Homefront is first person shooter that tries to set itself apart from other games in its genre but ends up being a poor imitation of its contemporaries.
The game is set in the United States of America being occupied by the Greater Korean Republic, after the unification of North Korea and South Korea. Instead of being a soldier that’s part of an invasion force in a foreign country, the player is witnessing the events of their home country being controlled by an aggressive foreign power.
There are very few positive things I can say about the game.
Homefront does make an effect to mix up the gameplay. One level will have you sneaking through an enemy base camp, where you’ll have to quietly snipe lookouts to allow you to pass through undetected. Another level has you flying a helicopter, where you’re tasked in protecting supply vehicles from oncoming attacks.
I guess I could say that the checkpoint system was surprisingly well placed throughout each of the levels, which is something that is very much appreciated when playing the game on the hardest difficulty. The game will even allow you to load up a level at any checkpoint that you’ve passed through, to which players who enjoying hunting hidden collectibles would appreciate when going back for collectibles they have missed.
Now on to the bad…
The graphics and presentation was very bland and fuzzy on screen. If someone were to show me footage of this game and told me this was a late era PlayStation 2/Xbox game, I would believe them. For a game released in 2011, after the likes of Call of Duty series has shown what graphical fidelity and details can be achieved on the seventh generation of games console, I was surprised how poor the game looked in comparison.
With a game set during an occupied United States, it’s expected that the game would want to show the horror and devastation the Greater Korean Republic have caused during their occupation. So much so that the game will frequently make you slowly walk through resistance camps and shanty towns as an NPC dumps story exposition on you. While I appreciate the game doing a “show, don’t tell” as it presents its story, it became increasingly irritating when the game was spoon feeding the story to me when I wanted to get to the next combat arena.
On the gameplay side of things, a lot of the weapons feel very similar to one another; pick up one automatic rifle and you’ve pretty much got a feel for how the majority of the weapons feel in the game. The “snap-to-aim” system, clearly lifted from Call of Duty, feels very hit and miss on whether it will lock on to an enemy. There were times when the aim will refuse to snap to an enemy close to me, but then there were times the system will snap to an enemy a hundred yards away.
Speaking of the numerous enemy soldiers that you’ll have to face in the game, they will fill your body with hot lead as soon as you show a nano-inch of your body out the open. They can be unfairly accurate at times, as well as being able to absorb an absurd amount of damage from your own attacks.
You’ll fight alongside characters that you will not care about; many of the NPCs lack any interesting depth, other than the action movie role trope they’ve been designated to play out. The game will do its best to conjure up emotion of characters that have been killed at the hands of the Koreans, but you’ll wondering how long it will be before the scripted event finishes so you can move on.
The story is nothing to write home about either. The game doesn’t have much of an ending; the game feels like it just stops because it has run out of time and budget to continue on. In fact, you can hit the credit roll in as little as four hours, which can work in the game’s favour considering it has so little to offer the player. I played the game through twice, as I blasted through it so quickly. (First playthrough on the easy difficulty, second playthrough on the hardest difficulty)
In conclusion, it feels that the scope the developers had for the game was bigger than the time and budget could accommodate. While I appreciate the game trying to put a unique spin on the modern day shooter, it ultimately feels like another ten-a-penny Call of Duty: Modern Warfare clone. Homefront wasn’t bad or frustrating enough to cause me abandon midway through; the game was functional and entertaining enough to hold my attention. The Call of Duty series gets mocked for being the same game over and over again, but at least I know that there’s almost always a high level of design and polish that comes with the Call of Duty games.
The game is set in the United States of America being occupied by the Greater Korean Republic, after the unification of North Korea and South Korea. Instead of being a soldier that’s part of an invasion force in a foreign country, the player is witnessing the events of their home country being controlled by an aggressive foreign power.
There are very few positive things I can say about the game.
Homefront does make an effect to mix up the gameplay. One level will have you sneaking through an enemy base camp, where you’ll have to quietly snipe lookouts to allow you to pass through undetected. Another level has you flying a helicopter, where you’re tasked in protecting supply vehicles from oncoming attacks.
I guess I could say that the checkpoint system was surprisingly well placed throughout each of the levels, which is something that is very much appreciated when playing the game on the hardest difficulty. The game will even allow you to load up a level at any checkpoint that you’ve passed through, to which players who enjoying hunting hidden collectibles would appreciate when going back for collectibles they have missed.
Now on to the bad…
The graphics and presentation was very bland and fuzzy on screen. If someone were to show me footage of this game and told me this was a late era PlayStation 2/Xbox game, I would believe them. For a game released in 2011, after the likes of Call of Duty series has shown what graphical fidelity and details can be achieved on the seventh generation of games console, I was surprised how poor the game looked in comparison.
With a game set during an occupied United States, it’s expected that the game would want to show the horror and devastation the Greater Korean Republic have caused during their occupation. So much so that the game will frequently make you slowly walk through resistance camps and shanty towns as an NPC dumps story exposition on you. While I appreciate the game doing a “show, don’t tell” as it presents its story, it became increasingly irritating when the game was spoon feeding the story to me when I wanted to get to the next combat arena.
On the gameplay side of things, a lot of the weapons feel very similar to one another; pick up one automatic rifle and you’ve pretty much got a feel for how the majority of the weapons feel in the game. The “snap-to-aim” system, clearly lifted from Call of Duty, feels very hit and miss on whether it will lock on to an enemy. There were times when the aim will refuse to snap to an enemy close to me, but then there were times the system will snap to an enemy a hundred yards away.
Speaking of the numerous enemy soldiers that you’ll have to face in the game, they will fill your body with hot lead as soon as you show a nano-inch of your body out the open. They can be unfairly accurate at times, as well as being able to absorb an absurd amount of damage from your own attacks.
You’ll fight alongside characters that you will not care about; many of the NPCs lack any interesting depth, other than the action movie role trope they’ve been designated to play out. The game will do its best to conjure up emotion of characters that have been killed at the hands of the Koreans, but you’ll wondering how long it will be before the scripted event finishes so you can move on.
The story is nothing to write home about either. The game doesn’t have much of an ending; the game feels like it just stops because it has run out of time and budget to continue on. In fact, you can hit the credit roll in as little as four hours, which can work in the game’s favour considering it has so little to offer the player. I played the game through twice, as I blasted through it so quickly. (First playthrough on the easy difficulty, second playthrough on the hardest difficulty)
In conclusion, it feels that the scope the developers had for the game was bigger than the time and budget could accommodate. While I appreciate the game trying to put a unique spin on the modern day shooter, it ultimately feels like another ten-a-penny Call of Duty: Modern Warfare clone. Homefront wasn’t bad or frustrating enough to cause me abandon midway through; the game was functional and entertaining enough to hold my attention. The Call of Duty series gets mocked for being the same game over and over again, but at least I know that there’s almost always a high level of design and polish that comes with the Call of Duty games.