Homefront

Very good game-with a rather interesting war conflict

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Just rolled credits on this because I wanted to play a generic, short shooter. And that's probably the nicest way to put it. It's a basic first person shooter from 2011 with mechanics to match. You get to shoot a bunch of bad dudes in a variety of reasonably well-rendered contemporary environments. Nothing too special. However, it's absolutely wild how much of a time capsule it is. For starters, the game is short. Really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ short. It clocked in at under 4 hours according to my time on Steam, and that includes a bunch of times I had to replay the same sections over and over due to missed quick time events (I'll get onto those later)... you could look at this as a positive in that you can fire through it in a single sitting. I also don't know how much better it would be if it were any longer. From a game development perspective, it's fascinating to revisit this era of ultra-scripted campaigns, where you're shoved from set piece to set piece, with very specific actions required to progress (including an abundance of absolutely miserable QTE's), and a tacked-on multiplayer that nobody in their right mind is going to touch after launch. It really does feel like the last gasp of that type of shooter. You can feel what they were aiming for, but everything is so condensed (probably because of the super short run time) that nothing gets room to breathe. No narrative weight builds up, as characters flip-flop from compassionate to full-on "♥♥♥♥ the Norks" in what feels like seconds. And yes, hilariously, "Norks" is their in-universe slur for North Koreans... I guess they didn't check in with any Brits. And the game tries really hard to sell you on the cruelty of the Korean occupiers, but it lands with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Feeling a hop skip and a jump from outright racism. It's so heavy-handed it starts to feel like self-parody; I kept waiting for a twist or some kind of subversion, but nah, it's just clumsy. Big propaganda vibes from this one for sure. By the end, I honestly wasn't sure what I was supposed to be fighting for. The goals felt muddy, and I never felt any real sense of victory or progress. I have to say, the voice cast are acting their little hearts out. You can tell there's effort here, and there's a sense that the team wanted to do something meaningful with the narrative. There's even a specific additional call out in the credits to the writer of this piece. But it just falls flat, much like the campaign itself. Like the narrative script the gameplay script also lacks any subtlety. Not only did I run into frequent bugs and broken sequences, but even when things worked, you could feel every invisible trigger and railroading event. Instead of a guiding hand, it's like a giant pendulum swinging behind you, smashing you onto the "right" path. There were far too many of those annoying moments where you're trying to navigate around scripted characters and there collision is popping all over the place forcing you to go stand in a corner and wait your turn. Speaking of which; collision and invisible walls are everywhere. Half the time I was fighting the environment as much as the enemies, either by getting caught on geometry, running face-first into invisible walls ever-so-slightly off the critical path or being unable to hit an enemy because the collision mesh on some cover doesn't remotely represent the art mesh. It's all rather sloppy and frustrating. I don't especially like to dunk on a game like this, but I can’t say that Homefront is especially fun to play in 2025. It's an interesting piece of history for sure; a relic from a time of over-scripted, over-produced shooters that have (thankfully) gone out of style. If nothing else, it's a reminder of how much the genre (and expectations) have changed. ...oh and the PC port is a little raw (another staple of the era)!

Tried all mentioned fixes this game is toast just plain locks up

Homefront is a pretty unoffensive shooter. It feels like a Call of Duty clone that many companies were trying to release in the early 2010s, but it has a *more* original story which gets some brownie points, in my opinion. Unfortunately, I just don't think the game is very good - everything is just pretty average about the game, and so I can't recommend it. I always find it funny how somehow this game got a sequel 5 years later when no one was expecting it (at least I wasn't) 4/10

"Oh wow, $2 for 4 hours of comfy commie-killing kino? What could go wrong?" As a sucker for 7th gen shooters, I really thought this would be a nostalgic fun time. Nothing outstanding, but at least enjoyable, and I'd at least be prepared for Homefront Revolution, a far better-received game. But man, this game pretty much summed up all the NEGATIVES of 7th gen shooters I wished remained forgotten. >Lazy PC port. Game has UNPLAYABLE levels of freezing and hitches if you change ANY of the graphics settings without restarting the game afterwards. And even WHEN you restart, you'll still get enough stuttering here and there during more hectic firefights that it can actually throw off your aim. Trust me, I have a Ryzen 3700X3D and an RTX 3080. My PC was handling this game at 144fps without even getting warm, but nevertheless, it'll stutter, and you WILL miss shots because of it. >Controller support-but-not-really. Despite having controller support listed on the store page, the game doesn't show the correct button prompts for the controller buttons (i.e. "Press BUTTON 3 to reload" when they actually mean the X button). So have fun dying to missiles because the flares are tied to "BUTTON 1", and you were busy messing around trying to figure out which one that was. Also, there's no aim assist, so trying to use a controller for this game is a pain in general. >HYPER-linearity. I've been marathoning the CoD games, so I'm well-versed in how shooters of this time were supposed to feel, and man, in those games, I RARELY felt like I was getting railroaded, even when I actually was. The CoD derivatives, however, aren't so good at hiding it. There are so many visible AND invisible walls, all creating a map that feels more like a bunch of hallways and shooting galleries than a suburban neighborhood people used to live in. Not only can you never branch off the railroad, you can't even choose what SPEED to go through the railroad. Like all CoD clone campaigns, it features closed doors that serve SOLELY to stall you so your NPC teammates can catch up and open the door FOR you, because the devs made you Silent McSelfinsertman, a homunculus so stupid that he cannot even figure out how to use a doorknob by himself, and so autistic that when he gets blown off a bridge and drops to the lower level, everyone on the radio thinks he's dead, because he's too socially awkward to just radio in and tell everyone he's alive. THAT is what the devs think of the average FPS fan. >One giant order-taking simulator. At least when CoD NPCs give you orders, it's to do cool stuff, like "Ramirez, defend Burgertown!", or "Ramirez, rain fire on the AC-130!" Meanwhile, in Homefront, it's "Jacobs, instead of shooting, use your binoculars to tell the automated tank where to shoot!" or "Jacobs, kill these two snipers out of the 20 guys shooting at us, otherwise they'll keep spawning forever and we can't advance!" Where it REALLY pissed me off was during this one sniping section where it said "Kill the MARKED TARGETS only", which I said okay, sure, I can do that. Connor tells me to shoot one guy, only to quickly change his mind saying "Oh crap, there's a guy getting close to me". Hearing the urgency in his voice, I immediately looked in his direction and shot the guard... only to get a game over. Because not only can you ONLY kill the marked targets in this section, but you're also not allowed to kill them UNTIL the NPCs give you permission to. There's no stated reason why you shouldn't kill them the moment you have a shot; most of them aren't moving outside of their guard posts. You're just arbitrarily told that you can't shoot them until dommy daddy Connor takes the metaphorical chastity cage off of your sniper barrel. Even CoD gives you a LITTLE more freedom than this; they'll at least tell you "wait until no one's looking before you shoot", not "wait until the WAIT icon changes to an ELIMINATE icon before you shoot". So yeah, this whole campaign (and other bad FPS campaigns like Battlefield 3) is just 4 hours of being on the cuck coaster. If I wanted to play a Call of Duty campaign where due to the depletion of fossil fuels, America loses its military power and gets conquered by another nation that would realistically never have the ability to... first off I'd be owed two nickels, second off, I'd play CoD Ghosts, because at least CoD Ghosts has cool setpieces like an orbital railgun ripping apart the Earth's crust and causing earthquakes across California, instead of Homefront blowing up the Golden Gate Bridge, like we haven't seen THAT a hundred times over. Hopefully Revolution is better than this.

Pretty fun. It does show its age since the performance isn't amazing, but campaign is memorable and enjoyable even if its short