Homefront: the next great military shooter?

Engine Room: We catch up with the creators of THQ and Kaos Studio's next epic shooter - Homefront - for an exclusive preview and chat.

Recently we looked at a 2027 where the world was preparing for a transhuman revolution. This time it's a 2027 where North Korea has grown to become a South-East Asian powerhouse that tackles the USA head on... and wins. Homefront is no fight to hold back an invading force on US soil. Homefront is a game where North Korea has successfully occupied North America and you're story begins with an effort as an American insurgent trying to claw back some of your homeland.

Homefront comes from Kaos Studios straight out of New York City, the developer formerly known as Trauma Studios. Their pedigree for quality shooters is top notch, having delivered the popular Desert Combat mod for the original Battlefield 1942 and then going on to create Frontlines: Fuel of War for its new corporate masters, THQ.

Much more than a Frontlines sequel
Pedigree aside, on our visit to New York City Kaos studios was eager to promote its latest project as much more than some kind of simple evolution of Frontlines. Homefront is likely to arrive in the first half of 2011, three years after Frontlines hit the scene, and in that time Kaos feels its brought a lot more to the table.

The big revolution in the development of Homefront has been the involvement of a Hollywood legend, John Milius, to give the story behind the game a lot more power. Milius didn't just have a hand in the screenplays of classics such as Apocalypse Now, Dirty Harry, and Conan the Barbarian. He actually wrote the all-time classic line "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," amongst others. And most important in the context of Homefront, John Milius was the writer and director of Red Dawn, that classic '80s film where the Russians invade and occupy American soil and a group of high school kids, the Wolverines, step up as guerrilla fighters.

You won't be playing a high school kid, and our guerrillas won't be calling themselves the Wolverines (though we did see concept art of a high school turned internment camp with a nice 'Go Wolverines' homage). But the general story concept allows a talent like Milius to bring some substance to what in FPS games is so often just a wafer-thin layer of story.

A small, human story
There's a real point of difference in the way this story is set to unfold. We've mentioned guerrilla fighters above, but in this game that isn't meant in some military sense of the term. Homefront is not at all based around some team of über warriors armed to the teeth taking on an overwhelmingly strong occupying force, like you might find in umpteen other shooters. You're just a civilian trying to make a difference.

"It's not about saving the entire country," says David Votypka, Design Director at Kaos Studios. "It's really a small story about this small resistance squad."

Danny Bilson, Executive Vice President of Core Games, THQ, adds a little more detail to the story of the game.

"The objective is move some fuel from Colorado to San Francisco to fuel up some National Guard stuff that they've recovered to try to take back the Golden Gate Bridge. It's not military ra-ra. It's 'what would it be like just for people and civilians?' Our game has lots of civilians in it. We're trying to have consequences to violence."

"This is something John Milius brought to us," says Votypka. "To keep it a small, human story. That's really the goal in the campaign and what's really great about doing a game like this in a setting like this is that the resistance makes mistakes. In the demo you see a misfire. It's like, shit! We just burned some of our own guys! Things don't always go to plan. And in a lot of shooters based around the military you don't often get those twists and turns."

The campaign is a linear story, with a series of encounters where you will be pushed to the limit against an enemy with better numbers and tools than yours. And that means you're going to need to play dirty.