With plenty of hype and a generous marketing budget it's easy to be fooled into thinking a game is the "must have" of the month. With Bulletstorm and Crysis 2 also out around the same time, you'd be thinking Homefront IS the first-person shooter that'll make you put Black Ops back in the box. Unfortunately, despite an interesting premise and some nice visuals, Homefront isn't the game it set itself up as being.
With a story penned by legendary Apocalypse Now and Red Dawn writer, John Milius you'd expect Homefront to excel in the story department, and it truly does. Set in the near future USA, you fight in the resistance against the invading Korean forces, who are no longer divided into North and South and have become the super power of the Planet, known as the Greater Korean Republic. Taking advantage of a financially weakened USA, the Koreans land on the US shores to claim the Country and show just how powerful they have become.
You play as Robert Jacobs, who is rescued from Korean clutches at the beginning of the game and drafted into the resistance. Throughout the game you'll be fighting with three or four AI characters in a series of tense out-numbered battles. The game begins well after the initial invasion though so the streets are littered with signs of Korean dominance from the get go, which is delivered in fine detail even if it is a little rough around the edges graphically.
With seven missions, and a total running time of only around 3-4 hours depending on the difficulty, the game tries to pack in as much variation as it can. I say variation, but it's all the same stuff we've seen in recent shooters. There's the generic checkpoint to checkpoint shooting sections, which at times feed you so many enemies it's difficult to know if they'll ever end or just keep spawning until you take five steps forward. There's also the on-rails shooting sections, which tend to throw enemy trucks and helicopters at you like there's no tomorrow. There's also a nice, but brief, section where you get to man a helicopter (flight and guns), to protect your team mates down below.
We've seen it all before, so apart from an engrossing story and some rather nice set pieces, Homefront really doesn't have a unique selling point. The online multiplayer is good enough, once you manage to get on that is. A problem that has been fixed now, but forced many of the release day purchasers to pull out their hair and launch control pads at the television.
If you've played Kaos' previous title, Frontlines: Fuel of War you'll be familiar with the multiplayer, mixing standard shooting with vehicle combat. It also features Battle Points, which acts as an in-game currency allowing you to buy new weapons and vehicles once you've conjured up enough kills or assists. While it does the job of providing many hours of online shooting fun, across various modes, I highly doubt it will pull many away from Call of Duty.
Although Homefront is not a ground breaking FPS, and certainly doesn't match up to the likes of recent Call of Duty games, or even the underrated Medal of Honor, it does show potential. The fascinating story does enough to warrant future sequels. Only if they work hard on the gameplay to deliver a shooter that truly does contend with the big boys.
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