Homefront.....

DISCLAIMER

If you are expecting a tirade of complaints or a call for a Pox on the house of THQ then you will be dissapointed. I think the whole "die in fire" thing is a little immature.

When Homefront was first anounced, I had high expectations. I like John Milius movies and I expected that Homefront would be a modern version of Red Dawn  where you could defend the sanctity of Mom, apple pie, White Castle and Hooters from the commie hordes of North Korea.  The game trailers reinforced that concept and the trade show demos showed some interesting ideas as far as the multiplayer game went.  I was glad to see another take on the military FPS and not a clone of Call of Duty but not touted as a COD killer.

When the game released, the critics started to tear at it as critics  will do. The forums were full of expert opinon from  game developers and programmers ...wait, no, sorry, most of the critques on the forums consited of in depth analysis summarized as "this sucks" , " I hate this game" or the previously  mentioned "die, die die"  rants. 

But instead of blasting the game apart, I thought maybe I would just play the game and make some personal observations.

The Story: 

O.K,  not the whole Red Dawn thing I wanted, but it did have an action movie feel about it. Definite chapters, action sequences and clear cut good guys vs. bad guys. A typical climatic ending with enough wiggle room for Homefront 2.

The Characters:

Straight out of action movie central casting.  The female (Rianna) fighting in hip hugger skinny jeans,  sleeveless shirt and cowgirl boots. Reminded me a lot of Alex from Half Life 2.   Connor, the tough as nails -lone wolf -loose cannon and Boone the ex cop -natural leader who worries about his rag tag bunch of resistance fighters and of course, Hopper, the young whiz kid who can hack any computer or  fix anything mechanical. You play as Jacobs, a pilot  so valuable to the resistance they rescue you from the mean ol' North Koreans but  then immediately send  you go out on dangerous missions where the last thing you do is actually fly anything.

The weapons:

pistols, assault rifles, sniper rifles, rocket launchers, machine guns, shotguns. yep yep and yep. If there was a laser gun or a rare and unique secret weapon, I didn't run across it.  All the weapons looked good but I did think the sound was a little different from what other games have.  No big deal. 

The bad guys (booo)

Basically, four versions of the same person.  North Korea has perfected a spawn- o- matic  machine where fully trained and equiped soldiers  just keep popping out  forever until your character crosses some invisible point where then the  spawn o matic  shuts off and goes somewhere else.

Controls:

Just like default CoD  - Mk1 Mod 0 - no difference.

Some other stuff: 

In 2027 , all ladders regardless of whether it's to climb the side of a building or enter  a hand dug  tunnel will come from Home Depot.

Gabions (those blocky things made from a wire frame and filled with dirt or rocks) will be all over the place even in places where you would think, "why would you have these thing here?" 

I finished the campaign in about six hours start to finish. Other than maybe going back and trying to get a couple of achievments, I really don't  see playing through it again.

And then there is the multiplayer.....

I have played some team death match and in the games I could get in, it was pretty good. The gameplay seems to have  a Battlefeild feeling to it. The respawns are as fast as CoD but you get a quick overview of  the map to help orient you to where the opponents are. Hit detection is very good, better than CoD. I like the battlepoints concept for getting things like UAV, air support, RPG,s and vehicles.  I like the drone that lets you put great big red markers on the enemies so your teammates can see where they are and get them. The maps are good sized. I like dedicated servers and most people expected that all the multiplayer games would be server based. I I think the company could have been more forthright about letting people know that for the most part, they would be using peer to peer much like CoD. There are some issues with the servers and I have not had any luck getting to play with a group of friends.  I expect this problem will be resolved soon.

Overall, I would say they game itself isn't bad, there are some serious technical issues with the multiplayer, but based on updates from the developer, they at least acknowledge the shortcoming and are  saying they are going to fix them. I think once they get their server issues worked out Homefront could be a really good online game.

There, I didn't wish horrible death on anyone and I didn't try to tell the hundred or so people who worked on this game how much I hate their guts or how talentless they are. I don't hate their guts, I've never met them and as far as talent goes, I don't know the first thing about programing a videogame so who am I bust their chops?