Console: Xbox 360/ PlayStation 3/ PC /
Players: Single Player / Online Multiplayer
Release Date: 18th March 2011
Developers: Kaos Studios
Publishers: THQ
Genre: First person shooter
Price: €49.99*
Another first person shooter? Sweet we thought when we heard about THQ’s Homefront and by now you all know that we’ve got a really itchy trigger finger and are big fans of the FPS genre. So when more and more information began to surface about Homefront we fell for the whole thing hook, line and sinker! After a North Korean attack on a South Korean submarine, the first of many events to send the world into a downward spiral, the world begins to recognise the real threat N. Korea now poses. However it is too little too late and Kim Jong Il begins his global campaign of destruction and conquer, bringing the people of the free world to their knees, crushing all opposition and claiming North Korea as the new and only super power.
(We’re going to stop right here for a second and take a deep breath because and this will become more apparent as our review of Homefront continues… we really did not enjoy this game! There we said, it’s out there now, let’s just continue!)
You are Robert Jacobs, a former Marine helicopter pilot, living in Montrose Colorado in the year 2027! North Korea now known as Unified Korea (after amalgamating South Korea) has invaded the US, crippled Japan and has waged nuclear warfare. Dragged from your home by Korean soldiers, you witness the slaughter of innocent Americans at the hands of the brutal invaders and while en route to an unspecified location before being sent to a ‘re-education camp’ you are rescued by a resistance movement of freedom fighters. The Resistance aims to recover fuel for the US military located in San Francisco which is obviously a Korean stronghold and from Colorado to California the route is covered by Korean troops.
As a first person shooter Homefront is utterly lacking in anything new, bringing nothing to the playing field and relying heavily on old tricks of the genre. Being in the Resistance means a lack of proper munitions and most of what you use to kill enemy soldiers will be picked up along the way. For any skilled first person shooter player (by skilled we mean if you play FPS frequently) the campaign mode will take you an easy five hours of total gameplay with developers relying on the online multiplayer to help you fill the rest of your time.
Multiplayer mode isn’t about to bring anything new to the genre either! You gain battle points after each match, more or less depending on your performance and outcome of the match. Set in the US prior to the complete demolition of the US Armed Forces, vehicular combat plays a large part in the multiplayer mode and using the points you earn you may buy new weapons, tanks and more.
Why don’t we like the game?
Not to belittle the work of the people behind the game, we understand how much time and effort goes into making one but it is 2011 and we’ve come to expect an awful lot more for the €50 we dish out to play them. Homefront genuinely plays and looks like something from the early days of the PlayStation and not in that ‘Oh cool a game that feels like a throwback to the good ole days of gaming’, we mean in the ‘terribly sucky why is the game freezing on the loading screen?!’ kind of way! Visually the game is dull and dirty and while we get that it is a near apocalyptic future with the destruction of US society there are ways to make things look bad without making it all look crap! (See Badlands for an example of how to get this right!). We’ve two main problems with Homefront aside from the weak visuals: the storyline and the AI.
Your fellow resistance members are slow to react, particularly when entering/exiting new areas of the map! Stand in their spot as another member goes to kick a door in and you’ll be waiting for ages until you finally give in and move an inch more to the right just so they can have their own way. The enemies are no better, after stealthily creeping our way around a troop of soldiers we accidentally stumbled forward (slip of the hand!) right into the middle of them but we still had time to drop a grenade and leg it before they realised what we’d done!
Onto our other point – the storyline had immense potential, written by the co-writer of Apocalypse Now and writer of Red Dawn, John Millius, we were intrigued by the timeline at first but soon found ourselves snarling awkwardly at the pro-American BS, anti-Everyone else doctrine this game forces you to swallow. We’re not about to get all political on you don’t worry, we were looking forward to seeing how the whole thing was handled only to realise it is overall a story that is poorly executed (when Medal of Honor dropped the ‘Taliban’ from the enemy names we were annoyed by the censorship so trust us when we say this isn’t a case of us wanting THQ and Kaos to be more politically correct).
If you want to shoot stuff mindlessly and aimlessly then yeah go ahead and pick up Homefront, it provides a few hours of ample occupation until something a lot better will come along. On the other hand if you want your games to actually have some semblance of decent gameplay and be worth the hard earned cash your forked over for it then keep your money! Homefront is a weak contender in the world of first person shooters and we hope that developers will take note that gamers these days although often content to just blow stuff up because it looks cool (not in Homefront though because of the bad graphics!!!) we also want our games to actually have some depth to them!
Good Points
Multiplayer provides a distraction
Bad Points
Poor visuals
Poor AI
Poor storyline
Rating: 4/10
*Prices may vary
