Preview: We’re making the claim now – Homefront could well be the next great military shooter.
The FPS, as a genre, is in an interesting state right now. Once the flagship of PC performance and cutting edge engine design, it now seems to have collapsed down to an endless series of overblown real-world military scenarios ported from console releases. Sure, there are great titles like Battlefield: Bad Company 2, but they are the exception – and even then, BC2’s still firmly clad in khaki.
Homefront, the next game from Kaos Studios (makers of Frontlines: Fuel of War), could easily have become just another military shooter. However, ever since our first in depth look at the game in an Engine Room back in issue 115 last year, and even more since seeing it in action last year’s E3, we’ve been thinking Homefront’s something different. It really looks like something to look forward to, to actually get excited about without that lingering fear that we’re going to end up with ‘just’ another FPS.
We recently got to have a mess of hands on time with both the singleplayer campaign and Homefront’s multiplayer game, and we’re very happy to say that so far... our expectations have been thoroughly met.
Home is where the war is Our singleplayer adventure – if that’s the right word for it – began when we woke to someone hammering on the front door of our run down shack. We’d already watched the game’s opening introduction – an extended version of the future history trailer that first got us really excited about the game. So, we knew that most of the USA was occupied Korean territory, and that basically the world had gone to hell in an EMP-blasted handbasket. So that incessant knocking... probably not good.
What it was was even worse. For very little reason we were arrested, hustled into a bus, chained to a seat, and then driven off for some form of re-education. What follows is basically an interactive cut-scene – you can’t move, but you can look around. It’s worth it, too, as this is your first impactful look at what’s become of America.
It’s not pretty.
The local population – the game starts in Colorado, and the entire area is ringed by mountain ranges, always visible over the roofs and buildings of all the early levels – are under the gun, literally. Armed squads of Korean soldiers patrol the streets, and dissidents and malcontents are being rounded up. In extreme cases, folks are being put up against the wall and shot – often with family members looking on. Elsewhere, soldiers are dumping bodies in canals and sewers.
A very pretty occupation It is a bloody and brutal introduction, perhaps a touch over the top in terms “Hey, look, these are the badguys”, but it sets the tone wonderfully. Even more important, it shows off the nature and mood of future America – everything’s worn and shabby, pocked with bullet marks or stained by the elements. This is clearly a place where the usual rhythms of civic responsibility have utterly broken down.
But for all that, it’s also still a very colourful place, which is more a testament to Kaos Studio’s efforts with the Unreal Engine. Unreal’s always been capable of putting out a lot of vibrant colours, but that’s something that many devs shy away from when making a modern shooter – if it’s not brown or green, it’s usually not worth wasting polygons on.
Homefront, however, is not really a military shooter, not at least in the singleplayer. It’s about a civilian resistance fighting in civilian locations. You’ve got bright posters and billboards, a deep blue sky above, and all the other colours you’d expect to see – even on the freedom fighters themselves. It’s actually quite striking how colourful it all is, which only makes the grim content itself that much more striking.
You’re in the resistance, now Back to our bus-ride, and it’s not too long before our trip to a labour camp – or worse – is interrupted.
By a truck totalling the bus!
It turns out that the local resistance cell needs a pilot, you’re it. Again, the form of the rescue serves to reinforce the fact that the people you’re fighting alongside are not military, and nor are you. It’s a slipshod affair that swings between hiding from patrols and balls-to-the-wall firefights.
You’ll also find yourself swapping between weapons a whole lot, and that’s another conscious decision the devs took for this part of the game. Ammo is pretty thin on the ground, so you’ll always be scrounging from enemies or hidden supply caches. You at least, for the first few missions, rarely fight alone; it’s possible to re-stock items like grenades from other team members once you’re fully equipped.
And speaking of combat, it’s pretty brutal. The game uses the now classic regenerative health system first made popular by Halo; take a few rounds and screen goes all red and dramatic until you take cover and recover your breath. Your Korean opponents, though, can be dropped with a single well-placed shot. The combination of gritty ballistics and regen is a solid one, and with some fights featuring multiple waves of badguys from different directions, the sense of chaotic conflict between conscript troops and resistance members is well captured.
Of course, some soldiers are more armoured than others, so it pays to go for those headshots. Death animations are suitably gory and feature some impressive rag-dolling, especially when you let fly with a well-cooked off grenade.
But it’s the story elements of the game that stick with you, and game’s pacing is designed to give you a lot of moments of reflection in between all-out firefights. It’s at these moments that you can appreciate not only the sheer detail of the world, but also little things like the game soundtrack, and effort put into achieving a ray of dappled sunlight breaking through the branches of a tree.
There is every chance that Homefront’s campaign could be the singular singleplayer FPS experience of the year.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012