Homefront Angry Review
Angry Joe discusses the implausible North Korean Invasion in THQ’s newest military FPS Homefront. If this crazy new dictator, Kim Jong Jo started the third world war would it be any fun to play? Find out!
Homefront
Players: 1 Player
Publisher: THQ
Genres: First-person Shooter
Publisher: THQ
Genres: First-person Shooter
Release Date: March 15, 2011
Developer: Kaos Studios
MSRP: $59.99
Developer: Kaos Studios
MSRP: $59.99
The year is 2027. Her infrastructure shattered and military in disarray, America has fallen to a savage occupation by the nuclear armed Greater Korean Republic. Abandoned by her former allies, the United States is a bleak landscape of walled towns and abandoned suburbs. This is a police state where high school stadiums have become detention centers, and shopping malls shelter armored attack vehicles. Join the Resistance, stand united and fight for freedom against an overwhelming military force In Homefront’s gripping, cinematic single player campaign, and experience epic, ground breaking multiplayer action all set in a terrifyingly plausible near-future world.
GDC: Homefront – Home is Where the Hype is
Posted By Taylor H. about 1 year, 2 months ago
what, no homefront urinal cakes?
It’s a time when reunified Korea has taken over. An EMP has destroyed technology across America, defense systems are rendered useless, and kimchi is the current form of currency. Well, that last one I may have made up. This is the setting for THQ’s latest FPS game, Homefront. In case you haven’t noticed, they are marketing this game like crazy. At GDC this week in San Fransisco, it’s hard to walk down the street without seeing a billboard, taxi cab, or taco truck without some sort of marketing for this
game.
As someone who lived in South Korea for a year, the premise for this game is so ridiculously far-fetched it’s borderline hilarious. When North Korea attacked the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong, China didn’t want anything to do with North Korea and the United States had a pretty sizable military exercise. Trust me, I was there. So trying to imagine North Korea invading America, let alone South Korea, is something that’s hard to wrap my head around. I understand that it’s a video game and not meant to be taken too seriously, but when you use a clip of Hillary Clinton from an actual press conference in your trailer, it feels like they’re trying to convey a pretty serious tone. If they wanted to remake Red Dawn, a better and more believable choice for the enemy might have been China.
But how is the look and feel of the actual game? I had a chance to check out Homefront in the aforementioned taco truck (Korean tacos, yum!). The game is very cinematic and gritty. The main story is that you’re apart of a civilian resistance group trying to make your way to San Fransisco in order to deliver aid to the military. As the demo begins you’re being forced into a bus and watch innocent pedestrians getting slaughtered all around you. One particularly brutal scene showed a young boy watching his parents getting murdered by a Korean solider. It really gave you a feeling of distress and despair. The game plays like any other FPS might and is quite responsive.
There were very noticeable graphical flaws, however, where pixels were clearly protruding from window frames, etc. The game really resembles an HD version of a late PS2 game more than a true PS3/ Xbox 360 game. All in all though it seems like the main draw of this game is going to be its premise. It’s one of the more story-heavy shooters I’ve ever played. If you’re looking to fight back against North Korea in a struggle to free the (U.S.) Homeland, then you might want to check it out. With THQ seemingly putting “all their eggs in one basket” with this game, will it be good or just another shooter in the crowd? We’ll find out when in launches in NA on March 15th and EUR on March 17th.
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Guru Reviews: Homefront
Koreans in my America? It's more likely than you think!
Sage Reviews: Homefront
The only memorable thing about Homefront is how forgettable it is.
Homefront Review
It's like Red Dawn, only more Korean, and less good.
Homefront Angry Review
Angry Joe discusses the implausible North Korean Invasion in THQ's newest military FPS Homefront. If this crazy new dictator, Kim Jong Jo started the third world war would it be any fun to play? Find out!
Trailerpalooza!- Batman: Arkham City, Okamiden, Homefront, F.3.A.R., Dungeon Siege III
You’re probably already sold on Batman, but what about some of these other great titles?
