambitious game. It wants to tell the story of a war, how that war impacts the lives of the people caught up in it, and how it skews the morality of the people on both sides of the fight. On the gameplay side, it wants to put the player into challenging firefights, massive set-pieces and make them feel like a hero who turns the tide of the war. Unfortunately, several problems prevent Homefront from living up to those lofty ambitions.

The first problem is that the game's characters are really flat. The protagonist, Jacobs, is a former pilot and a decorated soldier, and that's about it. The same applies to your AI teammates who accompany you throughout the game - Connor, Rianna & Hopper. These characters are never fully realized beyond some broad strokes, and they don't feel like real people. So when the dramatic moments of the story are delivered using these same characters, those moments hardly have the intended impact. This problem extends throughout the game, all the way up to the ending.

Gameplay-wise, Homefront is even more of a mixed bag. The environments look massive, but are in fact, linear. You will encounter a large number of guns, but the difference between them boils down to SMG/LMG/Assault Rifle. Enemy AI varies between two extremes: sometimes they ignore you standing off to their side, and at other times they hit you with full automatic fire while you're behind cover. Some sections also feature infinitely spawning enemies that keep on coming until you can push forward and reach a certain point. In almost every other section, being too aggressive at combat will get you killed. You're also forced into following your teammates from objective to objective for most of the game. There a few parts that allow you to go off on your own, and I found these sections to be the most interesting in terms of gameplay. Some of the level design is also respectable, and the autonomous combat vehicle - 'Goliath' - is a cool piece of equipment.

To summarize, I feel that Homefront ends up being a far cry from what it set out to be. The story and the characters never get a chance to breathe, and the gameplay is too generic to form an identity of its own. Homefront isn't completely bad, but it's still a mediocre game even at its best moments.

A rather dull, generic FPS with a terrible story and uninteresting game play.

The main premise for the game is that the USA gets invaded by North Korea in a sort of Red Dawn style. You play as a former pilot that is sent to a "correction" facility when you get busted out by resistance as you're a key part of their plan to fight against the occupying force.

Now I don't mind the North Korea occupying the USA bit. This in fact is the most sensible thing you can find in the story to come. As the story is just sooo bad. The whole game is about minor spoilers stealing some gas in order to win the war(?). It's just stupid and the whole bit makes little to no sense. And it could be excused if the game play was at least OK - but it's not.

Visually it looks and feels a little bit like Half Life 2. But while that is not necessarily a bad thing - it just lacks character. It's dull. The enemies are basically clones, the environments are not necessarily bad but nothing sticking in mind either.

As game play goes - this is a generic FPS. The thing though is all the weapons feels pretty much the same so it doesn't matter what you're actually using. And there's just no fun.

Apart from standard FPS stuff it also adds some generic - on rails section, helicopter flying level - you're a pilot after all and this was what it was all about. And the probably worst sneaking section I ever saw in a game. And not that it was unfair, cause it was super easy but also super stupid.

Overall - at least it's a short game and doesn't break. Aside of this - can't really see a reason to pick it up.

Gameplay: 1.5 /5 Story: 3 /5 Presentation: 2.5/5 Difficulty: NA

Basis:

Story= plot progression, intrigue, characters, world

Gameplay= Mechanics, gameplay options (freedom), repetition, goals, difficulty

Presentation= graphics, animation, environment/character design, Art direction, Script, music

The game is an attempt to be a Call of Duty with a different story, but it ended up being a frustrating mess. The game design is just discomforting in the game. The AI characters just seem to follow their preprogrammed paths and seem to completely forget that there are enemies all over. Half the time they would bypass one or two enemies who would later shoot me in the back. This then leads to replaying from the same checkpoint over and over. You can't jump over cover which seems very important in most FPS games.

The story was decent having a more extreme Red Dawn type feel. It is about as generic and straightforward as any other military style FPS.

Homefront is the saddest type of game. A solid idea that’s badly executed. From the beginning Homefront was billed as Red Dawn the videogame minus the Russians (John Milius the director of Red Dawn was even brought on as a writer). It’s clear from how the game turned out that the developers wanted this to a “Call of Duty” type franchise with an FPS playstyle, big action set pieces, and special segments to shake things up every once and a while. But “Homefront” proves the old adage that imitating something and imitating something well are two different things. Let’s Review:

*The Story: Through an improbable and elaborate fictional scenario, North & South Korea unite to becoming a superpower and attack an economically crippled United States. Now the idea of a land invasion of the USA is silly on its face for too many reasons to mention here but especially considering the invader is North Korea. A country ruled by an unbalanced incompetent leader with no military man power to speak of. Of course, the reason N.K. was chosen was because the Cold War is over so the Russians are out and China makes up a sizable part of the buyers’ market on planet Earth so depicting them as bloodthirsty invaders is bad for sales (incidentally this is the same avenue the Red Dawn remake decided to take years later). But this is a videogame and I can suspend my disbelief if the product is engaging enough. Unfortunately, it’s not. Which is in no small part due to…

*The Characters: One of the interesting aspects of Homefront’s gameplay was that the player has two (or three) A.I. companions with them for most of the game. If these companions are well written enough the player would have almost the entire game to bond with and become attached to them. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. The three companions that you’re with for most of the game are as follows: Pissed Off Guy, Asian Tech Guy, and the Chick. I’m sure they had official names but I couldn’t remember them if you put a gun to my head. This disinterest in my squamates was so pronounced that at the grand finale when Pissed Off guy sacrifices himself to stop a Korean platoon I really couldn’t have cared less.

*Gameplay: As I stated above, from all outward appearances the creators wanted to make Homefront into a franchise like Call of Duty and ended up copying a lot of thing verbatim from that series: FPS style gameplay, countries at war in modern day, urban warfare, sniper missions, stealth missions, AI companions, and select moments of moral ambiguity. The difference is that as much as the CoD franchise gets criticized for being repetitive for the most part the games are well executed and fun to play. Homefront is neither of those things:

Length: A large problem this game has is that on average it can be beaten in 5 hours. Now there’s no required length for a game to be but the short length of the campaign makes all the game’s other problems more noticeable.

Graphics: The graphics are muddy in addition to the drab monochromatic color scheme the environments sport. I feel obliged to point out that this game being released in 2011 isn’t an excuse because Batman: Arkham City, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Portal 2, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, Dead Space 2, Saints Row 3, LA Noire, Dark Souls, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and many other notable titles came out the same year with graphics that blew Homefront out of the water.

The Levels: The level design isn't particularly bad, so much as it is small. It’s no accident that the protagonists go back through certain levels, stop every two minutes to have badly written dialogue, or have the way forward blocked by some obstacle that only your companions can move, because all of these tricks are meant to distract the player from how small and linear the levels really are.

What bums me out about Homefront isn’t that it’s a supremely mediocre game, but that it could have been something great. The idea of becoming a guerilla fighter in an occupied USA is a compelling one that if properly executed could make a great game and the potential for greatness was here. Many of the game’s set pieces such as the opening level featuring an occupied Colorado town, sneaking through a survivalist camp, and an all-out war on the Golden Gate Bridge might have been noteworthy if the game was overall designed better or if the player was given as reason to care. The bad writing in this game made what should have been a rage inducing section where the player discovers a mass grave site for executed American citizens into a forgettable moment on an even more forgettable game. If you want to play a well-designed game where you fight a foreign power invading American soil, you’re better off checking out Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 again.

P.S. I haven’t played the sequel/reboot Homefront: The Revolution, so the jury’s out on whether it’s an improvement or not.