Homefront

The Short

Pros
- Decent enough shooter...that is, it never really broke
- Premise is interesting
- Multiplayer is stable and has a few unique ideas
- Graphics aren't...awful
- Explosive barrels are yellow instead of red. That's...a good thing.

Cons
- Single player is three hours long.
- Story is bland, patronizing to the intelligence of its audience, and borderline racist
- Shooting feels weak and bland
- Guns, sound effects, and voice acting are all very lame
- Even more "paint by numbers" than other Call of Duty clones on the market
- Controller support works, but only just
- Tons of blatant, in-game avertising
- Playing this game right after Spec Ops: The Line was a bad idea

Objectives: Keepin it simple for the dumb shooter fans

The Long

So let's get something out of the way real fast, despite my scathing reviews of the genre on this blog, I don't mind modern military shooters. I used to be really deep into Modern Warfare 2, and Black Ops, and for the most part I figure if you enjoy those types of games, that's cool and all. I mean, I wouldn't have played Homefront or Medal of Honor or all those other games if I didn't actually enjoy parts of the genre, right?

That being said, Homefront is an absolute disaster. 

I was actually looking forward to this game pre-release, and almost even pre-ordered it. As a fan of Call of Duty who was obviously seeing the series multiplayer (and single player) stagnate, I was more than willing to let THQ start up their own thing that could overcome it. However, after just a few minutes in both Homefront's borderline-offensive single player and shockingly boring multiplayer made me realize that Homefront is nothing more than an inferior clone, and all of THQ's large aspirations to make the game "better" than its competitors completely stumbled out of the gate. That, or died before even leaving the gate. 

So let's talk about Homefront.

Aiming down a red dot site? Never seen that before. 

Probably the worst thing about Homefront is its single player. Again, I felt the story had a lot of promise. It starts by giving you a stylized intro splicing real footage with obvious actors to show a series of events leading to North Korea taking over South Korea, allying with China to take over the majority of Eastern Asia, invading Hawaii, and occupying the Western side of the United States. It's actually somewhat chilling, especially for those who have followed North Korea in the news, because let's be honest...that country can be pretty scary. While the idea of it taking over the US is pretty far-fetched (especially since, I dunno, where the crap is the rest of Europe during all of this?), it's an interesting idea. Set a game in the US where half the country is occupied, and people are having to fend for themselves.

Homefront takes what could have been a decent premise and makes it downright stupid, and borderline racist.

Let me get this off my chest first, because I'm itching to say it: racial slurs for enemies, even if you made them up specifically for this game and are very obviously referencing "North Koreans," is not OK in your game. I get it, you want to show the people hate the North Koreans occupying their country, but having your team toss around racial slurs when you gun down people or using them amidst military jargon is not cool. I wouldn't say I'm one to get all uppity about this sort of thing, since I'm not a Korean-American and thus can't give my opinion on this game's representation of (what I'm assuming, based on the preface) is essentially both North and South Koreans, but still...seriously. There's even a scene in the game where they condemn a group of weird survivalists hicks (out of Utah, apparently  Do they have like ten wives too?) for being racist against your teammate who is Asian-American. Um...but you were all tossing around these racial slurs for the thousands of Koreans you gunned down during the game. But it's ok now because in-game you showed your guys are clearly incapable of racism because they defended your one team member who was Korean (and, also, the brilliant nerdy machine guy. Stereotypes, ahoy! Also, the black guy dies first. Again, awesome.).

First thing I said when I saw this cozy home base: it only exists to be burned in a "dramatic" moment later. SPOILER: I was right. 

Speaking of your companions, none of them are likable (except the Korean, weirdly enough. At least he was sort of witty). You have your rough-neck leader who is supposed to be a role model, but instead he's just a huge dick. You have your sort of hispanic girl ally who has a bare midriff and whenever an explosion happens that launches you all on the ground she somehow lands so her perfectly-rendered, jeans-covered butt is facing you. Classy. And...that's it, actually. There's a black commander but he dies (um...spoilers?) in like the first two missions so...awesome.

But where this game really fries my bacon is with it's attempts to be "edgy." It starts with Koreans busting into your house and putting you out on a bus that drives slowly through town. As you do this, you can watch all the atrocities that the North Koreans are doing to the enslaved Americans. Taking them to labor camps, shooting one that tries to one away, randomly gunning down a set of parents in front of their child (seriously...why?), complete with blood (that looks like bad ketchup, by the way) splattering on your bus window. You know. Edgy.

It only gets worse from there. As mentioned in the image, you find this utopian little self-sustaining refugee house, which exists for you to walk through once and come back to find it burned and everybody strung up and dead. You see them shoveling bodies into mass graves, only to have to "press X to hide in mass grave" later to avoid overhead choppers. You find a bunch of rednecks who just want to linch your Korean buddy and rape the girl, who spend their time torturing everybody they find but especially North Koreans. It's just one obvious attempt to "push the envelope" after the next, and all of it feels so fake and forced it's more offensive for being stupid rather than offensive to have a purpose. 

Seriously? This is the worst. 