GDC: Homefront - Home is Where the Hype is
THQ is giving their latest FPS game Homefront a big marketing push with no shame. Is it all hype? Read our demo (and marketing) impression to find out.
Homefront Sees Multiple Pre-order Bonuses, Massive Partnership with OnLive
Homefront, as a game, has an interesting concept to it. America has been invaded by
Homefront PC Specs Released
The upcoming shooter stakes its territory and lets the PC crowd know if we have the hardware to defend home and hearth.
New Homefront Trailer
A new trailer from THQ’s upcoming FPS Homefront has just dropped, with particular detail being painted on the ins and outs of being occupied by a military state.
Homefront Angry Review
Angry Joe discusses the implausible North Korean Invasion in THQ’s newest military FPS Homefront. If this crazy new dictator, Kim Jong Jo started the third world war would it be any fun to play? Find out!
Trailerpalooza!- Batman: Arkham City, Okamiden, Homefront, F.3.A.R., Dungeon Siege III
You’re probably already sold on Batman, but what about some of these other great titles?
GDC: Homefront - Home is Where the Hype is
THQ is giving their latest FPS game Homefront a big marketing push with no shame. Is it all hype? Read our demo (and marketing) impression to find out.
Homefront Sees Multiple Pre-order Bonuses, Massive Partnership with OnLive
Homefront, as a game, has an interesting concept to it. America has been invaded by
Homefront PC Specs Released
The upcoming shooter stakes its territory and lets the PC crowd know if we have the hardware to defend home and hearth.
New Homefront Trailer
A new trailer from THQ’s upcoming FPS Homefront has just dropped, with particular detail being painted on the ins and outs of being occupied by a military state.
Homefront Review
Posted By Geoff T. about 1 year, 1 month ago
Homefront Review
In the weeks leading up to its release, I was genuinely excited for Homefront. Since experiencing the stellar “nuke scene” in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, I’ve been itching to play a modern war game that doesn’t require I shut my brain off 90% of the time. Homefront was seemingly poised to finally scratch that itch with a heady, politically-charged plot about a United States invaded by a foreign power. As you can imagine, though, once reviews started trickling in… well, to say my enthusiasm began to wane would be an understatement. Still, I held out hope that maybe, just maybe, it would turn out to be an example of idiots just not getting it.
Man, I hate it when I’m wrong.
| PROS | Solid multiplayer design, huge maps, lots of strategic variety, great vehicle segments, beautiful lighting effects and trees. |
| CONS | Terrible narrative, overly linear and scripted, “emotional” moments feel forced, cheap deaths, dated character models and environments. |
| WTF?! | OPEN THE GOD-DAMN DOOR ALREADY! |
Homefront is not so much one game as it is two different games with tangential similarities. On the one hand, you have the multiplayer, which tosses you into massive, 32 player matches set on sprawling, multilayered battlefields. Battles in this mode are fast-paced, frenetic, and give players on both sides a multitude of strategic and tactical options. On the other, you have the single-player, which tosses you into a linear succession of thinly-disguised shooting galleries and hallways. Battles in this mode are slow, tedious, and more concerned with stringing you between the scripted events that the developers worked so hard on than actually letting you play. Aside from some mechanical similarities, the two games could not be more different.
In case you couldn’t tell from that last paragraph, the vast majority of the problems with the game lie in how the single-player campaign is handled. Homefront very clearly wants to be an intelligent, emotionally resonant commentary on the subject of war. Unfortunately, it seems that John Millus, the game’s writer, is not intelligent enough to come up with anything resembling a plausible scenario, nor is he capable of inducing even the slightest bit of emotional response in his audience (aside from maybe violent rage). On top of that, by the game’s end it’s clear that he has little to say of any worth on the subjects at hand.
Gosh, how idyllic. I wonder if anything horrible is going to happen here later.
