Preview | Homefront

Homefront comes from the minds of two very diverse sources. The game spawns from the pen of acclaimed screenwriter John Miluis, the legend behind such films as Conan: The Barbarian, 1941, Apocalypse Now and, most importantly for Homefront, Red Dawn.

The second father to the Homefront universe is the studio that gave birth to the reasonably successful Frontlines: Fuel of War, Kaos Studios. Having spent a couple of years post-Frontlines launch building the Homefront universe, Kaos Studios will finally be bringing the war home in March next year.

Homefront was sliding below the radar during most stages of its development, but that all changed with the release of a spectacular cinematic trailer that gave the background to the main storyline and promised a rare game of intense firefights in eerily familiar locales.

The concept behind Homefront is golden and reportedly actually possible. In the future the death of the lovely leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-il gives rise to his despotic son, Kim Jong-un, who reunites North and South Korea and forms Unified Korea.

At the same time crippling oil prices and a implosion of the American economy force the American military machine to give up policing of the world and allows Unified Korea to annex most of Asia.

Eventually the Unified Koreans attack the US and unleash a massive EMP blast which takes down all American defenses and allows a Korean invasion on American soil. Homefront picks up events after San Francisco has fallen and the American military is scattered. It’s up to you, yep you, regular Joe, to take up arms and become the resistance.

It’s to this backdrop that THQ presented a small sample of Homefront to selected lucky guests at the end of last week, showing off a game that has echoes of Resistance and Modern Warfare 2 but one which, through a sense of realism and intensity, hopes to elevate the genre to a whole new emotional level.

After the still stunning cinematic we open in a rundown bedroom with a knock on the door startling your character awake. Unified soldiers await at the door to herd you into a bus and out of your city. As the bus passes through what was once a quiet and peaceful town, scenes of genuinely upsetting oppression and fear appear around every corner.

Suddenly the bus is slammed over sideways by a seemingly suicidal driver. With the guards dead and the bus destroyed, you are dragged through the wreckage by a mysterious couple from the local resistance, a couple who are specifically after you.

It’s here that the game proper kicks in. The gameplay is standard first-person shooter, with a Killzone 2 style cover system and destructible environments all placed over the top of a creepy and unsettling environment which is the star of this early demo.

While the firefights are reasonable generic at this stage, Homefront promises the introduction of a “logic engine” which will make every shot, every decision different than the one before, meaning multiple ways of playing through every scenario that the game throws at you and indeed multiple ways of blowing enemies away, which is really what we all want from our first-person shooters

For Homefront the main stars of the game seem to be the combination of that amazing setup and the environments in which the game takes place. With the EMP littering the map with fallen planes and huge destruction, Homefront takes full advantage of a polished Unreal 3 engine to push the desolation home.

If THQ can marry up the fantastic concept with a solid game engine that delivers something as strong as the story than come March 2011 every house is going to be a Homefront.