Title: Homefront
Publisher: THQ
Developer: Kaos Studios
Platform: Xbox 360, PS3, PC
Genre: Shooter
Release Date: March 15, 2011
Price: $59.99
Rating: M
Homefront is a game that looks to evoke real, raw emotion from the player in order to immerse them in middle America overrun by a unified Korean invasion. It’s an ambitious attempt to almost literally recreate the feelings drummed up in the 60’s with a present or near future threat. It’s disappointing that a game written by one of the writers behind Apocalypse Now and Red Dawn turns out to be something that unfortunately is just that, and attempt, not a realized vision.
In Homefront the US has fallen from grace, so to speak. They have been rejected by the rest of the world and the UN has basically turned their back on us. America stands alone against a world that wants to conquer it, and that is just what has happened. While the US was falling, North and South Korea have become a unified super power under the iron fist of Kim Jong-Il’s son Kim Jong-Un after Jong-il’s death. The US has become a shell of it’s former self. The people that remain are either in prison camps or live with the constant fear of being put in one. We are now a third world country.
You take on the role of former Marine helicopter pilot Robert Jacobs. A group of Korean soldiers come into Jacobs home, question then detain him. On the way to one of the many internment camps, his prisoner transport bus is struck by a mac truck and rolled. The driver of said truck is one of the many soldiers fighting in the underground resistance force. Jacobs is quickly thrust into the fight he had been actively avoiding. Fighting alongside the rag tag bunch of ex-soldiers Jacobs must now fight for his life and the lives of everyone left who wish to be “free” Americans.
From the very beginning of the game the mood was set. As you are taken from your home and driven to what would probably have been your death, the horrors of war are all around you. People are being beaten in the street, taken from their loved ones and shot with out reason. One scene even had a very young child witnessing his parents cold blooded murder. It’s is a very powerful vision of a world I hope no one would ever have to see. This is Homefront’s greatest asset as well as it’s biggest downfall.
The set pieces of the game are actually well thought out and very well delivered. Scenes of the worst war time atrocities play out with in front of you and will no doubt bring up some sort of emotion. These are the scenes that you can truly tell an accomplished writer was behind. The downside of this is that the parts meant to carry the game from one truly cinematic scene to the next are just your usual fair of shooting gallery style FPSs that most people have played time and time again. They never carry the real emotion set up by the previous story bits.
The problem is that the story sets your up with a punch in the gut, then you are shoved out the door and it’s just shoot this blow up that. If there had been a way to inject some of that emotion and story back into the fighting it would have gone a long way to making it better. I will give credit to the directors because you can tell that they tried to do just that, by breaking up the fighting with some story chunks but it almost ends up feeling forced.
As the story progresses, there are attempts through very sparse, very gruff interactions to show a relationship between the main characters. This does nothing to make you feel anything when those characters end up dying here and there. I would have cared more for one if he had been part of the story for more than a mission, another if he hadn’t been a dick the entire game.
When the game ended I truly thought there was going to be at the very least another mission, that however never happened. It wasn’t like the story even really wrapped up well. The ending just felt shallow and rushed, like they just didn’t care anymore.
The shooting and the core gameplay introduced nothing new to the genre. I had hopes that it would. In the beginning you are told to “conserve ammo” and “make every shot count” but as the game progressed I had NO issue with finding new guns or even ammo for the one I was currently toting. There were a few cases where you were asked to make use of the automated tank in the game called “Goliath” but really all you are doing is acquiring targets for said tank.
Some of the acting is just terrible. One line read about mid way through the game sounds like it was done with out any prior knowledge of what was going on in the scene to begin with. The best character in the game, isn’t even really IN the game, it’s the narrator of the story that talks only during the load times between missions. He is the only one that actually seems to convey real emotion through his lines.
What the story sets up through cut scenes and scripted events is quickly shot to hell by the boring, cookie cutter action of the rest of the game. If you haven’t been exposed to all the shooters out there on the market this would be a great starter game. It doesn’t do anything terribly wrong, but it just doesn’t do anything exceptionally well either. There is talks that there will be a tie-in novel that sets up the events of the game, written by Jon Milius and Raymond Benson, the writers of the game (as well as Apocalypse Now and Red Dawn). I would be very interested in reading this. Simply because the biggest accomplishment found in Homefront, is that it made me really want to go back and watch Red Dawn.
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