Let me start by saying this, when I bought this game, the guy at the counter saw my Walking Dead shirt, and suggested that I should read the comic series Fable, because it takes classic fables, and makes them "bloody and gory." This is not why I read the Walking Dead, nor is it why I do anything I do. Anyone who thinks gamers are addicted to seeing entrails get spewed all over the screen are mostly wrong, there are some gamers who delight in simulating human dismemberment, but they should seek therapy. The truth is, most people play violent games because those games also happen to have excellent story-telling, or interesting gameplay mechanics.
Which brings me effortlessly to Homefront. I pre-ordered it when a really nice gamestop employee told me it was going to combine everything that worked in Modern Warfare and Battlefield. But the best way I can describe it is completely influenced by ModFare, with only vehicles coming from battlefield. The controls are all the same as ModFare, the kinematics are the same as ModFare, it even does the same thing where your melee attack is a knife materializing from nowhere even though you're holding a seventy pound rocket launcher.
Not to say the game isn't good, to sum up the entire thing in one sentence; Red Dawn meets Call of Duty. If you have seen the movie and played said game, then you know that Homefront is worth checking out.
The story goes that in 2027, North Korea invades the United States. Most war games make the enemy some faceless PMC or a terrorist organization, but this game blatantly points a finger at Kim Jong-un, the son of the current dictator of North Korea. America loses the war, because the economy had taken a massive hit before the invasive, and the Korean occupation of America begins. You play as a pilot who was being taken to a labor camp, when the local resistance breaks him out, you then join a multicultural cast of characters in trying to get to San Francisco where what's left of the U.S. army is rallying.
The game goes to great lengths to get you angry, you see some disturbing imagery of soldiers doing horrible things to de-humanize the local population, and several times throughout the game you come upon a child's former bedroom or treehouse with drawings in it that all go something like "I love mommy and daddy, and being not in a labor camp and starving and being American and cute." It's like the game is trying to get you angry at communists, but the support characters do enough of that for you.
Like I said, gameplay is exactly like ModFare, but that's ok, because ModFare was a fantastic game, it's ok to copy something that worked in moderation.
Graphics take a bit of a hit, you know how in ModFare, you would sometimes stop and look at your gun, or the rock, and just say "Wow, I just got shot forty times for hesitating, but it was worth it because the graphics look like angels from heaven came down and rendered the environment themselves?" Well in Homefront, the graphics are good enough so you don't notice, but bad enough so you don't care.
Multiplayer is pretty cool, the matches are 32 person rounds and the maps are enormous, too enormous, I spent half of my multiplayer time running around looking for enemies and getting shot by snipers. In ModFare, you could always find the enemy, in Homefront, you need to do some looking.
If you've noticed that I'm compairing this game to ModFare a lot, you're right. I do it because to me, Homefront seems like an extension pack for ModFare chronicling a civilian's journey during the part where Russia invades America. So the game is un-original, that doesn't make it not good, all Boston songs sound the same, but you listen to them anyway. So I recommend Homefront to everyone who's ever played Modern Warefare, or been paranoid of communists and needs to take out some steam on North Korea's face.
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