Homefront Review

By: Michael Bee 

Ah, Homefront. You wanted to be Call of Duty so badly that you copied nearly everything from that series. Now, here we are, together at last, and all I can say is...you really let me down. You copied Call of Duty so perfectly that you also turned out to be a mediocre shooter. Alas, my heart does not flutter for you. It doesn’t even skip a beat.

Homefront wanted to be the COD killer, but now that the game has arrived, it seems to fall flat on its face. If there is one thing Kaos Studios and THQ failed to realize in their attempt to cash in on the ridiculous, over-the-top, war-themed first-person shooter genre is this, COD fans will never accept a copy as an equal, no matter how similar. (Disclaimer: This review will cover the single-player campaign of Homefront...all three hours of it.)

I’m sure you can already tell where this review is going, but let’s begin with the Homefront’s plot. It’s a ridiculous, but somewhat interesting premise. You play Robert Jacobs, a helicopter pilot captured by Korean soldiers as the game opens. The year is 2027, and the United States economy has all but devastated the country and severely hindered its military might. At the same time, North Korea (I’m sorry, the Greater Korean Republic, according to this alternate future tale) has been bulking up its arms and training batches of soldiers in preparation for a U.S. invasion. It isn’t a bad premise, but as is typical in shooters, it really doesn’t evolve into anything more than “there’s bad guys here to hurt us, let’s fight back!” You get rescued by members of the resistance and you fight alongside them for the duration of the game.

Homefront pulls no punches during its opening minutes. I was somewhat taken aback when I was shuffled into a prisoner bus and rolled down the street. KPA soldiers were beating and shooting civilians as they rounded everyone up. One moment in particular, and anyone having played the game will know what I’m talking about, left me impressed that Kaos Studios had the balls to go there. During your bus trip in the opening cinematic, you witness KPA soldiers gun down a wife and husband in front of their three to four-year-old child. It was impressive cinematic stuff. But that was pretty much where the game’s balls disappeared.

Once you get into the action, you quickly realize this is Call of Duty with a new skin. Weapons have next to no recoil, except when using the pistol, and enemies respawn until you move on Enemies are of the jack-in-the-box variety. They don’t seem to have any A.I. programmed in them except to duck behind their predetermined cover, peak out and shoot from time to time. Although they do have uncanny aim when they decide to put their sights on you. I guess the KPA had a few extra training sessions in marksmanship than your buddies, because they constantly shoot the cover right in front of them during the entire game. I kept wishing the game would allow me to carry around a foot stool so these idiots could climb up and maybe shoot OVER the cover.

Homefront’s graphics have been knocked a bit in forums and such, but I have to say they were quite nice for the most part. Granted, character models weren't exactly beautiful, but the environments were nicely done and featured enough detail to make them look believable. There was even a level about two-thirds into the single-player campaign that impressed me a great deal. The gameplay in the level sucked, as it was some of the worst stealth action I’ve ever experienced, but the level design, size and details made an impression on me. It was a level where you traverse across farmland and barnyards amidst American’s abusing KPA soldiers. Apparently, this group of Americans (the stereotypical hillbillies) had gone over to the dark side. I rolled my eyes at the bad gameplay during that entire portion of the game, but damn did I enjoy walking through that map. It was nearly a work of art.

Possibly the worst offense of Homefront is that it carried over the same part of the Call of Duty series that makes those games’ single-player campaigns so laughably bad. There is next to nothing for you to do except point your gun and shoot at enemies on pre-determined paths, and only the enemies that the game will allow you to kill at that time. Oh yes, there were quite a few instances where I fired my gun at an enemy that was moving into position on a rooftop, thinking to myself, “I could get this fucker before he has the chance to fire that RPG.” But forget about it, that character will normally be immortal until the time where your buddy actually says, “Kill that RPG guy over there!” Really? I tried doing that a minute ago and couldn’t get shit done. I felt like a bad employee getting yelled at by his boss because I was too stupid to shoot the damn RPG soldier in time. But no, that’s the way the game plays. It’s more like playing an interactive movie than a game. Prompts flash on the screen anytime you need to do something and you have to press the button at that time or the game is over. Yay for quick time events. I remember playing full motion video games like that on the SEGA CD. They sucked then, and they still suck now.

That’s a big problem with games like Homefront. It doesn’t feel like you’re allowed to do anything outside of what the game tells you to do. There’s no exploration, no experimentation, no figuring things out for yourself. It constantly beats you over the head with your objective and exactly how you’re going to go about completing that objective. It’s linear in not only level design, but gameplay design as well. I haven’t even mentioned the fact that even basic interactivity is absent. You are allowed to open precisely one door in the entire game. I was actually shocked when it happened. I wasn’t sure what to do. I panicked. Which button should I press? The rest of the game you spend watching your teammates clear the path for you. They go into the battle first, they move debris from doorways, they even get to kick down all the doors. 

While there’s nothing broken in Homefront, and it does everything it set out to do, it fails at being fun. Hell, it fails at being a game for the most part. It’s very much like Call of Duty. You watch the screen and press the buttons when you are prompted. That’s basically the extent of it. However, I will offer a positive note, as I feel this part of the game deserves a mention. The only thing that stood out during my time with Homefront was the sound. The sound was fantastic. Guns sounded meaty when they needed to be, and they all had their own vastly unique sounds, instead of generic pea shooter number one, etc. But that was my only praise. The rest of this game is mediocre. It’s just another average, generic, war-themed shooter. Sadly.