Homefront: The Revolution (Xbox One)
When America finds itself a new enemy, you can expect the media to revel in having a new easy villain for their use, and while the United States has not yet really escalated its tense relationship with North Korea following the end of the Korean War, the rise of them as a potential threat in the 21st century put the thought in America’s heads they may soon be our enemies in a new war. The Homefront series hasn’t quite been so patient as to wait and see if North Korea will be a legitimate threat though, so in Homefront: The Revolution, the game alters history a little to make things work for their narrative.
In Homefront: The Revolution, it was North Korea that managed to lead technological innovation in the Information Age, managing to develop the smartphones and advanced military technology adopted by the rest of the world as it pushes to stay on the cutting edge. However, the technical advantage North Korea had over the U.S. lead to America accruing an enormous debt to that country, one they tried to call on but the U.S. didn’t have the cash to cover. This leads to North Korea activating a secret backdoor in all their products, America immediately being plunged backwards technologically and North Korea easily able to swoop in and start taking over. Now in the year 2029, the player takes on the role of a character named Ethan Brady who is part of the resistance efforts in Philadelphia. Taking an alternate history approach in game design has lead to titles like Wolfenstein II showing the interesting differences America might have if it had been conquered by an enemy, but sadly, Homefront: The Revolution doesn’t really take advantage of its concept in any way besides setting up some easy targets as the game’s main enemies. North Korea could very well be any generic dictatorship save their choice in language here, no form of culture bleeding occurring despite the new regime’s gradual integration as rulers, and Philadelphia itself might as well be any old city as well save the rare landmark that actually makes an appearance. While I have never been to the city myself, so much of the city has been swapped out for buildings that match the futuristic sci-fi side of the story or are completely reduced to unrecognizability by the conflict between the resistance and North Koreans. The only real integration seen is societal in that people who resist the North Koreans are poor off and collaborators are scorned but have more comfortable lives. It’s certainly clear the North Koreans are oppressive leaders who have no qualms about wiping out any opposition with extreme brutality, but this game would have likely been just the same if any other country had been selected for the role.
Ethan Brady is a bit of a flat protagonist as well, as he doesn’t speak, is never actually seen, and no actual reason is given for his participation in the resistance. The state of the world is an obvious enough reason of course, but the weight of the story is carried by his compatriots’ personalities and interaction. While there are cutscenes that show the resistance’s main members chatting and planning, the game also has tons of radio chatter you can listen in on, but it’s so frequent and comes in cluttered bursts of activity that it sort of blends together or is better off ignored as characters say the same things three different ways. So much of the story is really just about trying to make the resistance more effective, the player getting both freeform and scripted missions to complete towards that aim. Homefront: The Revolution is a first-person shooter, so you can expect those missions to involve a lot of gun fights, but it’s certainly not as simple as bouncing from one gun fight to another. The main cause for variation is because of the different kinds of zones, the player having to approach yellow zones of the city differently from red zones. Red zones are wide open areas where any time the player is seen they’re in danger and most enemies are better off shot down or run away from, these areas often being the bombed out warzones. Yellow zones operate differently though, as North Korean troops operate a bit more peacefully as they intermingle with citizens, so in these zones you can walk around safely so long as you don’t do so suspiciously, an emphasis on stealth present even though getting into a gunfight doesn’t really drastically make it different from fighting in the red zone.
While story missions will throw curated battles at you in any zone as well as other activities like sabotage or meeting new allies, Homefront: The Revolution also makes its areas open to explore and engage with between missions. The problem is, these optional objectives feel very similar or basic in both zones, and sometimes they are required, especially since the yellow zones will have a story mission that basically gates progress until you’ve done enough to pressure the North Koreans and inspire the local citizenry. Yellow zones have small optional tasks like disabling enemy communications, helping citizens who are being accosted by the police, activating radios to play resistance channels, and bombing enemy vehicles before ultimately taking on a police station that seems pretty similar in design across the yellow zones. Doing these sabotaging missions to earn the public’s love is a bit tedious though, the requirements high for the story mission and the actions themselves often about swift action after slowly hunting down the right place to do things. Red zones naturally have the heavier action inclination, the player able to take over sections of the city by forcing enemies out of certain areas they’ve held up in. Some of these zones are as simple as taking out all nearby soldiers and then activating a radio, but sometimes you might have to find the proper way to get a motorcycle to a generator to restore power or solve some puzzle involving how to access a certain area or finding all the items hidden in the building. These areas are staging points you’ll pop back at if you die and allow you to access resources like gun stores, so acquiring them can be helpful and will lessen the presence of the enemy in that zone. Since they’re much more optional than the yellow zone urging you to win the hearts and minds of people by filling up a percentage bar, red zones are the more rewarding side of the game, but having yellow does break things up from the constant hostility.
