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Homefront review

Game: Homefront
Platform: PlayStation 3
Genre: First-Person Shooter (Contemporary)
Developer: Kaos Studios

Staff review by Gary Hartley

February 14, 2012

More like 'Home is where the BORE is! Comedy gold!'

It’s not often I change my mind on things (or, at least, publicly admit it) but that’s just what I’m about to do now. Once upon a time, I penned a review for Modern Warfare 2 where I poked fun at just how short a game it was. I used phrases like “The single-player campaign is blink-and-you’ll-miss-it short” and I’ve had to highlight this here because you’ll no longer find it in the body of that review. You can thank this change of heart solely on Homefront.

You see, I get it. I do. I don’t expect FPS’ to have the huge lifespan of games like Doom because the game development is an entirely new kettle of fish. Putting Doom stages together back in the day was more about employing the limited resources you had to, essentially, try to screw the player over as much as you could without making it feel like it. The devils were in the design, and, as such, the series is kept alive even today with fan-made .wads, proving that anyone with enough time, good enough ideas and a computer predating medieval times has the means to slap something together in the comfort of their own homes.

Times have moved on and production values have skyrocketed to the extent where being given a gun and told the pixellated armies of hell are trying to eat your face before being shoved into the midst of battle simply don’t cut it no more. Here’s the thing, though; a decent play through of Doom could take weeks, months. The simplistic levels were numerous, evolving, never the same and crammed full of secrets and hidden paths, weapon caches and inside jokes.

Homefront can be completed in an evening.

The trade-off modern shooters have brought to the table have been those production values. You couldn’t piece a game like Homefront together at home without some serious hardware, but for all its fancy values, its famous writers and highly paid voice actors, the game is over before it really begins. More damning still is that it doesn’t mange to advance a single stand out moment in its handful of hours of life. It’s not Doom; please understand that was never my thesis, because it doesn’t want to be. Right or wrong, it views that mindset as obsolete. It wants to be Call of Duty: Modern Me Too. It wants it so hard you can taste it oozing from every cut scene that tries to tug at your heartstrings, or every set piece you’re meant to be wowed by. And it’s not. It’s just.. really, really not.

Homefront checks its subtlety at the door on almost every level. The game starts with one of those “sit in a vehicle and watch atrocities happen” openings you’re probably long used to via its peers, complete with parents being shot down in front of weeping toddlers right on the doorstep of razed suburbia. You’re supposed to be appalled by these events but, thanks to the brevity of the game, these are stockpiled atop each other in rapid fire procession. Stage 2! American corpses bulldozed into shallow trenches! Stage 3! Flailing, burning soldiers as, oh god, we’re as bad as the enemy! Stage 4! Korea steals Christmas!

Korea because the one thing Homefront doesn’t pinch from CoD is a Russian invasion and instead hires John Milius, the guy who wrote Conan the Barbarian pre-reboot, to substitute them wholesale for another nation then pen a small collection of action character tropes to serve as a supporting cast. Badass former marine cliché is a badass former marine, and slinky huntress comrade doesn’t worry about body amour just enough to still allow the world to see her bared midriff. Your American-Korean tech geek’s place in occupied times is woefully underexplored and likeable retired black cop’s fate is obviously obvious.

So your ragged little troop more or less trudges through the game ticking all the boxes. Overwatch sniper stage? Check. On rails vehicle section? Check. Paint heavy armour for artillery strike? Check. Despite all these actions requiring equivalent hardware, the game still tries to sell you on the basis of a guerrilla war, which suggests to me that while Milius may know how to write about muscled guys with broadswords, he seems to have some trouble with definitions. Every attack you make on Korean forces turns quickly into head-on assaults. Charging headlong into enemy encampments isn’t an especially lauded guerrilla tactic, which is a shame, because the idea of a hit and run war in a burning middle America sounds promising. But it’s a premises Homefront takes precious little advantage of.

I stopped expecting First Person Shooters to be marathon slogs a long time ago, but I don’t think I’m ready to expect them to stop being good or ready for them to be a handful of hours before completion. For the most part, the trade off between challenge/length to a more rounded overall product has brought few complaints when done well -- that these games now have a story, a higher purpose than they used to is a huge positive and a giant step in the evolution of the genre. But successful implementation is not just a case of making a half-arsed ape of the current big thing and expecting that to be enough because, as much as Homefront wants to be comparable to Modern Warfare despite being the equivalent length of one of that title’s chapters (MW has three chapters; Homefront has seven stages) it’s simply not even within touching distance. For all its holographic and ACOG sighted assault rifles with under-barrel grenade launchers, for all its click right stick to melee and everything else it eagerly lifts from Activison's measuring stick series, by design or by accident, it falls long short.

Told you!

More Reviews by Gary Hartley
	Hudson Hawk (NES) Lame Duck.
	Labyrinth X (Xbox 360) Trial and error so tedious, it even takes the gleam off barely-covered anime tits.
	Spec Ops: The Line (PlayStation 3) Come suffer alongside me. You'll thank me for it.

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