Early in 2011 THQ released Homefront, a fictional first person shooter taken place 16 years into the future. New Korea is slowly taking over the world and has finally made it's way to American shores. You play the part of Jacobs, a resistance freedom fighter.
Homefront offers up some fresh ideas in the FPS genre. The biggest being the fashion in which the story is told. There are long breaks between section where you meet new people, talk and explore, these help tremendously to flesh the story out. Instead of fighting for a general cause, you meet the people you're fighting for. I find this way of story telling forces you to connect a lot more than finishing a level and simply viewing a cut scene which is the over done tradition of shooters the past 3 generations. That said, the story is involving and while you may not be into it immediately you do end up wanting to see where it goes by the end of the game. Which brings up my next point, the pacing in this game is perfect, you always feel like the next course of action is the right and logical one to take. You don't jump from a jungle level to an enemy base with the producers cheesing out saying "it's a flashback".
Graphics in Homefront are good, they're not ground breaking but they're not generic either. The environment was clearly designed by the story and fits. If you were to imagine this scenario playing out, this is exactly how you would envision it. During the last third of the game the story forces the scenery to change and when it does, it's like a breathe of fresh air from the trashy wasted urban.
Gameplay in Homefront is really a mixed bag, for every thing Homefront excels at, it is plagued by a problem. The first two thirds of the game are a direct Call of Duty rip off with the last third being a direct Medal of Honor rip off. One of the biggest issues I had was that your fellow resistance fighters constantly depend on you for everything "Jacobs do this, Jacobs do that, we'll stand here and do nothing". It often forces you to feel like you're a one man army, especially since your teammates AI is pretty worthless. The enemy AI however does shine, you'll get killed by peaking around corners and they'll try to flank you. When not confronted by smart bots it is usually because they are swarming you with numbers to make up for it. A brilliant aspect of the game is the variety in weapons and the utter lack of ammo. This forces you to constantly pick up weapons from KIA'd enemies and go through the entire arsenal instead of picking a favorite and sticking with it the whole game.
Homefront concludes in about 5 hours which personally I find to be a perfect length for this type of game. Overall it does have some issues such as enemies spawning behind you and a few of the guns are straight up inaccurate. It offers a fresh take on story telling and brings the visuals to match. Probably nobodies new favorite game but well worth playing through. 7.5/10
