Nukezilla Review: Homefront (360)

This is the Nukezilla Review for Homefront’s Singleplayer Campaign. For reasons discussed in the review, we didn’t play enough multiplayer to provide an honest opinion either way, but we hear it’s pretty laggy.

Evidence of the horrors and atrocities of war seem to be everywhere these days. If you’re watching TV, listening to the radio or reading the newspaper then you can’t avoid stories about the raid on a compound in Pakistan and the assassination of Osama Bin Laden by US Navy Seals. You could read countless books written each year about modern warfare covering such lovely topics as PTSD, improvised explosive devices, genocide, waterboarding and other gruesome elements of battle. Our digital entertainment offers an escape from all of this bloodshed and conflict, but some of the most popular franchises of this and past generations are military shooters.

What THQ promised to deliver with Homefront was a new experience that brought the war “home” (if you’re an American, of course). They intended to shock the player with scenes of near-future warfare and Americans as the seemingly hopelessly oppressed civilian population. A cynical person might have expected pure exploitation: playing off of our collective fears with a combination of a Neo Cold War Communist villain (a Unified Korea under North Korea’s control) mixed with post-9/11 shock and awe tactics. On the other hand, if you were like me and bought into their pitch, the game would bring out the personal nature of war and force the player to live through an attack on their way of life and the calculated extermination of American freedom and prosperity; something that lingers in the back of the minds of most thinking/feeling citizens. What they ended up with was really neither the cynic’s worst fears or a realization of the optimist’s hopes. Despite all of the millions of dollars spent on billboards, TV ads and Korean invasion performance art, Homefront has failed to make me feel anything other than a disconnected disapproval of the storytelling and a flat-out rejection of the product as a piece of entertainment.

The most glaring shortcoming of Homefront is its characters. Rather than providing you with a cast of average-Joe civilians or washed up veterans, they ended up with something closer to GI-Joe meets Team America. Your constant male companion spits out horrible action cliché one-liners like, “Come get some!” while vomiting out foul profanities every other sentence. The most rational member of your team is *surprise* the only female soldier in the squad. She spends most of the game trying to calm down Mr. Testosterone or defending the squad’s Korean-American weapons specialist. Though when she discovers the torture and murder of her commanding officer at the hands of the Korean army, she snaps and now wants nothing more than to kill as many Koreans as she can get her sights on, screaming all the while.

Speaking of the weapons guy, he’s the only interesting character of the bunch. He’s lived in the US his whole life, but his ethnic heritage is enough to cause Tommy Redneck constant doubt and anxiety. In spite of all of the hostility, he manages to feel like the only thing resembling a real character out of the whole ensemble. These caricatures are only functional as barkers, crassly guiding you through each scripted maze past explosions, automated sentry towers, in-game advertisements and survivalist compounds that serve as level decoration.

You’re a helicopter pilot, by the way, which is something that every character reminds you and simultaneously chastises you for not living up to the sacrifices made on your behalf. Will you redeem yourself by piloting a chopper and saving everyone’s asses – of course you do. On your path of salvation, you witness parents being lined up and shot in front of their children, march through forced labor camps and hide under piles of corpses (‘Press X to enter the Mass Grave’ – I’m not joking this is in the game).

There are a few moments that stand out as salvageable during the entire 4 hour campaign (Oh wait, you are surprised that a big budget modern shooter would ship with a single player experience that can be completed in a long night? Don’t be, it gets better from here on in). Your Korean-American tech expert (stereotype?) reprogrammed one of the NK forces’ “Goliath” armored drones and during a few sequences allows you to select targets. This seems like a great way to empower the player and break the tension via Deus Ex Machina…until you realize that all you’re doing is progressing through to the next scripted explosion. Here comes two NK APCs, press left on the D-Pad – BOOM!

