E3 2010: THQ's stand at E3 was packed with games - we spent time with Homefront, Red Faction: Armageddon and Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium. Kinda...
Of all the fantastic stands, costumed characters, and flashy promotions that we endured at E3, one effort stands head and shoulders above the rest. We admit, we're biased here, but we're sure you'll understand. The stand in question belongs to THQ, and my love for them stems entirely from Relic's excellent efforts in bring the Warhammer 40,000 universe to vivid life.
At E3, this meant a fake Imperial Shrine, and three animatronic costumes of an Ork, a Chaos Space Marine, and an Ultramarine. Ah, my beloved Ultras...
THQ also had a whopping seventeen games on show, too, and we spent some times with the hardcore titles we can't wait to see.
HomefrontGiven that nearly every other shooter on show at E3 this year features military elites going into battle with state of the art hardware, Homefront's a refreshing take on future warfare. In Kaos Studios' game you're instead part of a civilian militia fighting an insurgency against a Korean military force occupying much of North America. It's brutal, very well thought out, and it's looking like it's going to have a killer single player campaign.
If the game's description sounds a little familiar, don't worry. One of the people who's been working with Kaos on the game's story is John Milius, the writer of Red Dawn (not to mention Apocalypse Now, Conan the Barbarian, and parts of Rome). He's brought a remarkable verisimilitude to the title, and to the grittiness of the setting. Check out the backstory trailer to the game:
In the first part of the live demo we were treated to at E3, we saw the game's main character, a rescued pilot, being shown around an insurgent hideout. It's essentially a part of a 'normal' suburban neighbourhood, but the subtle and not-so-subtle changes really reinforce Homefront's central tenet - the familiar made strange and new. There are tarpaulins everywhere to hide the place from satellite overpasses, so that it simply looks like another abandoned neighbourhood. People tell you about shutting the place down to avoid drawing attention from patrols, and every surface is either covered in maps and notes or given over to sustaining the place's hidden existence. There are recycling bins for everything, hanging plantpots and hydroponics gardens, and even play pens for the kids.
In the other words, it's a believable environment quite unlike anything else we've seen in gaming.
Of course, all that cool atmospheric stuff is great in a shooter, but what we want is action, and the second part of the demo delivered that in spades. By this stage in the game, you're helping the resistance mix it up with the occupying forces defending an important objective - which is a hardware store. It's an odd touch, but it rings true. It's a repository of stuff that any dictator worth their salt would never want to see fall in to enemy hands. And that's exactly why you want in.
Sadly, the scene is heavily scripted, so it was pretty light in true open gameplay. But it did show off the brutal violence of the game. As you set up a distraction to draw the guards together, members of the resistance launch a white phosphorous attack that pretty much sets everyone alight. It's horrifying, and in the demo the player decides to end their misery - which gets his own side very angry at him. This is definitely the hand of Milius.
The whole amateur scale of the attack is brought into sharp focus, too, when the second phosphorous strike goes wrong, and results in blue-on-blue casualties. What little combat we saw does like tight. The level also showed off one of the ground-vehicle drones in the game, a six wheeled breaching vehicle that autonomously follows the player.
Definitely want to see more of this one.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012