Homefront is a game that seemed to catch a lot of buzz during its development, but is also a game that I never really paid much attention to. I am a fan of Freedom Fighters, a last gen EA/IO Interactive game with a similar storyline and setting, so it seems like this game would have interested me more. I also love the film Red Dawn, which the screenwriter also penned the story for Homefront, but not even that made me too excited for Homefront. Despite my coldness towards the title, I still love some first person shooters and I gave the game a shot. I will start with what is good about Homefront.
The world has been taken over by North Korea (which the game takes you through chronologically through cutscene timelines) and Americans are fighting the hostile takeover of their country. You play as an ex-military pilot who gets mixed up with a group of American rebel fighters and eventually end up fighting the good fight. The game does a fantastic job at bringing the player into this world and showing how people are suffering and being basically exterminated by North Korean forces. At one moment you actually witness the slaughtering of American people, and the game does a good job at making the experience gruesome and depressing to where it amps the player up to get some revenge. So yeah, that is about the only fantastic part of Homefront.
Homefront's gameplay is decent enough, but it steals a LOT from the Call of Duty series. The control scheme is identical to CoD, the level progression is identical to CoD, and the multiplayer is almost identical to the Battlefield series. Playing Homefront, I felt like the game had no real identity of its own, except for it's storyline, because the developers were too busy tying to blend together the two most popular FPS franchises into one game. The single player is fun while it lasts, but the campaign literally look me 3 and a half hours to complete which is simply unacceptable for a full retail priced game. While playing the campaign, I kept finding that the level progression relied way too much on NPC characters opening doors for the player to progress further, which took WAY too long for it to occur. I would many times end up way ahead of the NPC characters and found myself waiting in front of doors for several minutes before the NPC decided to show up and kick the door down for me to continue.
Homefront's multiplayer really did nothing for me. It felt like it tried to copy Battlefield's forumla way too much. Even if Homefront succeeded at copying Battlefield, the game should have been fun enough. However, the quality of the maps are low, the analog controls were not quite smooth enough for me to rack up kills, and getting into games was no easy task. When I was finally able to join a server, the experience was usually laggy and sometimes unplayable. The game also copies Call of Duty's ranking system, which rewards players with better gear and a higher edge over the competition. This type of multiplayer is starting to get pretty old now and I wish someone would deliver a multiplayer experience where it leveled the playing field a bit more like the Halo titles do.
You can tell the developers of Homefront tried a bit too hard to copy the elements of the best shooters on the market in an attempt to topple their sales and come out on top. The end result simply gave gamers a terribly short campaign, a "been there done that" multiplayer experience, and a value equal to a $10 Steam game. Maybe a sequel will show more promise, but as of right now I can only recommend a weekend rental on this one.
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