There’s something fascinating about seeing two attempts at creating a game franchise fail so miserably as it happened with Homefront. I can understand why the publishers thought there was potential here – a franchise of FPS titles built around an idea of war happening on US soil. It could be provocative and novel and independently of quality of the end product guarantee to cause at least some uproar and publicity, positive or not. And its not like the attempts were the same, they tried approaching the same basic idea from rather different perspectives. Yet, both of them are very much not good and not worth playing at all.
I’ve originally played Homefront 12 years ago, just a year after it was released. As such, even then I knew what to expect. Locked doors that only other characters can open became a symbol of its obscene linear scripted nature and its script was ridiculed for being formulaic, despite a strong premise.
And yeah, the premise is strong. It has plenty of leaps in logic in terms of world events that had to happen to lead to the occupation of US by the “Greater Korean Republic”, sure. But some things have found a reflection in reality of the decade following the game’s release. Same with its depiction of a genocidal occupation – it doesn’t make a lot of sense in general and is clearly done mostly for shock value, but it shows what’s at stake and is also something that turned out to be very real in a modern world. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t really know what to do with any of it, so the story that you actually experience is hollow and stupid.
The scripted nature of it all makes things even worse. It’s not just that you only can do what other characters tell you, at the exact moment they tell you, in the exact way they tell you. It’s also the fact, that none of it is especially interesting, it often involves a lot of waiting for said characters to do anything and on top of it, things can break during those scripted elements. I’ve died in several such scenes where I didn’t even have controls of the character, because a grenade was too close to where the cutscene started. I’ve gotten stuck in an animation several times when performing a contextual action. Characters got stuck in their animations… It can be a horrible mess.
Though the biggest issue of the game, really, is the fact that it’s a really boring FPS. Even by the standards of the era, when every FPS tried to copy Call of Duty and everything was horribly scripted, at least other games usually played well. Homefront doesn’t and every gameplay aspect of it is surprisingly boring and underwhelming. You constantly kill battalions of enemies per level, and yet none of it feels exciting or tense. And as a result, I can’t imagine even a single reason for anyone to ever play it. As I understand, multiplayer used to be one for those who play multiplayer games, but I doubt you would find others to play this game with nowadays.
Why did I decide to play Homefront: The Revolution? I’ve been seeing a lot of takes about how “no actually it was quite good” lately and the curiosity got the best of me. Plus, I’ve heard about the TimeSplitters 2 mod that restored and fixed the full version of the game that is hidden inside this game as an Easter Egg, and since I’ve never played the title I thought I could kill two birds with one stone. And I don’t know what exactly people are finding that is “quite good” in this game, but I haven’t found it.
Unlike the original Homefront, The Revolution attempts to have a more Crysis or Far Cry structure to its gameplay. So instead of the absurdly linear corridors you get a bunch of small open levels with objectives you can complete, some of them necessary and some optional. On top of that, there are some traversal mechanics like climbing and riding a bike and the buildings on the maps tend to be multi-layered, providing a genuinely impressive amount of ways you can get through the levels. Now, none of this is any good, mind you, the objectives range from absurdly easy to easy but unnecessarily complicated and achieving them never gets super inventive and systemic, like what can happen in Crysis or Far Cry. But it’s usually at an acceptable level, at least when things don’t break horribly. Which they do, even if, as I gathered, not as often as they did when the game launched. I still got soft locked out of several objectives via normal means and had to break the game in other ways to achieve them.
Shockingly, where the game fails even more than the original title is in its story. The plot that happens during the game and its DLCs is just formulaic and stupid. In general it’s at a higher quality of writing than the crap from the first game, but it’s still very poor. What’s worse is the bigger picture plot – the premise is so bizarrely undercooked and underexplained that the big villains of the game never seem to have any clear goals with their occupation. For context – The Revolution isn’t a sequel, but rather a different take on the same idea of a North Korean occupation of the USA and the events leading up to it were changed. Except with this updated premise, the logistics of the occupation make even less sense and the occupation force, that still remains the main enemy type of the game, just kinda… exists. Maybe a lot of the story was cut because it was deemed too… risky? I don’t know, but the end result is that it’s never entirely clear what is at stake (apart from freedom, obviously), who wants what and why and what is possible and what isn’t in this world. And things feel very sterile and even more hollow than they did in the first game. The DLCs, that work more like a linear cinematic adventure, try to address at least some of the issues with storytelling, but it’s too little, too late. And it’s not like they say anything interesting anyway.
So… At best, Homefront: The Revolution is “adequate” – a cut down Far Cry experience without the tedium of a full open world. And it’s not often at its best. Is it worth playing it? I don’t think so. Is it worth trying to get it for TimeSplitters 2? Depends on how much you like TimeSplitters 2 and even the work of the modders the experience with the game isn’t ideal. Probably no.