Homefront works best when it stops pretending it's some kind of gritty war drama and fully commits to being the schlocky shooting gallery it wants to be.

Sadly out of seven missions, only three are decent. Mechanically stiff, it is not enjoyable enough to wade through the first five chapters.

If you are craving that 7th gen war schlock, there are plenty of decent alternatives to go through first.


[ Full review at https://bluedemonarchive.blogspot.com/2022/02/review-homefront.html ]

Some cool gameplay, okay graphics for the time.

Once again, US as good guys military shooter.

Damn, what a cesspool of uncreative story design.

First-person shooters are trying to get smarter, but being the most criticized genre in the game industry is not easy. Homefront tries to deter this but delivering a sickeningly surreal atmosphere never really delivered in an FPS before. The writer of Red Dawn creates a too-close-for-comfort storyline where North Korea tries to take over the world in 2027. The beginning cut scene set this up in a scary way with live-action footage (both real and made up) of how North Korea allied with the south, and then made friends with our enemies. They used an EMP satellite to knock out our defenses and that’s where the game begins.

You play as Robert Jacobs in Montrose, Colorado. You start out in a wrecked home and the Norks (as they’re called in the game) take you as a prisoner and stick you in a bus. As you’re driving down the road you see the horrors that the Koreans are doing. This is where it really starts to hit home because this is America and the game is so detailed that it looks like it, and not just some bland everyday country. You see people getting lined up and shot, and this is the part where you really feel the atmosphere. A child has to watch as his mother and father are executed. They tell him to look away and it’s OK and then you hear blood-curdling screams from the child as the Koreans walk away. It’s heart-wrenching and it’s like this throughout most of the game.


Yes, I said most of the game. After you get halfway through it kind of forgets it’s atmosphere (mainly when you get to San Francisco for the main fight), but the first half really gets to you. I’ve never hated an enemy more in a shooter than in Homefront, and thanks to the detailed world you feel like you are a nobody trying to fight something you can’t beat. That’s also another great part of Homefront it takes you along and makes you feel like you accomplished something only to tear you down and make you feel helpless again. Other than the incredible atmosphere it’s a standard shooter for sure.

You have standard military weapons, but they feel good to shoot and have a good punch and weight to them. There are a lot of them and you have to use them in a strategic way and use them where they best fit. I love shooters that do this so it doesn’t just feel like a rail shooter. The AI is also good at hiding and trying to draw you out of cover with grenades so there’s quite a challenge here. Thanks to constantly changing environments and a mix-up of vehicle shooting you never feel bored.


Some sections have you shooting from a mounted machine gun on a vehicle, some have you controlling a Humvee type vehicle, and towards the end of the game, you get to fly a kick ass helicopter than you can fully control. There are some stealth sections, but they feel dated because you just follow the NPCs around scripted paths so you can’t really get caught, but they are tense thanks to the atmosphere of the game. There are some sniper sections as well, but overall, it all gets super intense and the climax is grand thanks to the huge battle on the Golden Gate bridge at the end.


And then it ends just like that. Obviously, it’s open for a sequel but I hate abrupt endings and the campaign is fairly short with only about 4-6 hours to the finish. Homefront could have added some new elements to the genre, but there’s nothing exciting here gameplay wise and it loses steam towards the end. The game looks fantastic even though it uses the Unreal 3 Engine, but the game is highly detailed and that’s what sells it. The multiplayer is a standard affair but isn’t nearly as exciting as the single player, so after awhile you just move on. For people into atmospheric shooters, Homefront sets the bar, but only for a while.

Homefront is first person shooter that tries to set itself apart from other games in its genre but ends up being a poor imitation of its contemporaries.

The game is set in the United States of America being occupied by the Greater Korean Republic, after the unification of North Korea and South Korea. Instead of being a soldier that’s part of an invasion force in a foreign country, the player is witnessing the events of their home country being controlled by an aggressive foreign power.

There are very few positive things I can say about the game.

Homefront does make an effect to mix up the gameplay. One level will have you sneaking through an enemy base camp, where you’ll have to quietly snipe lookouts to allow you to pass through undetected. Another level has you flying a helicopter, where you’re tasked in protecting supply vehicles from oncoming attacks.

