The first Homefront wasn’t very good. Thankfully, Homefront: The Revolution fares much better.
It’s important to note that Homefront: The Revolution is not a sequel to the previous game, but a reboot. To understand Homefront’s setting, you have to put aside your preconceptions of the world as it is and imagine a history where Silicon Valley never came to be, and that the first successful desktop computer was developed not by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, but by a pair of North Korean programmers who went on to create the APEX Corporation, turning the Communist-run country into a powerhouse of technological innovation.
As America found itself embroiled in yet another war in the Middle East, a nuclear bomb went off that decimated most of America’s army stationed in Saudi Arabia and thus began the short, but inevitable decline of the country, which had come to become reliant on North Korean technology, which was overridden one day and shut off, leaving America completely vulnerable to foreign invasion. As riots broke out during what characters in the game refer to as the “Troubles,” the Korean People’s Army landed on American shores under the guise of providing aid relief. With the blessing of the international community, the KPA brought America’s populace to heel, imposing strict new laws and ending the period of anarchy.
It’s been some years since then, and the KPA has full and total control of the good old USA. That’s where you come in: you’re a member of the resistance in Philadelphia, fighting to reclaim the independence and sovereignty of the American people. And the people fighting alongside you? Well, they’re not so nice, but they’re fighting for the same things you are.
Backstory aside, the game takes place across three different types of zones: Red Zones, a no-man’s land where KPA and revolutionaries engage in open warfare; Yellow Zones, slums where the local populace lives under the heel of the new government; and Green Zones, which are the safe spaces where the rich, powerful, and those connected to the KPA are live happy lives insulated from reality. Each zone offers its own style of gameplay—from all-out action to stealth and sabotage. But for the most part, you’ll want to stay out of sight as much as possible and pick off enemies using your guerrilla toolkit, which provides you the means to create powerful IEDs, RC Car bombs, and remote hacks to take control of automated KPA drones.
You can’t loot new weapons in the game, but you can loot materials to sell and in turn buy guns with, padding your personal arsenal with all manner of highly customizable firearms. Each base weapon can be converted to two separate weapons, different in both form and function, and further modified with add-ons like suppressors, bipods and a variety of scopes. It’s actually kind of neat to watch as each weapon is modified on-the-fly in first-person as your character quickly dismantles the existing kit with a new part.
There are obvious similarities to Ubisoft’s Far Cry titles. Instead of climbing up towers and clearing open encampments, you’ll have to capture a variety of different buildings and KPA-converted strongholds for the resistance—each of which may confer a different benefit for being captured. Capturing radio stations and communications hubs reveals collectibles on the map, while destroying a fuel depot reduces the number of automated drone tanks you’ll encounter. Taking out a sniper nest will put more resistance footsoldiers on the ground to support you in future engagements. Completing most of these actions will raise your “Hearts and Minds” rating for the zone, which in turn causes the populace to rise up and fight against the North Koreans in open revolution. It’s pretty satisfying to see a beat-down populace take up arms against their oppressors.
It’s an effective way of making you feel empowered, given that much of the game’s setting feels extremely oppressive. You can watch as civilians are brutalized by the Norks (that’s what the civilians call the KPA) and choose to do nothing, or break cover and do something about it. Once your cover’s broken, you can dispatch your pursuers until there’s nobody left and the alarm goes down, or simply find someplace to hide.
When you first arrive in a zone, you’ll be pretty much alone and forced to take on the KPA through stealth, rescuing civilians being intimidated by lone soldiers by strangling them to death, planting IEDs to take out patrols, and freeing civilian captives from prisoner transports. As you capture more points, you can recruit resistance fighters to fight alongside you and eventually, you’ll be conducting large-scale raids on heavily armed bases as AI-controlled characters show up to assist you. When they AI isn’t acting stupid, these unscripted moments really shine.
The only thing I don’t like about the game is that the AI of both allies and enemies generally feels stupid and artificial. When they aren’t assisting you in raids in an unscripted, procedural fashion, the ones who you recruit to follow you around have trouble with their pathfinding and don’t always follow you to where you need to go, and the Koreans can seem particularly stupid when they fail to notice that each of them is being gunned down one by one as they round a corner. These elements detract from the game’s overall realistic feel, but they aren’t game-breaking.
While most games of this sort make you feel like one-man army, fighting against the bad guys singlehandedly, Homefront: The Revolution does a very good job of making you feel like a part of a team. The resistance feels like a cooperative effort that’s been building up for a long time as there are supply caches set up all across the city and makeshift tunnels for members of the resistance to sneak across enemy lines. Interestingly, there are also motorbikes stored away in shipping crates that allow you to get across the city and zip past patrols.
By now, you might have noticed some early impressions of Homefront: The Revolution panning it for its graphics. Yes—the game is undoubtedly ugly on the PS4 and Xbox One. You’ll definitely want to play it on the PC, where it looks pretty damn good and runs surprisingly well even with its settings cranked up to maximum. There was a moment in the game where I was looking down at a wooden desk in an abandoned warehouse with a broken roof when the pitter patter of raindrops started to softly flood my ears. The raindrops progressively darkened spots on the wooden table until it was completely drenched. I looked up just to check, and sure enough, it was raining. For all the criticism the game might take for its presentation on the console, the game looks stellar on the PC.
Despite some of its shortcomings, Homefront: The Revolution is a solid open-world FPS. It gets a lot right and if you’re in the mood for liberating future America, it might just be your jam.
Final Verdict
8/10
Note: In addition to the game’s single-player mode, there’s also a separate multiplayer mode with a ton of maps for you and up to three friends to attempt cooperatively. At the time of this writing, I did not have the opportunity to play the game’s co-op mode. I’ll update this piece with my impressions at a later date.
Homefront: The Revolution is published by Deep Silver and developed by Dam Buster Studios. It is available on the PC, Xbox One and PS4. This review was conducted based on the PC version of the game, a copy of which was provided by the publisher.
