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Homefront: The Revolution
Homefront: The Revolution is a semi-cover shooter, with all the elements of a great game: Great premise with exceptional potential, list of tasks and missions, decent shooting mechanics, beautiful environments. It’s just that when these elements come together, Homefront sadly misses its mark. It’s a technical mess, the story falls short, and the gameplay is moderately interesting at best, asinine at worst.
Story
This is what initially drew me in to the original Homefront on PlayStation 3 back in 2011.
Set in an alternate timeline wherein North Korea reunited with South Korea to become the Greater Korean Republic. Using the North’s military might and the South’s economic power, the Greater Korean Republic (GKR) become a global power. After a war between Ira and Saudi Arabia, each one having their own nuclear weapons, destroy global oil supply. The GKR see an opportunity and invade Jan after the U.S. recalls much of its overseas forces due to rising gas prices and civic unrest at home. Japan becomes the GKR’s first “puppet state.”
As conditions get worse in the United States, the GKR continue their annexation of Southeast Asia until they’ve grown an empire reminiscent of Imperial Japan. Soon, the U.S. is hit with the “Asian bird flu”, a virus that takes the lives of millions and forces the Mexican Government to quarantine the country as the flu spreads throughout North America. Around this time, the GKR launch a global satellite, supposedly as s signal of peace. Instead it’s a massive high-altitude nuclear weapon which launches an EMP blast over the United States, taking down all electrical systems. Seizing the opportunity, the GKR launch an offensive against the U.S. ad take control of Hawaii and the Pacific Coast. The Eastern Coast manages to stave off the GKR and the States are spit at the irradiated Mississippi River.
Now, all that great backstory, forget it all. Homefront: The Revolution restarts the story, saying that with the United States in economic debt, they turn to a new company called Apex, secretly in league with North Korea, for new technologies. Apex is hired to build military equipment for the U.S. Meanwhile, North Korea secretly installs backdoors in all their software, allowing them to remotely shut down everything. After a few decades of allowing the States to grow used to their technology, and increase their debt in the process, Ape asks for their payment, and when the United States can’t produce, North Korea flips the switch, so to speak, and shuts down all of the United States. They use this opportunity to invade the States. This is where Homefront: The Revolution’s story gets a bit farfetched. In the original Homefront, while it was incredibly unlikely, it wasn’t impossible. An obscure sequence of events would have had to have taken place perfectly, without a single hitch, but Korea could’ve effectively taken over the world. The Revolution seems to ignore the exquisite setup of the original in favor of far less believable story, where for decades nobody finds these backdoors in all of the technology built by Korean company Apex. It’s a bit of a letdown for those who’d enjoyed the original Homefront and wanted to see a continuation of its story. Sadly the story here is lackluster and uninspiring.
Gameplay
This is where Homefront: The Revolution falls apart. For the most part, Homefront works. To be fair, this game has had one of the most strained development cycles out there. When THQ filed for bankruptcy in 2012, it left numerous titles on the table, including Homefront. The IP was bought at an auction by Crytek. Sometime during the development cycle, Crytek reported some financial issues, putting Homefront on hold for a while and forcing many devs to leave the company. Eventually Koch Media was acquired by publisher Deep Silver, who would hire developer Dambuster Studios to finish the game.
The game starts with giving the player control of silent Ethan Brady, new recruited to the rebel “Resistance” fighters hoping to take back their country slowly but surely. After a few short gameplay segments followed by some talking between non-player characters, the player is let loose in open world Philadelphia.
You’ll be moving from segment to segment of Philadelphia, clearing out enemies and taking back strongholds, chokepoints, and other bases to operate from. Zones are categorized as Red Zones, wherein enemies have order to shoot on sight, shoot to kill, and Yellow Zones, where the Korean People’s Army (KPA) and the conquered people of former America live in a strained coexistence. Despite desperately poor living conditions, many of the people in the Yellow Zones openly complain about the movements of the Resistance, saying that they only serve to make things harder on the people.
Each sector has a “Hearts and Minds” meter, which Brady is tasked with completing by fulfilling the laundry list of missions, ranging from sabotage, collecting intel, clearing enemy bases for the Resistance to take over. Doing these fills the “Hearts and Minds” meter, along with helping the occasional citizen being harassed by KPA police, beggars, and destroying propaganda equipment. The more missions you complete, the more of the map will be open to you, allowing safe passage once you’ve completely cleaned out an area and turned the previously red map blue.
The shooting is nothing to write home about, and there are few mechanics that make it stand out, but it manages to make it work well together. Unfortunately, Homefront: The Revolution is riddled with so many bugs it becomes hard to enjoy it sometimes. There aren’t many game-breaking bugs, sometimes quite the opposite: one time, I loaded up my game save because reviving after dying isn’t worth losing everything you’d collected to sell early on in the game, and when I did, all the enemies had suddenly disappeared. It was as if they’d all gone on break at one of their strongholds; the streets were empty, there were no more soldiers or unmanned vehicles patrolling the streets, save for a single Wolverine unit. I completed the objectives with such ease it became boring. After cleaning up the district, I reloaded a save and everyone had returned.