I guess I could say that the checkpoint system was surprisingly well placed throughout each of the levels, which is something that is very much appreciated when playing the game on the hardest difficulty. The game will even allow you to load up a level at any checkpoint that you’ve passed through, to which players who enjoying hunting hidden collectibles would appreciate when going back for collectibles they have missed.

Now on to the bad…

The graphics and presentation was very bland and fuzzy on screen. If someone were to show me footage of this game and told me this was a late era PlayStation 2/Xbox game, I would believe them. For a game released in 2011, after the likes of Call of Duty series has shown what graphical fidelity and details can be achieved on the seventh generation of games console, I was surprised how poor the game looked in comparison.

With a game set during an occupied United States, it’s expected that the game would want to show the horror and devastation the Greater Korean Republic have caused during their occupation. So much so that the game will frequently make you slowly walk through resistance camps and shanty towns as an NPC dumps story exposition on you. While I appreciate the game doing a “show, don’t tell” as it presents its story, it became increasingly irritating when the game was spoon feeding the story to me when I wanted to get to the next combat arena.

On the gameplay side of things, a lot of the weapons feel very similar to one another; pick up one automatic rifle and you’ve pretty much got a feel for how the majority of the weapons feel in the game. The “snap-to-aim” system, clearly lifted from Call of Duty, feels very hit and miss on whether it will lock on to an enemy. There were times when the aim will refuse to snap to an enemy close to me, but then there were times the system will snap to an enemy a hundred yards away.

Speaking of the numerous enemy soldiers that you’ll have to face in the game, they will fill your body with hot lead as soon as you show a nano-inch of your body out the open. They can be unfairly accurate at times, as well as being able to absorb an absurd amount of damage from your own attacks.

You’ll fight alongside characters that you will not care about; many of the NPCs lack any interesting depth, other than the action movie role trope they’ve been designated to play out. The game will do its best to conjure up emotion of characters that have been killed at the hands of the Koreans, but you’ll wondering how long it will be before the scripted event finishes so you can move on.

The story is nothing to write home about either. The game doesn’t have much of an ending; the game feels like it just stops because it has run out of time and budget to continue on. In fact, you can hit the credit roll in as little as four hours, which can work in the game’s favour considering it has so little to offer the player. I played the game through twice, as I blasted through it so quickly. (First playthrough on the easy difficulty, second playthrough on the hardest difficulty)

In conclusion, it feels that the scope the developers had for the game was bigger than the time and budget could accommodate. While I appreciate the game trying to put a unique spin on the modern day shooter, it ultimately feels like another ten-a-penny Call of Duty: Modern Warfare clone. Homefront wasn’t bad or frustrating enough to cause me abandon midway through; the game was functional and entertaining enough to hold my attention. The Call of Duty series gets mocked for being the same game over and over again, but at least I know that there’s almost always a high level of design and polish that comes with the Call of Duty games.

Rating: 5/10 - Bad

This is, at least so far, the worst fps I've played. The weapons don't feel good and have horrible sound design, the maps are uninteresting and most of the gameplay segments are boring, with only one of two being memorable.

The story is the part of this game with the most amount of substance. After the unification of North and South Korea, the country manages to turn into a superpower and decides to invade the US. It is an incredibly far fetched premise that has the potential to be fun and even insightful, as the United States and North Korea do have diametrically opposed politics... But nothing is done with it.

There are bits that attempt to appeal to emotion and show the horrors of being invaded and oppressed by a foreign country but there is no reflection or something meaningful said by anyone, leaving said moments hollow and artificial.

the only reason why I don't give this game a lower score comes mostly from the fact that it could be worse. The game botched a ton of opportunities to do something interesting, but it still could be worse... and that's mostly a statement on how bad things can get when it comes to video games.

Unfortunately it didn't do so hot in sales with a short campaign.

It had a lot of potential to compete against COD/BF if it was done better. I like this game a lot however.. usually return to play its campaign.

Also has no bots so the MP is dead, bots should be default.