There’s another sequence where you are perched atop a strip mall’s roof with a sniper rifle. NK forces are moving in to engage en masse, but the resistance has planned a phosphorous artillery attack, showering white-hot flame on most of the enemy forces. Sergeant Douchebag threatens, “Don’t you dare shoot one of those bastards! Let ‘em cook!” Ten seconds later: Achievement Unlocked – Let ‘em Burn. If I was invested at all in this moment either with horror at the burning, screaming human beings or sadistic rage as the enemy suffers, the achievement reminds me this is a game and that I’ve been incentivized to behave with extreme cruelty. Ignoring morality and taste for a moment, this is just bad design. Other games have found ways to extend these achievements to the end of the level so as not to interrupt the flow of the scene.

The most rousing and honestly gripping part of Homefront comes at the very last moments where you’re fighting for control over the Golden Gate bridge. You’ve been shooting dudes outside of Hooters parking lots and through TigerDirect.com aisles, but now (finally) there is a real landmark to anchor the location and scale of the conflict. I’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for most of my life, taking trips to the city and sightseeing afternoons frequently involved the Golden Arches. They ripped off the bridge level from Half-Life 2, however I stayed invested because the game was building momentum. Just as the game hits a triumphant note and validates itself as a worthwhile experience, it stops. Roll the cut scene and credits; bye-bye! Am I supposed to wonder if they intend to continue the story with Homefront 2? The game doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, but rather right in the midst of its rising action. If this were a play, we’d only be most of the way through Act 1 rather than reveling in the catharsis of Act 3 as we’re supposed to be.

Okay, so we’ve covered the characters, the story and some of the scripted set pieces. What’s left to discuss is the feel of the game’s core mechanics (i.e. How does the shooting feel?). Mediocre would be too nice of a word to describe the experience of firing any gun in Homefront. There’s a very limited variety of weapons at your disposal and the ammunition for each gun seems severely limited, usually only to what’s in the magazine and a reload if you’re lucky. Firing each gun feels more or less the same, but to artificially expand the range of weapon types they’ve renamed each weapon based on the type of scope that’s attached (identical to how Treyarch handled weapon naming for Call of Duty:Black Ops). Unlike with COD, though the scopes don’t seem to offer any significant improvement or modification to how the guns aim or fire, so what you’re left with is either picking one gun that has plentiful ammunition on account of enemy weapon drops, or cycling through the entire catalog during the course of one mission.

Aside from their sinister actions during scripted in-game cut scenes, your opposition is neither frightening nor cunning. NK soldiers in Homefront play the all too common game of whack-a-mole. You take a few steps forward, they come pouring out of some off-screen spawn location and you shoot them in the head or center mass until they’re dead. Some shooters handle the monotony of this cycle by implementing intelligent adaptive routines where your enemy attempts to flank you, flush you out with grenades or retreat when they’re outnumbered. None of those modern innovations are present here, other than a few grenades thrown during a 10-15 person firefight. Most battles in the game give you the feeling of being outnumbered, but they’re so stupid and easy to kill, you’ll survive every encounter on the normal difficulty.

The only areas of the game left to discuss are the visuals and sound. While the dialog and voice overs are utterly terrible, the music shines through as the game’s only real high point. Composer Matthew Harwood’s score isn’t going to change your mind about the experience of playing Homefront, but he certainly did his best to deliver a spot-on reproduction of a big budget war film. If music makes you feel a part of the action, then the game’s engine and artwork should complete the illusion. Sadly, here Homefront is also at a significant disadvantage. The visual presentation is on par with a Source engine mod from 2007, not a triple-A game from 2011. Kaos Studios needs to abandon this tech if they plan to be taken seriously as a successful developer. There were only a few neat effects on display such as the blue laser targeting beams sweeping out of the elevated sentry guns. The rest of the production came across as crude and out of date, like when the Goliath destroys a tank or APC and the vehicle model is replaced with a damaged vehicle model textured all around with smoldering ash or when you come within a few meters of your squad members who look like plastic toy models with equally stilted animation routines.

Though there is a competent multiplayer mode where players have the opportunity to play in large matches with vehicles, squad commands, weapon and class unlocks all with different modes, I couldn’t be bothered to take the time, which is why the multiplayer won’t be discussed here. Homefront’s campaign was such a complete disappointment where it counts. I couldn’t separate my feelings for the story from my interest in the game. When a game repulses you so completely sometimes it’s best to put the disc back in the case and walk away.