10.0
Homefront
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Homefront is probably one of the most anticipated games so far this year. Branching away from the FPS staples of fighting terrorist, insurgents, reliving old battles and fighting aliens, Homefront took a stab of a possible future where the North Koreans take over Asia and the USA. Unfortuantely for THQ, and anyone who paid full price for the game, Homefront failed spectacularly in living up to the promise around the story.
To set the scene, imagine the already rather crazy North Korea successfully creates their first nuclear bombs. They take over their richer, more advanced brothers in South Korea. They then flock into China and Southern Asia and all is lost when the mighty Japan soon surrenders at the might of Kim Jung-un and his army. The US armed forces conduct a strategic pull out of Asia but they don’t stay safe for long. The North Korean army, called the Korea People’s Army (KPA), have their sights on America and in 2026 they invade using a combination of steal tactics and EMPs.
A different America
The setting is unusual and the bad guys are different. With such an incredible background for the game you would think that it would be difficult to go wrong. Where to begin? Homefront established such an amazing back-story you expected the single player campaign to live up to the time and effort put into creating the world. As you play through you come to realise that the time and effort they put in has all been wasted. It is another excuse to have a linear shooter where you are not encouraged to use your own initiative nor given a real motive. Like Call of Duty: Black Ops where you follow your partner through most of the missions, you are instructed to follow your fellow freedom fighters from start to finish. There is little variety in gameplay and the odd stealth and sniper missions that you are thrown into feel forced and out of place.
You start by waking up but within seconds the KPA is at your door and forcing you onto a bus. As the bus goes through the streets you get to witness firsthand the atrocities that the KPA are inflicting on the American people; public executions and taking people off the streets to put into labour camps. The sequence is long but there is a lot to see. I have heard some people call it needlessly violent but that is because it isn’t set in a war zone that isn’t in America. Before you know it the bus has overturned and some resistance fighters drag you out. Cue a long trip back to resistance headquarters, also known as Oasis, which really should have been a stealth mission but ends up being large fire fights and lots of collateral damage. But on the positive side at least you learn the controls quickly!
The controls for the game are self explanatory but Homefront relies heavily on you having played FPS games before to know what to press. If you have played any of the Call of Duty games you should be able to get the hang of the controls quickly. In the unlikely event you haven’t played an FPS there is little to tell you which buttons do what in terms of firing. The only instructions you are given is how to crouch, crawl and jump. This lack of instruction is obvious later on in the game when you have to pilot a helicopter when you are thrown into the cockpit with very little instruction on how to fire the weapons or how to change your altitude.
Flying helicopters is fun but takes a while to figure out
The console version of Homefront also boasts a pretty good auto-aim which does come in useful, particularly in fire fights where your opponent is far away or if they are moving around a lot. On the whole the auto-aim is very good but it does have a tendency of sometimes aiming just above the enemy’s head even if he stays still for the entire time. This added to the weapon recoil can result in some rather frustrating shots. As with most shooters, you can shoot controlled bursts to improve your accuracy. The weapons all seem to have more or less that same accuracy but I tended towards using weapons with red-dot sights since this gives a clearer view of the battlefield than guns without. There isn’t a great selection of weapons really and the most fun weapons such as rocket launchers and machine gun coming in during the final battle.
On the whole I was impressed with the introductory sequence to the game but it all went downhill from the moment you are dragged out of the bus. The tactics used by Connor and Rianna (your AI companions) seem to be the exact opposite of what a resistance team would do and their methods are too loud and obvious for an effective resistance cell to operate effectively. This problem of huge fire fights and large impromptu battles comes up time and time again in the story. As the story places you in the role of a small resistance cell member, you would expect there to be more stealth and sniper missions and less emphasis on running into a scene guns blazing but that seems to be what happens in almost every scene. It is not made any easier by the fact that one of the characters, Connor, seems to have a very short patience with the Koreans and likes to kill as many as possible. The sole purpose of Connor seems to be to get as many KPA on you as possible and then it is your responsibility to get everyone free again.
The companions who are forever getting you into trouble
By the time I got to Oasis I was expecting some sort of explanation. Why have you joined the resistance? Did you contact them or did they contact you? What are they fighting for? What is Connor’s story? What is Rianna’s story? Why is there a Korean fighting alongside you? The many answers that would give the game so much more depth are not given. Once you are at Oasis you are more or less rushed to the next mission. There is little to see around Oasis and even less to do which makes it all less horrifying when it is inevitably destroyed. Worse than this is that you are never given a real reason as to why you need to complete the final mission. Homefront fails to flesh out many of its story telling devices and there are some rather large plot holes and huge unexplained leaps of faith amongst the characters. While it gives the character motivation in the game it fails to pass that motivation on to the player.
