Homefront: The Revolution
FROM $89 | PC, PS4, X1 | WWW.HOMEFRONT-GAME.COM A passable shooter that’s far from revolutionary.
Homefront is a mash of the past 15 years of shooters, full of story contrivances and designs I’ve played and criticised before: the bad NPC chatter, the dystopian graffiti, the ‘keep the tank safe’ mission. It’s not totally bungled — I had fun for the first half of the ten-hour-plus campaign — but there are a lot of crumbling buildings, uninteresting guns, and repeat objectives to put up with as your silent protagonist steals Philadelphia back from North Korean occupiers.
The open world is Far Cry- like, but less visually interesting and with no good reason to backtrack once the story has taken you to a new area. Whether in populated or off-limits zones, stealth is emphasised — the patrols are tough and big firefights lead to death — but I mostly just ran around a lot. I could’ve sneaked, or driven one of the overpowered, unsteerable motorcycles that get stuck in stuff, but neither of those options are very fun. So I just ran. I’d be detected by patrolling units — a few soldiers and an APC, often — but no one seemed to bother pursuing me.
If I died doing anything, it was never a big deal — all my progress toward my next objective was preserved. I appreciate that death wasn’t frustratingly punishing, but in a better game, dying would teach me a lesson. Not so here, as there just aren’t all that many ways to approach Homefront’s missions. Stealth is limited to throwing distractions and hiding, and the enemy AI can be overbearingly eagle-eyed or oblivious. Tools and guns meant to be cool just aren’t useful. You can sneakily drive an RC car up to a patrol and detonate it, but in my experience, the dumb things just got stuck on rubble. I ended up using the same two boring, stock video-game guns — an SMG and marksman rifle — for most of the game.
And like the guns, the North Korean occupiers are stock enemies: communist baddies who come in basic infantry, sniper and heavy, bullet-sponge flavours. They run to cover, or at you, and fire, with no notable behaviours or abilities — though sometimes, you can kite them so they come at you one-by-one, down an alley or across a bridge between buildings.
The main activity, other than the story missions that have you meeting up with resistance fighters and getting them stuff, is capturing Strike Points, which act as safehouses and respawn points. I like these. They’re pretty quick to do, and there’s a good variety of simple platforming and combat challenges. Fighting random patrols is pointless, so Strike Points are also a chance to get in some shooting that matters, and that can be fun.
I had fun early on in Homefront, when I was experimenting with weapons and learning the tricks to breaking into safehouses. I got into a pleasant rhythm, ping-ponging between Strike Points on my way to the main missions, enjoying the satisfaction of accomplishing several small tasks in quick succession. But I never felt excited to see a new zone, and the story isn’t riveting enough to accommodate hours of running past the same patrols without so much as a different-coloured landscape to look at.
With technical problems on top of that, I can’t possibly recommend Homefront when there are so many better shooters like it. Tyler Wilde