Homefront: The Revolution is a sequel to the 2011 shooter Homefront and is set in 2029, four years after the events of Homefront. Players take on the role of every-man protagonist Ethan Brady, a revolutionary fighting against the invasion of the United States by the Greater Korean Republic.
Game details Developer: Deep SilverPublisher: Deep Silver, Dambuster StudiosPlatform: Windows (reviewed), Xbox One, PS4, Linux, Mac OSRelease Date: May 17, 2016ESRB Rating: M for MaturePrice: $60 (£40)Links: Revolutions are tricky. Ostensibly, they are the end result of the frustration and desperation of a group of people. They are upwellings, the last recourse of a downtrodden nation.
In practice, though, they’re often among the most brutal sorts of wars. While oppressors stand as the intended targets, the collapse of a reigning social order and the construction of a new one never comes without moral compromise and collateral damage.Homefront: The Revolution captures the compromised morals dead-on. Given the haphazard execution of the rest of the game, though, I’m not sure that’s intentional.
A muddy revolutionIn this guerrilla war, you play as Ethan Brady, a recent recruit for yet another American Revolution. This time, North Korea, not England, is the occupying force.
The Revolution opens with a series of brutal scenes that show your chosen band of freedom fighters as bordering on psychopathic.After being captured by the Korean People’s Army (KPA) while making bombs, you end up finding your way back to the revolutionaries. Under suspicion of espionage, your former band of brothers beats and brutalizes you before threatening to tear into your flesh with knives and torture you for information. Your main tormentor even goes so far as to suggest that you scream so that she’ll get her fill, all without a shred of indicting evidence.
That's disturbing enough. Even worse, though, the whole thing is dismissed minutes later as a misunderstanding, and you’re welcomed back into the arms of the eponymous revolution. It’s an odd string of events—one that not only strains your suspension of disbelief but also leaves the main protagonists as wholly unsympathetic.
From the outset, you feel as though you're fighting for a bloodthirsty, aimless lot instead of a band of noble liberators.That kind of flawed anti-hero motivation isn't impossible to pull off, of course. But Homefront muddies the message by constantly pressing a narrative that you’re doing good and that your fight is a righteous one. From the troubling introduction through many mediocre narrative follow-ups showing your compromised nature, that’s a tougher pill to swallow than it should be.
Off-target shootingPlot aside, there’s not much interesting gameplay to hold this outing together. What's on offer here is a melange of occasionally clever design and aggressive mediocrity.For most of its 20-hour runtime, Homefront is a bog standard first-person military shooter. You have a swath of guns and explosives that are nearly indistinguishable from those in any other military shooter—pistols, shotguns, molotov cocktails, and the like. The conceit here is that you can modify and augment your arsenal with an array of attachments on the fly. You can turn your sidearm into a submachine gun with a quick trigger press and a slide of the analog stick, for example.It’s a nice enough system, but it’s not enough to make up for Homefront’s chintzy gunplay. Weapons lack oomph and aiming is loose, leading to unsatisfying shooting.
Those problems are compounded by an ethereal lack of presence from the game’s world. Enemies don't seem solid and tend to just flop over in an unnatural way after taking fire (even when you consider the whole just-being-shot thing).As far as incoming fire goes, it’s hard to get a sense for when you’ve taken damage. Your health bar is an inconspicuous white band in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, and when things heat up, it evaporates without much warning. Roaming around war-torn Philadelphia, firefights come quickly and frequently. Without a solid grasp of how much health you’ve lost or where threats are coming from, death is common.
Those frequent gunfights are a bit odd, too, given your role as a revolutionary. Your movement is supposed to operate underground, but the KPA’s drones are constantly following you, and they’re quick to alert nearby soldiers to track you down. It comes across as a poor use of the game's narrative premise, which would support stealth action and infiltration more than public skirmishes with the KPA.The whole game suffers from this kind of inconsistent tone. You're just an average person drawn into an insurgency, not some demi-god in power armor. Yet the game never really lets you hide from your heavily powered foe or blend in to prep for silent assassinations. While you can theoretically avoid the ire of the KPA by not venturing too close to their patrols, in practice this tactic just doesn’t work.
Just about every mission and safehouse lies along a route that directly intersects with the KPA. The result is a game that feels like a messy, cut-down rendition of Tom Clancy’s The Division. A failed overthrowThere are moments that do work. Running between main missions in stolen motorcycles is a thrill, giving the whole campaign an appropriate on-the-run feel. That's one of the few pieces that really feels at home here, though, and it’s not much for the game to hang on.In addition to the underlying narrative and gameplay issues, there's a litany of technical problems that take Homefront from mediocre to downright bad. The KPA’s AI is terrible, arbitrarily losing track of you and often forgetting you were ever there to being with. If you take pot shots at a vehicle and even dash down stairs, they’ll have a hard time figuring out where you went.
