Homefront – Review

Homefront is a shooter from Kaos Studios and THQ. In a highly competitive first person shooter market, Kaos has done an outstanding job in creating a memorable shooter that is in a class by itself. The storyline in Homefront is what sets it apart from every other shooter out there. There are a lot of shooter titles out there that will have players fighting in some far off land. It is a pretty rare thing to have a shooter that uses a real world locale, and Homefront is by far the best shooter to do it yet.

Instead of fighting in a fictional, far away land, the fight is at home. The tagline for Homefront is “Home Is Where The War Is,” and that point is immediately driven home the instant the campaign starts and a tattered apartment gives way to innocent civilians being killed in the street.

The year is 2027. The Greater Korean Republic has invaded U.S. soil and taken everyone by surprise. They conquered Hawaii first and then invaded San Francisco. An EMP blast from a Korean satellite has fried every piece of electronic equipment in the United States. As the campaign opens with the player being dragged from an apartment, it immediately becomes clear how bad things have become. The KPA (Korean Public Army) are performing atrocities everywhere. The player is thrown into a converted school bus that is now being used to transport prisoners to detention centers. It isn’t long before a rescue occurs, and that’s where the game really begins. As the game progresses, players will bear witness to unspeakable acts committed by the KPA as they try to hunt the player down, fighting through suburban neighborhoods, popular retail stores and, basically, everything identifiable as “home.” Even though the EMP fried everything, a few people have repaired some items, such as radios. In between stages, radio broadcasts from the “Voice of Freedom” inform all the American citizens listening of the player’s progress and urge them to help the resistance in any way they can. Kaos has done a great job reaching an emotional level that most shooters don’t get to. The last level of the game is a great climax to the story, and it leaves plenty of room to wonder what happens next – hopefully Homefront turns into a franchise, because there’s clearly more Kaos has in mind.

The only thing worth changing about the game is adding a cover system. It would have been nice if Homefront featured a proper cover system so players didn’t have to be completely in the open to shoot at someone. Having the ability to lean around a corner during some of the huge firefights would have helped a great deal. The scenery and set pieces in Homefront look fantastic, with a couple of instances worth simply stopping to look at the environment for a few moments because it looked amazing. Homefront also features one of the most memorable stages in a shooter, memorable enough to warrant playing it again immediately. This is a game with real staying power, including a full run at the hardest difficulty – a rare thing to commit to, and a mark of just how much Homefront earns that respect.

Of course, the story is only part of the game, with the multiplayer also bringing some new concepts to the table. Homefront’s multiplayer can be played either over Xbox Live/PSN or over system link. One interesting new feature is the battle point system. Battle points act as the currency in multiplayer and accrue based on how well a player is performing, working as a risk vs. reward system. A tank barreling down on your position might call for quickly spending 250 battle points on a rocket launcher to defend yourself, or points can go toward flak jackets, drones and much more depending on loadout. The decision is whether to take the instant gratification of using points as soon as they’re earned, or to be patient for a bigger payoff down the road – for instance, saving up enough points to buy a helicopter and respawn straight into it to start raining down destruction on opponents. It’s a mechanic that can genuinely change how a battle unfolds.

The development studio wanted to really focus the multiplayer on large scale warfare, and Homefront features up to 32 person multiplayer with dedicated servers. There are four different modes to choose from: traditional Team Deathmatch, Ground Control, Battle Commander (Ground Control) and Battle Commander (Team Deathmatch). Team Deathmatch is self-explanatory, while Ground Control is all about an evolving battlefield – three locations must be controlled at a time, and once a round ends, three new areas are chosen, changing where the fight takes place. The team that wins two of three rounds wins the game. If the KPA wins the first round and the USA wins the second, the KPA is forced to retreat to the original three locations and try to prevent those from being overtaken. The Battle Commander modes add an A.I. battle commander helping coordinate each team; players start with a one star rating and can climb to five stars based on performance, occasionally receiving specific missions such as taking out five more enemies for bonuses. The opposing battle commander can respond in kind, classifying a dominating player as a “Priority Threat” and directing the whole enemy team to hunt them down specifically. The game ships with seven multiplayer maps, with the Xbox 360 version getting an eighth thanks to the exclusive “Suburbs” map.

Overall, Homefront is a fantastic game. It was one of the most anticipated titles for the first half of 2011 and it doesn’t disappoint. Kaos has created a great shooter and, hopefully, a great new franchise. The Homefront novel is also worth checking out – reading it before playing the game helps with some of the back story, covering the events before the game and giving the origin of the “Voice of Freedom” among other things. Fans of the first person genre should have Homefront in their collection. It is a breath of fresh air in a genre that tends to recycle the same old thing. In Homefront, home is indeed where the war is.

Our rating: 9/10