Of course most times it doesn’t really matter. Enemies are so dim that simply running and ducking behind something will allow you get away clean most times. If things get hairier, find a dumpster out of their rather limited line of sight and hide. This will usually end most conflicts quickly. Even worse, most missions can be completed by sprinting to the objective, bypassing enemies and healing when necessary, hitting the button on the objective and that’s it. Enemies will clear out, your allies will take over. It’s as if the guards don’t really care about you, they’re just working to get a paycheck.
Additionally, the game offers no way to manually save your game, you must simply rely on (or manipulate) the auto-save system, which means there may be a few times you find yourself in a sticky situation and reloading your auto-save might just make things worse. Also, every time the game auto-saves, which is a lot, the game hard freezes for around 2-6 seconds, depending on what system you may be playing on. Again, this isn’t game-breaking, but it is jarring and certainly breaks the immersion.
Still, all these things said, Homefront has a strange way of bringing me back. Perhaps it’s my own completionism, but I just love the feeling of satisfaction at clearing out an area and making it my own. In this way, Homefront does a good job at giving me a laundry list of things to get done and rewarding me for doing them. New bases open up, which makes getting around the districts easier, new recruits join the cause, which makes storming enemy bases doable.
Visuals
Homefront: The Revolution actually has an interesting art style. To just glance at it, the game demands your attention almost immediately. The game world itself runs a gamut from bright, vibrant cityscape to downtrodden, desolate urban areas nearing wasteland status. It all comes to life in interesting and beautiful ways. That said, this game does look somewhat aged. I know this game has been in development hell for quite some time, but even so, there are times when Homefront looks just plain bad. At other times, it can look very, very good. Unfortunately, some of the textures on both the landscapes and the non-player characters don’t always show the same love. That is, assuming they show at all. Sometimes the game’s textures load up late, pop-in, but other times, they don’t show at all.
Still, for the times when everything works, Homefront can look good when it wants to. At other times, though, things can look kinda rough.
Audio
The sounds in this game are pretty generic. None of the weapons actually sound as you might expect a first person shooter in 2016 to sound. The NPCs. Both neutral and enemy, all have repetitive audio tracks, though it takes a good bit of standing around to hear the loop. The ally NPCs in any of your many safehouses are a bore. The ones not pertinent to the story are just generic angry men and women with repetitive one-liners and the like.
The music, at times, can be emotional but these moments, much like the bulk of Homefront, are few and far between.
Online
Homefront: The Revolution’s multiplayer isn’t like it was in the original. Instead of the competitive multiplayer we enjoyed back in the day, The Revolution’s multiplayer is all about co-op, but not in the way you might be thinking. The campaign is still entirely single-player but the multiplayer has its own campaign to run through.
To start, you need to create a character. The templates to choose from are as generic as they come, with the game even warning you about it. No sliders or customization options here at all. After picking a basic face and body, you choose your “background.” This essentially amounts to choosing where your first skill point will be spent and nothing more. This is a revolution, nobody cares what you did before anyway, just about what you can do now. You can create up to 4 characters, each with their own skills, though the gear and clothing you unlock is shared between them.
After setting up your super basic character, you can choose to join a public match, private, change your character gear, loadout, and skills, or the armory where you can spend in-game funds on weapons and armor caches, as well as vanity and attachment gear.
After you pick a mission, it’s just a matter of waiting for another player to join you. You can wait for a full team of four players or go in early with as little as two and hope others join in progress. Once you’re in, however, the game does a poor job of setting up what it wants you. What it does is drop you onto the chosen map and giving you a list of objectives to complete, each one unlocking the next objective. Completing them is usually a simple matter “go here, take out these enemies, guard this thing”, rinse, repeat. There is some variation as there are a good amount of missions to do, but it may get repetitive quickly. When in missions it is up to your teammates to revive incapacitated players, which can get frustrating when you go down and your teammates, who may know the mission so well they’ve gone off to do their own thing and leave you noobs behind.
Outside of missions, there are the aforementioned weapon and armor caches, attachments, and vanity items to unlock with funds gained from each mission and it seems, at least early on, funds are plentiful so long as the mission is completed. You can also spend these, along with XP, to unlock new skills. All skills, weapons, attachments, and the like can be earned with in-game currency obtained from missions so the more missions you do, the more you can conceivably unlock.
Conclusion
Homefront: The Revolution is much like its predecessor in that it’s a good idea, stuck in some very mediocre wrappings. The original Homefront had a lot of promise and some very good idea, but The Revolution doesn’t seem to capitalize on them and instead goes off in its own direction. While The Revolution tries to differentiate itself from its predecessor it still fails to hit its mark, nor does it make a lasting impression on any who play it, aside from some bugs that may actually cause some players to not even finish it.
From buggy and broken mechanics to a story that never quite achieves its goal, there was a lot of potential in the original Homefront, but it was all ignored in The Revolution in lieu of its own narrative, but ultimately it never truly came to fruition.