Homefront: Revolution
I’m not much of a shooter fan. But the original Homefront found a way to wiggle into my gaming library all the same. Through extremely immersive story telling, live cinematic sequences, and countless ways that your stupidity can be repaid with instant death, the game just grew on me. It wasn’t so much about twitch reflexes or being able to 360 no scope my opponent. Rather Homefront drew me into a believable world, with a story I could relate to. Yet it left us with so many unanswered questions that I never thought would be detailed. So we took the west coast back? What about everyone else? Well five long years later, the sequel we never thought would happen is about to arrive.
While the original game felt like a roller coaster (i.e. on rails with everything occurring in smaller corridors), the sequel is more of a theme park. They’ve broken up Philadelphia and its surrounding suburbs into three color coded regions where all the action occurs. Green zones are rather calm government zones controlled by the Korean overlords. Starting a ruckus here will likely get you killed instantly, assuming you even had an excuse to get inside in the first place. Yellow zones are the work camps where the majority of American POWs are living in extreme poverty. You can expect most story missions to revolve around this zone. The red zones however will be your base of operations: destitute, bombed, and burned outlands where the Korean soldiers will shoot Americans on sight. And what fun, this is exactly where we got to play around in for our demo!
Whether online in co-op settings, or in your single player campaign, this is where you will enact guerrilla hellfire as the resistance to change the world around you. Unlike most FPS games that involve moving across a map killing any enemies you encounter, Homefront: Revolution forces you to engage in hit and run tactics, staying one step ahead of your foes if you want to stay alive. Every action you openly take against the Koreans will up your severity level, resulting in more soldiers, more vehicles, more tracking drones, and eventually some horrifying hovering fortress ships coming after you. But… stealth is your friend.
Note: If your game looks like this, you’re doing it very wrong.
By taking out tracking drones as quickly as possible, you can confuse your foes into chasing you in the wrong direction. And every direction is available for your discretion, as you have been unchained from the narrow corridors of the first game. Thus the more you get to know the layout of the city, the more slippery you will become as you climb ladders, jump ledges, and ride motorcycles away from your pursuers! Your gadget pool is even more impressive than ever as you can tack bombs onto RC cars, hack communication systems, and augment your weaponry to do everything from silent shots to spewing fire.
The beauty of this model is that no two play session will be exactly alike. Whether your actions are successful or utter failures, you will see the world change around you. New dynamic events will force you to make tough decisions between assisting other resistance fighters or saving your own skin. If you find success more than failure, you can even begin to rally the people to come out of hiding, post pro-American propaganda on walls, and occasionally even take up arms to stand with you against their oppressors.
Once again Homefront is breaking the limits of the FPS genre. Combining this style of open world conflict with their campaign story telling is going to be like nothing else we’ve ever seen in the genre. With the addition of co-op gameplay, this is sure to be one of the highlights of online shooting come launch in spring 2016!
That concludes this year’s coverage on PAX Prime 2015. But be sure to keep an eye on our youtube channel as we still have a few more videos coming out including our Indie Games compilation spotlight!