For the uninitiated, the “disturbingly plausible” (according to the game’s creators) premise of Homefront is thus: the United States, after being crippled by an EMP burst, decades of massive debt and an avian flu epidemic, has been invaded by the Greater Korean Republic. The GKR an alliance of small East-Asian countries that came together after Kim Jong Il’s son, Kim Jong Un, managed to re-unify the Korean peninsula under his rule. Now, to the layman, this might indeed seem plausible, but to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of current politics, it’s complete nonsense. Never mind the fact that the USA would convert all its poor into fuel before even considering cutting its military budget, the idea that South Korea would ever peacefully submit to the North, especially under the rule of Kim Jong Il’s batshit-insane progeny, is utterly ridiculous.
Of course, the outlandishness of the premise could have been offset if the narrative based around it was any good. Unfortunately the writing in the game is almost entirely wretched, and not just in the sense that the dialogue is hammy and stupid (though believe me, it is). Millus does not seem to grasp the fact that, for a tragedy to affect its audience, it is first necessary to make the audience care about the world in which it is taking place. Instead, he lazily throws out a series of inherently “horrible” scenes, which range from seeing parents executed in front of their child to watching rednecks torture prisoners of war, and simply expects the player to care because they would if it happened in real life. It’s as though he looked at Modern Warfare 2‘s infamously tasteless “No Russian” mission and decided to write an entire game like that.
5/10
Guru Reviews: Homefront
Koreans in my America? It's more likely than you think!Sage Reviews: Homefront
The only memorable thing about Homefront is how forgettable it is.Homefront Review
It's like Red Dawn, only more Korean, and less good.Homefront Angry Review
Angry Joe discusses the implausible North Korean Invasion in THQ's newest military FPS Homefront. If this crazy new dictator, Kim Jong Jo started the third world war would it be any fun to play? Find out!- March 28, 2011 at 03:03pm
I agree with you that the multiplayer is fantastic. Wanna know how fantastic I think it is? I actually have used the precious “magic” hours when I can actually get an internet connection for my PS3 to play it and take a break from Black Ops, something that I would never, ever do considering Black Ops has one of the best multiplayer modes ever created.
My main gripe with this review is that the single player here is regarded as abysmal. I couldn’t disagree more. Yes, the idea of North Korea invading the United States is plainly absurd considering its army is built specifically for combat on the Korean peninsula, a task which it is more than capable of handling; that and the fact that it has over 1,000 artillery pieces trained on Seoul is reason enough to actively pursue a war with them. However, this is a fictional story, a worst case “what if” scenario. This is about as plausible as Modern Warfare 2′s story. Despite that, I find the world within the game to be fascinating and the opening narration sucked me in immediately. Also, I actually wanted to find the hidden newspapers littered throughout the game to find out more about how it got to this point.
As for the emotional points, it worked on me because these things were occuring in mid-western neighborhoods and towns not too disimilar to the kind where I would spend the long, hot summer days with my grandparents and cousins. Seeing tanks and propaganda posters all over the place struck a nerve, as did seeing bodies being dumped into a baseball field and survivalist nutjobs betray their own country men ( growing up in the south I knew kids with survialist families and quite frankly, I wouldn’t put it past them if anything like this were to occur). As I’ve said before, I rarely have ever been in a shootout with a screaming baby next to me or have had to endure the sudden shock of seeing a resistance community wiped out and the leader crucified on a swing set (normally an object that would bring back nostalgia) for a raid I committed last night. Also, the Voice of Freedom is a great addition that really reves you up for a mission (especially the final one in San Fran). Maybe I liked it because I’m a shallow, ADD riddled jingoistic idiot who loves blowing up “Norks” in a power fantasy. Or maybe I liked it because of the fact that I’m the game’s intended demographic: a patriotic American that finds familiar settings in ruin and occupied by a relentless enemy to be disturbing and infuriating.
Maybe I should just put it this way: I’ve played games before ( like Haze and Turning Point: Fall of Liberty) where I played the single player campaign and had to lie to myself to be convinced that it was worth the time and money spent. I feel no such reservation here. I loved the single player, in spite of its short length. If there is DLC that contains more story missions, I will buy it. If there is a sequel, I will buy it. Different people have different tastes. Geoff happened to hate the single player. I happened to love it. Overall I would give this game an 8/10. .