For months running up to the release of Homefront its developers, Kaos, was showing off the multiplayer component. Homefront multiplayer is, in a word, brilliant; but before you can even get to the Homefront multiplayer you have to actually be able to get online. At the time of writing this review Homefront was having all sorts of trouble with freezing problems, particularly with the PS3. In the eight hours it took me to try and get into a game my PS3 froze five times (which meant having to reboot the entire console) and I was lumped into empty game lobbies about ten times when I did actually get through. So when it came to actually getting into a game I was so scared to leave the match I was in even when it got really bad and the eventual console kiddie came in to swear at everyone for a little while.
Homefront comes with three multiplayer modes, Ground Control, Team Deathmatch and Battle Commander. Ground Control is your straight forward ‘get this many points as quickly as possible’ by assisting in kills, avenging teammates and killing the opposite team. Meanwhile the goal of Team Deathmatch is simply to eliminate the other team. Battle Commander is an interesting mode where there is an AI battle commander instead of a human commander. This mode allows the AI to change the multiplayer mode between the two other modes at will. There are a range of different weapon kit depending on what you want to do. You have sniper kit, tactical, heavy, assault etc. Each one is customisable once you are in the multiplayer lobby and in between battles. If you choose to modify your armoury between battles you have to be quick because once the countdown starts any unsaved changes will be lost.
Within battle you have a choice of spawning either as infantry or in a vehicle. At the start of the battle you usually start with enough Battle Points (BP) to have the option to start out in a humvee. The more people you kill and the more people you avenge the more BP you get. The higher your BP the better vehicles you can spawn in. Unfortunately to be able to use the vehicles to their full potential you need the help of an ally to man the guns. You could just ram your humvee at enemy soldiers but in a lot of the maps the streets are narrow and it is difficult to run over soldiers unless they are in the middle of the street. Controls for the vehicles are pretty straightforward. If you have played any of the Halo games before and have been lucky enough to be the crazy ass driver of a Warthog then you will easily adapt to controlling the vehicles in-game.
Helicopters, UAVs and drones make multiplayer more challenging
The multiplayer would be just like any other multiplayer if it wasn’t for all the added extras that make the game so much more fun to run around in. The added ability to use hover drones, helicopters, tanks and UAV airstrikes at any moment the maps get quite hectic and at some points it requires some thought as to how you will get from one side of the street to the other without being shot. The map is updated every few seconds, which means the enemy may not be where it says they are. This adds to the chaos of the multiplayer and can lead to some rather frantic missions.
The depth of the story and involvement of the player would have been greatly enhanced if Homefront was more open world, maybe not quite on the scale of Fallout or Oblivion but even a few extra side missions would have gone a long way in utilising the amazing back story to the game. Having you prove your worth to the resistance and finding out more about your own history would have gone a long way in establishing the character. Something that (I am almost ashamed to say) Call of Duty: Black Ops seems to do better than Homefront!
The only thing it did succeed in doing was entertain me with Korean accents that I have never heard before and an incredible amount of dodgy swearing that made me laugh throughout the entire game. At one point I’m pretty sure a Korean soldier said he was hungry when digging his own grave while the subtitles was a stream of insults…but there is a chance I misheard it due to being ill and tired at the time. Unfortunately if you cannot speak Korean you will not find it quite as amusing.
There are so many unanswered questions in this game and so little explanation that when it does abruptly end after a measly five hour mission you feel cheated and incomplete. The single player campaign could have brought so much to storytelling in FPS games but instead of letting the game do the telling Homefront forces you down a particular path and does not give you the chance to find the answers motivation to hate the KPA. The multiplayer mode, when I finally got on to it, did redeem the game slightly and is the only reason I haven’t given this game as few stars as I want to give it but a game should not have to stand on the multiplayer alone. If you want a good shooter go and buy a Call of Duty game since Homefront doesn’t seem to know exactly what it is or what it wants to be.
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I’m a little disappointed that this game only got a 6. By disappointed, I mean I’m disappointed in the game, not RT’s rating system. This game had so much potential. I was hoping it would be a better game….