Spotty AI isn't the only technical issue, either. Bugs are frequent, causing everything from framerate dips and crashes to errant controls.These problems are disappointing for a game that needed something—anything—to keep it at least minimally interesting. As it stands, Homefront: The Revolution is just casually bad—a confused mess that tries a handful of interesting ideas but fails to pull those disparate pieces into a coherent whole that's worth anyone's time.
The good:. On-the-nose presentation of many revolutionaries. Occasionally engaging motorcycle sections show sparks of intelligenceThe Bad:. Threadbare plot comes off as jingoistic and makes its heroes unsympathetic. Frequent firefights give no opportunity to make you feel like an underground revolutionary. Levels are cluttered messes.
Bugs, poor AI, and a litany of technical problems stall the experienceThe Ugly:. Being forced to team up with uncomfortably sadistic comradesVerdict: This sequel utterly fails to establish Homefront as a solid franchise.
Homefront: The Revolution is an open-world first-person shooter and follow-up to the 2011 original, though not a sequel but rather a reboot. It tells of a United States under military rule of North Korea in an alternate future timeline where a group of rebels fight to retake the land of the free.There’s no doubt that Homefront: The Revolution is a fun game.
There are moments when everything comes together and you are entrenched in the story and the missions, feeling a palpable sense of desperation for the cause, and it just feels good, the way a video game should. But there’s also no denying that in-between these gems of chaotic gameplay are a lot of troublesome issues that often break the experience and have you staring at the screen in abject befuddlement. Homefront has all the necessary parts (and then some) to make for a great shooter so its a statistical probability that at some point it will work, but too often is stutters to a halt and leaves you thinking the game is unfinished.
Homefront: The Revolution Gameplay (Early Missions)The story is the best place to start. Homefront takes place in future where the digital revolution of the 1970s didn’t happen in Silicon Valley but rather in North Korea, turning them into a world superpower and not the United States. In North Korea, a giant tech company called the Apex Corporation rises to world domination of consumer and military goods, ending up in complete control of the US armed forces and more. When the American economy collapses after decades in debt to the Middle East, the North Koreans use it as an excuse to occupy the United States under the guise of goodwill, a coup that is seen as welcome among the international community.
Using a backdoor program installed on the US military’s dependence on Apex, the North Koreans shut down the whole of American defense, leaving ships, planes, tanks, and any other tech-controlled vehicle or otherwise obsolete (and many falling out of the sky).Players take control of an unseen, silent protagonist named Ethan Brady, a brand new recruit in the Resistance happening in the overrun city of Philadelphia. Expecting a visit from the movement’s leader, a guerrilla fighter named Walker, who has rallied many against the KPA occupation, things go sour when you meet up with the leader and he is shot and captured. Now you’ve got to get out there and face the enemy while retaking districts, raising morale, and generally causing a lot of mayhem. And there is a lot of mayhem that can be caused. Homefront: The Revolution ©Deep SilverOccupied districts are controlled by patrols of NPK soldiers, armored vehicles, drones and large blimp-like airships that hover low and are steadily scanning for rebels.
That’s not to mention the myriad cameras, snipers, traps, and sealed areas that are around every corner. And it is because of these elements that understanding the gameplay of Homefront is vital. This is not Call of Duty or Battlefield. You’re not going in with superior weapons and tactics and mowing down waves of enemies. This is about not being seen until you need to be, avoiding forces and finding ways to break the enemy stronghold through sabotage and subterfuge. You’re going to die. Or rather, become critically wounded, which in this game is the same thing, ending your current mission and sending you back to the start as it were.
Interestingly though, and a nice touch, is waking up from these wounded blackouts with significant time passing so even though you may be in the place where your mission started, it’s now hours later and the patrol you were fighting has moved on. Homefront: The Revolution ©Deep SilverThat’s not to say there aren’t battles. In fact, you could fight your way through all of it, but it would be a slog as there are very rare encounters with just one or two NPK soldiers. They are drawn to a firefight as a single shot raises alarms so the little conflict you think will be easy can quickly turn into a struggle to escape as a battalion of highly-skilled hunters looking to shoot you dead come in from all sides. It’s like Grand Theft Auto and trying to stay clear of the cops for a few minutes before they give up except here it is foot soldiers, tanks, drones, and blimps. Where Homefront really shines is the world it creates for the player to explore.
