Review | Homefront

Sometimes you have to take the bad with the good. For example, North and South Korea might finally put aside their differences and work together, but they might use the power of friendship to take over the world. America might get invaded, but it gives the people a common enemy to band together against. A game called Homefront might have an average presentation and mediocre gameplay, but it also might have a skillfully written narrative, chilling setting and damn good multiplayer.

When we first heard about Homefront, it seemed like a breath of oppressively fresh air. The first-person shooter market has been choking on a hundred thousand versions of Call of Duty wandering around Foreign Landistan being gritty and military-based for some time. Then up popped Kaos Studios with a game about the successful invasion of the United States of America, promising players the chance to fight with the resistance across eerily familiar suburban landscapes. A sensitive, emotional take on war? Yes, please.

Homefront begins on a promising note, with a quick recap of the last 15 years. North and South Korea have merged – with the North in charge, of course – under a new leader, and they start spreading their influence across Asia. At the same time, the US is running out of oil, which causes civil unrest and stretches the superpower to its limits. At face value this might seem ridiculous, but the presentation is believable enough to suspend your cynicism. Unified Korea launches a satellite which triggers an EMP blast over the United States, cutting all power and military communications, and before you can say “home-baked apple pie” the country is occupied by the Korean Army. With the American military scattered, your character will join up with a small resistance force fighting for control of San Francisco.

The campaign itself serves as more of an overview of the speculative world set up by the premise than an adventure of its own, with much of the game spent either watching the devastated population or following someone to the next objective. The characters and situations you are personally involved in are certainly dramatic, but ultimately shallow. That said, the setting is stunningly realised and doesn’t pull any punches. It’s hard to get overly excited about shooting a bunch of bad guys when you just witnessed the mass execution of prisoners, or when you just traipsed through a tellingly silent children’s playground with your assault rifle.

So it’s a shame that for all the effort Homefront puts in distancing itself from the traditional Hell Yeah, War message and creating a unique story, the gameplay is bog-standard shooter.

The style of action and weapons on show will be familiar to anyone who has played Call of Duty et al recently. You’ll be utilising the usual collection of rifles, handguns, rocket launchers and sniper rifles to gun down the usual waves of enemies, without seeing anything to set it apart from the rest of the genre. At times the gameplay feels at odds with the entire aesthetic of the setting. While the story constantly shows you the destruction and sadness conflict can bring to real people, when you’re actually playing you still have to kill a bunch of dudes to win. Characters will hint at ideas like conserving ammunition and sneaking past guards, but in reality it will almost always boil down to a shooting match. It’s fun, but you can’t help feeling it could have been really special with a little time outside the box.

Some technical difficulties hamper the experience as well, chiefly some problems with the AI and mission scripting. Companions will often stick their guns through walls or shove you out of your cover to get comfortable, which frustrates and immediately pulls you out of what is supposed to be an immersive experience. More alarmingly, some missions are so tightly scripted that the game will actually force you to wait while characters explain a situation, or because you’re blocking an NPC’s path to the next plot trigger.

Homefront’s greatest disappointment is its length. While the clock alone is no way to measure the value of a video game, Homefront barely gets started before abruptly closing off again. The campaign will take about five hours from start to finish, and the setup for a large-scale narrative never really leads anywhere. It’s a memorable five hours, but it’s all over much too soon.

On the multiplayer front, the game becomes an entirely different kettle of fish. While there are only two modes available – Ground Control (a control point match) and Team Deathmatch – they are as open and varied as the campaign is linear. Players take on the role of either Korean or US troops fighting for supremacy in the city before the American forces were scattered. Each map is a good size and has a lot of different terrain, allowing for fast and frenzied battles in city streets and cul-de-sacs. Ground Control in particular mixes things up by changing the way the map advances based on who has been leading the charge. New areas of the map will open up, often making it feel like a whole new map.

The core gameplay is the same as the main game, but the real magic comes in the scoring, which acts like an in game experience point system. As you rack up kills, destroy vehicles, take points and generally do good work, you accrue Battle Points, which can be spent during the match to spawn a drone, equip armour or call in an air strike. Yuu can even spawn vehicles, meaning the tide of a battle can turn quickly as one side gains access to a brand new tank. Multiplayer load-outs come in the usual class flavours, but are also customisable for those who know what their strengths and weaknesses are.

Also worth a mention is the Battle Commander system. This variant gives an AI commander to each team, who will keep track of the progress and actions of friend and foe. If a player is tallying a large number of kills on a given life they will start to gain notoriety, meaning an increasing number of opposing players have them marked for death. However this infamy also gives the player certain perks to help them survive, leading to a fascinating sort of cat and mouse that almost becomes its own game within a game.

If it sounds like a review of two different games, that’s about right. Homefront’s single player campaign has a wonderful setting which has obviously been created with a lot of care. Gameplay cribbed from any generic FPS unfortunately distracts you from that settings, and while the production values aren’t bad, they aren’t anything spectacular. But then you switch over to the multiplayer and are given a sprawling warzone filled with pure fun and quite different to any other game of its type. In the end, Homefront is a maybe.