Homefront: The Revolution review

^{[Reviewed on PS4]}

Here you are, ostensibly a new recruit into the desperate fight to retake America, and yet you’re able to glide through the game’s missions, sidequests and challenges with ease, washing through occupied Philadelphia like a biblical flood. When you arrive, the whole city is in North Korean hands. After a single hour of play, you’ve destroyed countless enemy installations and reclaimed entire neighbourhoods. You start to question how the occupation ever gained a foothold in the first place.

Homefront: The Revolution suffers from inconsistency of tone. Never do you feel like part of a movement, a groundswell or a Resistance. In Homefront: The Revolution, you’re a lone hero, capable of toppling entire platoons of enemy forces single-handed. Myriad tools are at your disposal. You have customisable weapons, sophisticated gadgets and a mobile phone that can scan enemies and automatically gather intelligence.

Conversely, the occupiers are ill-prepared and perpetually weak. Rather than the underdog, forced to use hit and run ambushes and guerrilla tactics, you feel like Captain Price, Soap and Ghost rolled into one, armed with weapons technology that easily overpowers an inferior force. Gunfights sound great and Homefront manages several of the shooter basics, like decent blood effects and death physics and a simple, credible cover system. But you may as well be playing Far Cry, Just Cause or Skyrim. You are the solo, unfailing saviour of the world – Homefront’s supporting characters stop just short of calling you “the Chosen One.”

That inconsistency is reflected in Homefront’s level design. Philadelphia is impressively modelled and thanks to the CryEngine’s superlative lighting effects looks wonderful at night. But it’s a painfully contrived world, so filled with assignments, missions and general stuff for you to do that it can only feel artificial. Again, you never get the sense of an occupation, or a downtrodden population fighting for freedom. For Homefront to work, the city needs to feel worth fighting for, as if something has been lost – or is being destroyed – due to the invaders.

But this Philadelphia is essentially a playground, expressly and noticeably designed for gun fights and exploration. Its streets are littered with flashing icons and collectible junk. Its buildings are plastic, functional places, serving only as hubs for buying weapons and choosing jobs. And the people are robotic. While the recurring Resistance characters recite clichéd, expository dialogue, the general population either stands idle or acts as a mere component to one of your missions.

They are hostages, they are prisoners, they are a collective mind that you must arouse into rebellion by completing X number of sidequests, but the civilians of Philly never feel like people. Everything in Homefront – the sense of progression and agency, the presumed desire for content – is designed around second-guessing what the players might want. Some might call this efficient videogame design. But when attrition, disempowerment and struggle are Homefront’s supposed narrative themes, the gold standards of open-world game-making no longer apply. On the contrary, they are jarringly out of place.

Undeniably, Homefront has its moments. Even more impressive is that they often happen organically – if the overarching levels are marred by uneven writing, the comparatively unscripted act of roaming Philadelphia often leads to exciting vignettes. Turning a corner and walking headlong into an NK patrol creates a perfectly unpredictable and scrappy gunfight, as everybody fumbles for their pistols and tries to get to cover. Occasionally, you’ll find a lone NK trooper who’s been separated from his squad. Picking him off with a single rifle round, which echoes down the street, then leaving his body stranded in the middle of the road feels appropriately grubby.

If Homefront is trying to be shocking (and judging by its opening cutscene, it’s trying hard) then moments like these are what really make you truly feel it. The game, at its best, is relentlessly bleak, filled with swift, random acts of violence amongst dirty, destroyed buildings. It’s only when it pushes hard that Homefront falls flat. The sequences where – heaven forfend – the Resistance commits atrocities, sometimes against its own people, are designed to lend ambiguity and high drama to the game’s otherwise rote story. But they’re ham-fisted and obvious: when the Resistance’s doctor admonishes you over the civilian casualties your war is causing, Homefront may as well prompt “Press X to self-doubt”.

Surprisingly – considering how multiplayer shooters are normally a rat race to see which individual can get the most points and unlock the most abilities – Homefront’s narrative conceits play strongest when you team up with friends. As a squad of four, you co-operate to conquer various mini-missions, capturing strongholds, reclaiming territory, etc. Here, you actually feel like you’re fighting as part of a group. If Homefront struggles to create a sense of community in its campaign, it’s easy to imagine that you and three friends, should you play long enough, will form a working dynamic with one person handling demolitions, one doing crowd control, one sniping and one acting as healer. It’s a smart move by Dambuster. Very easily the studio could have cast one team as Resistance, the other as North Korea and  created a typical multiplayer game.

There are dozens of reasons to like Homefront: The Revolution. It has technical problems – slowed frame-rate, texture pop-in – but they strangely add to the game’s dirty, tired aesthetic. Similarly, the abortive, occasionally messy gunfights feel appropriately amateur. Though the guns themselves are lifted from COD and Battlefield, actually using them feels suitably awkward. But still, Homefront’s masses of open-world content and staid narrative drag it down. It’s an overburdened, graceless game struggling to tell a story that requires a defter approach.