When you do get in a gunfight, you’ll find Homefront: The Revolution can get the basics of shooting down well, even making sure that enemies and you are both pretty capable shooters. You’ll need to find cover and approach foes intelligently since being out in the open will get you chewed up by bullets in no time, but your own guns can often take down a North Korean troop in one clean headshot or a few body shots. Health doesn’t recover gradually like in some of its contemporary shooters either, meaning you need health injections going into a battle to recover and some fights can get tense if you’re running low. There are some shock troops with armor that make your opposition tougher as well as sturdy enemy vehicles to worry about, your only real vehicle option being a motorcycle that only helps with navigation and not combat. Thankfully, you are still equipped to take down whatever you face so long as you don’t squander ammo. Most of the time, firefights do require good movement and good shooting, and that’s what can make a first-person shooter interesting and fun, but Homefront: The Revolution has a few things that keep it from sucking you into the moment. Enemy AI isn’t very good, meaning sometimes they might try to shoot you through walls or won’t approach you in an intelligent manner. Foes may have grenades but will choose to just rush towards you as you wait around a corner to blast anyone coming your way, and their movement limitations mean they can’t overcome the jumps your character can pull off to get to interesting vantage points the AI can’t target well. These moments aren’t so prevalent they break open the game’s difficulty, as there can be some cases where foes are so effective you’ll really need to act intelligently to overcome their numbers advantages, but there is a nifty feature where you can recruit resistance members to accompany you as you explore the city and help out in any firefights… if their own AI doesn’t lead to them getting lost or avoiding the conflict.
Homefront: The Revolution’s weapon options are both numerous and limited, oddly enough. The game locks you into always carrying a pistol, but you can also bring along an extra weapon like a machine gun or shotgun, the options opening up a little more as you make progress but you never really get beyond having three guns with you at one time. The layout and pace of many firefights certainly favors a long-range automatic, but having the other options would allow them to find situational usefulness, something the game technically gives you with its weapon customization options. As you collect money and resistance credit over the course of the game, weapon shops will let you add new features to your weapon, some allowing you to enhance it on a basic level like adding a scope or suppressor, but others can completely change how it functions. Rather than giving you a variety of weapons, the guns can be altered on the fly to switch to a new type, things like automatics becoming snipers or explosives as you swap on the fly in the middle of battle. That is conceptually the idea at least, as changing the gun’s function so drastically also takes a long time to do in a battle, and unless you’ve got a really good hiding spot, it often can’t really be justified to go from something broadly useful like the automatic to a sniper, especially since the automatic can be used a bit like a sniper if you just attach the right scope. While much of the customization makes the basics more interesting, it keeps you away from diversifying your fire type by making it slow and not worth the hassle, but at least the crafting works well with the explosives. So long as you got the right materials from scavenging, you can easily make new molotov cocktails or explosives when you need them, their customization even unlocking remote piloted versions and proximity adjustments to make them more useful than you might expect in a shoot out. While Homefront: The Revolution has many interesting ideas done awkwardly like its weapon changing, the explosives are done pretty well since they give you all the options without any of the rigamarole that would make those options unjustifiable.
Homefront: The Revolution is also a classic case of a lot to do but not having substance to all of it. Its multiplayer mode involves playing through special co-op missions but these just recontextualize the game areas a bit to challenge a squad instead of a single player. Perhaps the main problem with the multiplayer is actually it comes presumably after the single-player, wherein the optional content in the game’s open world soon begins to run together as it offers a lot of similar content if you want to truly do everything available. The optional nature of a lot of it outside of yellow zone requirements means that you can usually engage it as you wish, but the limits to weapon variety and mission approach do become more evident when the game just keeps throwing more and more similar objectives at you if you spend a lot of time doing the extra missions or multiplayer. More enemy types, less reused location designs, and having a bit more freedom with what you can do would allow things to stay fresh longer, but going too deep into the diversions will lose the appeal they hold when they’re starting off as interesting deviations from the normal mission design.
THE VERDICT: Homefront: The Revolution is a pretty typical resistance story set in the less typical but underutilized setting of a North Korean controlled United States, but much like its minimal exploration of its alternate history, most of what it does with its ideas aren’t really executed to their full effect. The shooting works well, taking over the sections of the red zones is rewarding and varied, and the explosives allow for some creativity in use, but the yellow zones take their gameplay shift and make it dull through being too repetitive and demanding, the weapons technically have an incredible amount of options but it can’t be accessed well enough for the player to bother with it, and enemy AI doesn’t always work well despite usually putting up the proper level of resistance to make its gunfights enjoyable and challenging. Homefront: The Revolution ends up having the benefits it needs to avoid being dull, but a lot of its extra ideas and activities don’t really improve upon the basics, and when they do, they’re held back by some flaw, leaving it a mixed package on the whole.
And so, I give Homefront: The Revolution for Xbox One…
An OKAY rating. Homefront: The Revolution fails to utilize a lot of its potential. The North Korean conquest of the U.S. feels generic, the weapon customization is hampered by its slowness, and a lot of the optional content blurs together due to similar construction. The gun fights can still exert the right amount of pressure to stay interesting and keep the plot moving, and they can carry the weight they need to during the optional objectives as well, but even they hit a few snags in design that means they can’t be relied on to carry the slack. Sometimes, just having really good shooting can cover up the issues in design, but Homefront: The Revolution takes a step back with every step forward when it comes to introducing something new.
More weapon freedom could open up the design of firefights a lot to allow things like more enemy types and strategies, but for what we got, taking back Philadelphia is still a decent time, it’s just hard not to notice how many of its interesting ideas don’t really enhance the experience as much as they should had they been implemented in a way that gels with the rest of the title.