Evan Plays: Homefront

Long story short, I made another video:

Homefront is a bad game – no beating around the bush there – and I knew it was a bad game. So why did I buy and play it?

Well, long story short, it’s because Saint’s Row: The Third was AMAZING. One of the top five video games of all time, IMO. Unfortunately, THQ, the publisher, made some poor decisions and is in some financial troubs.

Their most recent release, Darksiders II, might make or break the company. I enjoyed the first Darksiders enough, and will almost certainly play the sequel at some point, so I decided I would buy Darksiders II now, new and at full price to help that be a sucessful launch and put some bucks back into the company.

Around this same time, a friend was complaining about how dumb and bad Homefront was, and I realized that it too was published by THQ.

So, I went to the store and dropped 80 bucks on THQ games for no reason other than to do my part to ensure the company stays solvent long enough to make Saints Row Four. And, since I had it, I then decided to PLAY Homefront, which was my real mistake.

Homefront, in theory, is a knockoff Call of Duty game with an absurd plot about how North Korea has taken over all of America – and it is. But it’s also so much worse than that.

We run into problems almost immediately: there isn’t a difficulty selection (at least not that I could find), so you’re dumped into the game on a difficulty that is probably halfway between Hardenend and Veteran (to use the equivalent CoD difficulties). This is probably fine for the hardcore gamers, but has already alienated people like me who want a relaxing fun experience or just aren’t very good at games.

It starts the game with a 5 minute cutscene “explaining” just how Korea took over the world. The problem is, it doesn’t actually have any explanation as to how things happen, it just pops text up over stock footage – “2015 – North Korea invades South Korea”, “2020 – Unified Korea takes over Japan”, “2025 – Korea takes over all of Asia and oh yeah also the U.S.A. teehee”. It’s just absurd on its face. Sure, North Korea could do some serious damage if provoked, but the odds of them leading a full-scale invasion of the United States is about the same is Lithuania leading a full-scale invasion of the United States. So, the setting is established, but it’s so absurd and just flat out dumb on premise, it’s hard to get immersed.

It then launches into the tried and true “you sit in a vehicle and look around for a bit while we establish the setting” intro. The problem is, one, they don’t do a great job; two, they already established the setting in that dumb overly long stock footage cutscene; and three, the setting sucks. So this bit just feels like you’re sitting in a bus not playing the game. This portion of the game is about as much fun as ACTUALLY SITTING ON A BUS. To be fair – “sit in a vehicle and look at stuff” is a really hard intro to pull off. Skyrim did this and the intro was just as painful – but the game improved once you got past it and it won several Game of the Year awards.

Luckily, eventually, the bus crashes and you get to start playing the game. This is where the game goes from zero to sixty, and when I say “from zero to sixty”, I am referring to the number of enemies you face. It’s the game equivalent of being pushed into the deep end of the pool and being told “hope you can swim, bye”. And, as mentioned before, there is no difficulty slider, so this can be quite challenging.

Now we get into the game’s biggest flaw: it’s just not very fun. Shooting dudes is the core experience of the game, and they failed at it. Even if they got every other thing right (which they didn’t) having a core mechanic that doesn’t work would ruin the game. The AI you are fighting against is brutal – and not in a fair way. Whether you are visible or not, they know where you are. If even the slightest part of your body is exposed from cover, all the enemies on the battlefield will shoot it with deadly precision. Additional enemies spawn seemingly out of nowhere, and you are almost always severely outnumbered. Gameplay basically boils down to hiding prone behind a barrier, popping up for one second to fire two bullets and in the process get shot to near death, then going prone again, and staying prone for five seconds to heal. One second playing, five seconds hiding. One second playing, five seconds hiding. Repeat, repeat. Do this three or four times and congratulations, you will have successfully killed one of the twelve people shooting at you. But be careful, if you stay up for 1.5 seconds instead of 1, you will die and restart at the checkpoint, which, by the way, was 10 minutes ago.

It’s not fun. It’s frustrating. I understand that while I generally go in for a story and some light activity, challenge is a form of engagement people enjoy. But for challenge to be fun, it has to be fair – when you fail, you need to feel like its your fault, not the game’s. And it doesn’t. Playing this game feels like the game is punching you in the face. Can I go back to the part of the game where I sat on a bus?

A bit later in the first level (after the footage from the video) you defend a house, and the difficulty seemed much easier here, I cleared that area on the first try, I think, and there’s another bit where you control some sort of armored car which was a nice change of pace as well. Unfortunately, these bits came at a time when I was VERY frustrated with the game, and couldn’t properly appreciate them. If the whole game was like this, it might be salvageable, but the whole game isn’t like this.

I only managed to struggle through the first level. I suspect the game will never come off my shelf to attempt level two – it was just a wholly irritating, frustrating experience. My game time is too valuable to waste on Homefront – and so is yours.

Final Score: zero out of ten.

EDIT: After posting this, I discovered that Homefront DOES, in fact, have multiple difficulties. Rather than being asked when you start a new game like pretty much every other game with multiple difficulties, you have to set it manually via Options -> Game Settings -> Difficulty, and THEN start a new game.

This is an important feature, one that would potentially resolve many of the issues I had been having with the game, and it’s buried in a menu. If something is obfuscated to the point that I don’t know it exists, that’s functionally identical to me as not existing. So all the previous problems I was having REMAIN VALID.

That said, with the difficulty cranked all the way down to “Easy”, it’s a much better game: That is to say, it is elevated from “heinous” to “meh”. It still has all the problems it had before, but without the frustration of dying quite so quickly and having to replay large chunks multiple times, it’s much easier to look past them.

It’s still more difficult than I would like – the difficulty described in the original article as “between CoD Hardened and Veteran” was in fact “Normal”, with at least two difficulties selectable HARDER than that. Easy was the only difficulty that was easier than what I had been playing so the difference between the two was not as steep as I would have liked. Even on Easy, there was still a part of the first level where I died three times in a row due to eeriely accurate AI and an abundance of grenades.

At this point, armed with the knowledge of how to play on easymode, I will likely go back and finish the game. It seems like a game that if you enter with sufficiently low expectations, it can meet them. If, say, you just played through the story of Spec Ops: The Line (which was AMAZING, BTW), and need something less heavy, something mindless to entertain you for a bit, this can do that. That said, if you are expecting “good”, you will be disappointed, and while I can justify finishing a game I already purchased, I really can’t recommend buying it yourself.

Adjusted final score: two out of ten.