[Tangent inbound]

See, I'm all for edgy content, or stuff that makes me thing. But that's just it: edgy content needs to have a purpose. It needs to serve the story, or at least (in a game's sense) the gameplay. The problem is, while books and movies have gotten this right, games rarely do. Mostly we have crap like "No Russian" from Call of Duty, that exists just to be "shocking." It isn't really shocking because it's only skin deep. You can distance yourself from it because there's no deeper story implications, nothing that makes you mull it over and consider how it applies to yourself. Not to butt in on another review, but Spec Ops: The Line has a lot of very similar elements as Homefront, but because it addresses them serious and as the atrocious as they actually are (like using white phosphorous and burning people alive, which you do in Homefront without batting and eye but face some awful consequences in Spec Ops) the story has impact. Homefront is like that punk 12-year-old kid that you know who swears all the time around you and talks about sex or whatever. He's trying his hardest to get a rise and be "adult," but he's so ignorant and blatant it's just him making a fool of himself. Because Homefront doesn't use any of its shocking imagery, it all comes off as weak and bland.

Not to mention it falls into that "shoot thousands of non-white people as a totally white person America #1 Hoo Ra!" problem that plagues this whole genre. Makes me a little sick to my stomach. 

I'd also like to lastly point out that this is the first game where they actually recorded voice for "Take cover inside the Hooters!" and "Regroup in the White Castle!" I'm so glad to see in-game ads playing prominently in video games these days that an entire level is about infiltrating a TigerDirect.com physical store, complete with "half off!" and "killer deals on GPUs!" adds plastered everywhere. Maybe it was because I was playing the PC version, and if I'd done it on Xbox it would have been a Microsoft Store or something. 

Mediocre at best, deplorable at worst. 

It's also worth mentioning the single player is three hours long. No, that's not me exaggerating  I checked my Steam time after burning through the game on easy (including all deaths, menu navigations, me trying to figure out how to make the controller work properly, etc.) and my in-game time was just over three hours. Seven missions, one of which is maybe ten minutes long. What a great value. 

Multiplayer tends to be a bit better in terms of content, at least. It actually is pretty clever. The better you play, the higher your "priority" ranks up. So you get better unlocks (like weapons, scout drones [my personal favorite] that you can use to tag people for your allies, attack drones, etc.) but as your stars get higher and higher the other team sees your general location on the map and gets a massive points bonus for hunting you down. This idea of somewhat penalizing players for doing well (to aid the other team) is actually a pretty decent idea. And, as stated, the power-ups are cool (and there's vehicles in this game), like the scout drones and other stuff.

The problem is the shooting in Homefront is just as bland as its story and copy-cat feel.

Plus, really bad looking blood. 

Guns sound awful, to start, like pea-shooters. While I was annoyed at Metal of Honor for running by the book, at least Dice knows how to make a game sound good. Homefront doesn't. The guns sound bad, as does all the voice acting and everything else in the game. I guess I usually put this paragraph by the graphics section, but whatever.

Shooting is serviceable but not tight. While Call of Duty and Medal of Honor are obviously developed by people who have made these types shooters in the past, Homefront feels lacking. While I'll admit it was hardly bad, when I played on a controller the auto-aim seemed borked, and when I switched to a keyboard and mouse it felt waaaay too imprecise, even after messing with my mouse settings. This is combined by unrealistic and unreliable "kicks" from guns, weird iron-sights that never seem to hit where I point them, and the fact that most SMGs are just straight up underpowered, this game feels like a budget game. Which it wasn't released as, it was released as a Call of Duty killer. Sorry, not gonna happen.

Kills earn points, which you can cash in for one of two rewards. Not a bad system, honestly. 

Graphically this game looks dated. It's hard to describe, though, with static images. The game looks ok in screenshots, with a lot of texture detail, bump-mapping, and despite looking generic at least it appears to be...ok. The problem is this game looks horrible in action, and I'm not talking about the framerate. It just looks...well...the textures look like early Xbox 360 games. You know what I'm talking about, the ones that just discovered HD, so everything looks kind of weirdly shiny, like it was up-rezzed? Again, it's hard to describe, but I played the game both on the Xbox 360 and then on the PC with everything jammed up to max settings, and it looks...straight up bad. Like a budget game.

And "Domination." Woo. 

Homefront is an excellent example of failed expectations. Again, I was looking forward to this game for quite a bit, thinking it could convey a dark and interesting storyline and an actual multiplayer experience to compete with Call of Duty. Instead, we get a game that's a cheap knock-off and feels like it at every turn. It's story tries too hard to get attention and ends up floundering, the multiplayer doesn't do anything that breaks the mold or even matches it, and the game looks and sounds straight up bad.

I've been putting off playing Homefront despite having gotten it on Steam a while back because of what I've heard, and I kind of wish I'd listened. Sure, it was only about three hours of my time I sunk into the single-player, but I'd much rather have spent that time doing just about anything else.

Unless you really like bland modern military shooters, Homefront can remain forgotten. One out of five stars. I'd recommend Medal of Honor over it any day.

One of the worst thing ever.