- March 28, 2011 at 01:32pm
Yet another dull looking war based game that has a bad story. I always get turned off by games like this. If the multiplayer is good, why not make the game around it then? Have Colourful arenas (That means having a Palette of more than Black, Grey, Brown and Dark Green people) with a variety of modes that support it. And try not to take your self seriously if you can’t do serious right.
It’s a certain pass for me. Can we get a Online FPS that doesn’t try to take things seriously yet still maintains a well constructed Multiplayer (Along with Local Multiplayer as well.)?
- March 27, 2011 at 01:22pm
Personally, I remain somewhat unsold that a game which advertises itself on its STORY can still get recommendations when the story is proven to be generally weak. I don’t think it fair to give a game a free pass just for good or even great multi-player, especially when all we heard about Homefront for the longest time was the “scary and plausible” story.
I guess it’s a matter of principle, really….I don’t think it’s fair to give a game a “buy it now” recommendation based on something it wasn’t selling. When you go out to the store to buy yourself a garden rake and you come home with something that has a garden rake on the front of the box, but when you open the box, it’s actually a weed whacker. Well it might be the best weed whacker you’ve ever bought, and you might have a blast killing weeds by chopping them into bits, but in the end, it’s not what you went to the store to buy. Some people don’t mind that, but it bugs me when a game I purchase for Reason X does terribly in X but good in Y. Well, I didn’t get it for Y, I got it for X. It’s different than getting a game for X and having it be good at both X and Y, because at least then you’re getting what you were sold, but here….you’re not.
You do note that the “buy it now” recommendation was based on the game’s multi-player (which goes back to my note about wanting a garden rake and instead getting a weed whacker) and also on the THQ pass system (in that you’re restricted in renting). Doesn’t that encourage the player not to touch the title at all? I understand that the restrictions have been put into place to get people to buy the games rather than borrowing (it’s a direct crack against companies like GameStop and, in my mind, the game industry’s attempt to get even MORE of the pie), but….isn’t that kind of a bad thing, if the idea of renting is to get the full experience of the game without making a commitment until you’re sure you want it?
I suppose your points are fair enough, and I appreciate your review for being so very thorough. The game might have great multi-player and sure, it might be worth buying just for that. I just don’t like that it tried to sell itself as a “unique story” when it seems clear that the game’s story was likely built as more of an afterthought, with the multi-player being the focal point of their design.
- March 26, 2011 at 04:40pm
This review confirms the validity of my apprehension.
On a separate note: Does anybody else remember the days where developers didn’t mollycoddle players with grenade indicators *at all* and you had to spot them yourself?
Heaven forbid it require skill and attention to detail to be good at something.
- March 27, 2011 at 02:32am
Trouble with that is that in a first person game you don’t have the benefits of peripheral vision, never mind your senses of touch and directional hearing. Unless you’re looking directly at the enemy throwing it (and chances are you won’t be given that grenades are used primarily to flush you out of cover), or the spot where it lands, you won’t even know the grenade has been thrown until it insta-kills you. In that case, avoiding it requires luck rather than skill.
- March 27, 2011 at 04:55am
Eh, grenades barely do enough damage to kill someone in an FPS these days unless they’re literally under your feet, so it doesn’t matter much anyway. I never had a problem noticing grenades when they were thrown at me in games without indicators – like I said, I think they’re just being soft on people. If you get killed 20 times in a row by a hand grenade, maybe you’ll start paying more attention to that sort of thing when you’re hiding in cover. People that will be successful are the ones that adapt to the things that are dangerous and learn techniques that allow them to succeed. Developers are just putting everything on easy street to allow for greater appeal to people that… well… suck.
I can understand it – you’re probably going to sell more units if more people are enjoying the game (i.e. not getting absolutely murdered in MP), but it still irritates me from time to time. More then that, I really feel like it shows. FPS competition used to be pretty good; I really feel like the quality of players has dropped off in recent years, and I’d attribute some of that to the playing field not being as harsh/challenging. People will rise up and get better instead of just stagnating in easy conditions where you get markers all over the screen & a map that tells you where all the enemies are. You used to have to ID targets yourself for friendly fire; now a shiny triangle shows up above everyone’s head – and you STILL get shot by teammates. It’s embarassing.