Dambuster Studios, the game’s developers, clearly put most of their effort in crafting some exceptional environments in which to engage or not. Varied, challenging and full of secrets, the uprooted and debris-filled streets of Philadelphia are always a highlight of gameplay, though there are other areas equally beautiful that are just as visually stunning. And as there is valuable loot scattered just about everywhere, poking around is encouraged. Just don’t stay in one place too long. Homefront: The Revolution ©Deep SilverUnfortunately, Homefront is littered with problems that makes a lot of that exploration a chore.
The first and most concerning issue is being seen. It’s a roll of the dice whether crossing that wide intersection will get you spotted but so too is squatting in shadows behind a crumbled brick wall. Conversely, you might see a lone soldier heading your way, not see another patrol in sight or on the mini map, take your shot and suddenly be overrun by a squad of soldiers and vehicles. Or, the guard ten feet is utterly oblivious.
It’s never predictable.So you think, fine, I’ll go in like Sam Fisher and stealth my way through but that mechanic seems to be a secondary thought, which is odd considering the mission types and maps. While you can’t go prone, the real head-scratcher is the inability to hide bodies, something Fisher was doing 14 years ago.
Dead soldiers are found quickly and alerts send you running away from objectives or caught in an escalating firefight. It interrupts the flow and feeling of accomplishment, almost as if silent kills are a punishment. You can tag enemies with your in-game smartphone, a device that functions mostly well in practice, but since the mini map not only shows where enemies are at all times, complete with a cone of awareness for each soldier, there’s really no need. Homefront: The Revolution ©Deep SilverThere’s a great variety of weapons, gadgets, and tools at your disposal though and used well can give you access to much better weapons. And this is another aspect of Homefront that finds it mark.
There is a robust upgrade and jerry-rigging system that isn’t too complicated and also fun to use. The economy built into the game is relatively basic, with you just scrounging around picking up parts from the debris and using them to improve your guns. It’s satisfying and worth the effort to collect, especially a crossbow (a trendy shooter weapon) that is a distant, silent killer and a must for later missions. But there’s also big things that make big booms and all sorts of other essentials any well-prepared saboteur should carry.There was a game in 2003 from IO Interactive called Freedom Fighters, a third-person open world tactical shooter for which Homefront owes a huge debt. With a very similar story of an invading army (in that case, our trusty old pals, the Russians) taking over, leaving a rag-tag team of rebels to go about reclaiming districts and putting down the occupiers.
That game, like Homefront, wasn’t too concerned with the politics once the intro was done, and focused on the action. The selling point of that sneaky subterfuge classic was its ability for the protagonist to recruit fighters to join the quest, up to twelve at a time. Homefront plays out almost exactly the same way, and includes a recruiting element that strangely is not ever once mentioned in the game and is something you just stumble upon if you happen to walk up to a fellow rebel (an indicator pops ups asking if you wish to include them in your mission). That is a great feature and very helpful, though they are mostly fodder and help draw away a few guards, but still, it accomplishes a very important thing: you feel like part of a larger cause. In fact, often times, as you make your way to missions, you will encounter groups of rebels on their tasks and you can hear and see battles and conflicts happening that don’t involve you but do incite you. That is a really nice touch and one of the things that also make the game so frustrating since that level of care simply wasn’t spread evenly throughout the experience.
Homefront: The Revolution ©Deep SilverAnd this brings up the biggest flaw in the game, its thoroughly forgettable co-op missions. If there was ever a title that demanded co-op play, it is this, a game about rebels working together to overthrow a malevolent army. The online only co-op missions for Homefront are weak and disappointing. They feature a very noticeable graphical downgrade from the single-player campaign and offer only six missions, none of which last more than 10 or so minutes.
With a single player campaign that is admittedly well-crafted and lengthy, it’s a real shame the developers couldn’t have allowed a drop-in/drop- out feature for players to team up and play together in larger story-based missions that had a bigger impact. It’s a real oversight in a game with tremendous potential.As I mentioned at the start, Homefront: The Revolution has some truly great moments of fun. After the long intro and set up, once you get the feel of it and the lay of the land, there are many inspired moments of action and redemption. You want to keep going.
Unfortunately, these are fringe moments and the core of the game is marred (scattered freezing, character lips don’t move in sync with dialogue, load times are epically long, uneven difficulty, incoherent mission tracking, etc.). I never want to tell gamers not to play a game because gaming is personal, and so I won’t say avoid this because indeed, there is some value here, but there are better as well. Die-hard shooters fans though shouldn’t hesitate.
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