- March 26, 2011 at 04:04pm
The review was literally on the nose as to my own user review. I guess my problem is that I am not a fan of multi-player, so I put the try it out recommendation for it. Good stuff, Geoff. Good stuff indeed.
- March 26, 2011 at 04:01pm
Playing the Homefront SP gave me flashbacks of CODBLOPS SP, without the good parts mind you. Haven’t given the MP a go, but I know I’m gonna love it because Kaos Studios only know how to make good multiplayer games and this review only reaffirmed that. How can a game be so bad and so good at the same time?
- March 26, 2011 at 03:36pm
I’d like to rebut “no game is worth full price for multi player” then what about TF2? Just sayin. My brother put multi player in homefront like this. BC2 is the filet mingion og fps, Homefront is a 6 oz steak, and MW2 is a hamburger. I enjoy the 6 oz steak but I prefer the filet everytime
- March 26, 2011 at 02:44pm
How can you give a game 5/10, say the single player is terrible and recommend I spend £40 just for the Multiplayer? Are you Mad?
I uninstalled this game after 10 minutes of the single player, and NO FPS game is worth full price for mutliplayer only
- March 26, 2011 at 02:33pm
It’s amazing to me that you can give a game a 5/10 with the recommendation of buy it now.
- March 26, 2011 at 07:52pm
It’s amazing to you that a game considered to be average could be liked by someone?
- March 27, 2011 at 01:25am
No, the score should reflect the decision. If Dragon Age gets a 9.0 and a “try it out” rating, and this gets a 5.0 and a “buy it now rating” it seems a little bit backwards. I understand that he liked it, I also understand that he docked the score immensely because of the single player campaign. The score should be representative of his recommendation of the game.
If he really felt like the game was just a 5.0 and the only redeeming quality was online, that would be a “try it”, for example. Not everyone plays games for the online experience, and there are people who use some review sites just to view the score (I’m not one of those).
I’m not saying all this to be a dick, and I’m not trying to troll. My last comment made me come off as an ass, and I don’t mean it that way.
- March 27, 2011 at 02:13am
The reason we have both scores and recommendations is for precisely situations such as this. Homefront is an AMAZING multiplayer experience that happens to come packaged with an abysmal single player campaign. While the package as a whole rates a meager five, I’d recommend the multiplayer to pretty much anyone, even those like myself who tend to play single-player exclusively.
The reasons for giving it a “buy it now” as opposed to a “try it out” are twofold. Firstly, the game uses THQ’s online-pass system, which means that you can only get to rank 5 on a rental copy. Secondly, with most multiplayer titles, you get the most value from your purchase immediately after launch, so it makes the most sense to buy the game now.
- March 28, 2011 at 03:35am
“The score should be representative of his recommendation of the game.”
It is. It’s an average game overall, which he thinks you should buy. As Austin points out, DA2 appears to be considered an above average-great game in general, but if you’re a fan of the original you’re probably going to get really pissed at it.It’s not rocket science.
- March 27, 2011 at 01:37pm
A 5 is average on the BT scale. Average isn’t bad. I’ve had lots of fun with average games, and would recommend them to people easily. Dragon Age II might be a better game, but it might not be as easily recommendable because it alienates fans of the first.
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Homefront Angry Review
Angry Joe discusses the implausible North Korean Invasion in THQ’s newest military FPS Homefront. If this crazy new dictator, Kim Jong Jo started the third world war would it be any fun to play? Find out!
GDC: Homefront - Home is Where the Hype is
THQ is giving their latest FPS game Homefront a big marketing push with no shame. Is it all hype? Read our demo (and marketing) impression to find out.
Why do i get the feeling they put more money into advertising the game, than into actually making the fucking game?
Story in this game IS ridiculous. There’s so many good games coming out this year, buying this one is a waste of money.