It’s not quite a revolution, but the new Homefront is a dab hand with a shapeshifting gun
Homefront: The Revolution has seen tough times, both within its alternate-history setting and without. It has survived the fall of the United States to a unified Korea – reinvented by the writers as a nation of Titanfall extras equipped with DNAlocked weapons. It has survived the bankruptcy of original publisher THQ. It has weathered the near-collapse of THQ’s successor, Crytek, with Koch Media swooping in to pluck the studio now known as Dambuster from the wreckage. But we’re not sure it’s going to survive the attentions of Dorothy the personal fitness trainer, custom character during our time with the game’s four-player co-op mode.
Dorothy’s key traits are as follows. First, she looks a bit like The Simpsons’ Hans Moleman. Second, she has more stamina than most characters thanks to her pre-war vocation (the options in co-op include stevedores who bleed out more slowly and exterminators who can make bombs from rat poison). Finally, her best friend is the Inferno Launcher, which spits incendiary shards in a wobbly arc, showing off The Revolution’s lighting systems to superb effect. Some may categorise the Inferno Launcher as a medium-range terrain denial weapon, but to Dorothy it’s suited to every scenario. Fistfights, say, or while exploring cellars, or whenever you’re feeling bored.
Thing is, the Inferno Launcher kinda is suited to every scenario. The Revolution’s secret is that while it casts you as a scruffy resistance fighter, cobbling together IEDs from scrap in an open-world city overrun by selfdriving tanks, it has all the rich customisation of its spiritual forebear the Crysis series. Indeed, it makes Crysis look positively lean. Aside from slapping on accessories such as suppressors and scopes during play, you can rip away a gun’s top half and replace it with a different set of components from the same category. Thus, an assault rifle can be turned into a sticky mine thrower, a basic sidearm into a gas-powered pistol, and an Inferno Launcher into a shotgun.
It’s just a fancy weapon-select on the surface, but being limited to three guns per category coupled with the often-crucial few seconds it takes to turn one into another does foster a more calculating approach. You can’t just carpet a position in fireballs, then transform your launcher into an SMG while you’re actually galloping into the flames. Not that Dorothy has ever made that mistake. Ho ho.
The co-op missions we sample – which exist independently of the campaign but take place in similarly open-ended urban environments – are a somewhat generic bunch, though livened up by the quirks of the arsenal. In the first we hunt down elite soldiers by first hacking a couple of radar stations hidden in apartments, then holding off a Korean People’s Army counterattack. After we locate our quarry there’s a brief, hectic bike race across the city to their patrol route, where we attempt to lie in ambush.
The Philadelphia of Homefront, albeit much reduced, hasn’t quite been bombed flat, and the ability to work your way up to a sniping spot during a clash is one of the game’s big, if riskier, thrills. The handling sits somewhere between Dying Light and Battlefield 3 – you can haul yourself onto roofs and vault low cover, but basic movement and sprinting are ponderous, and death is swift when taking fire on anything above normal difficulty.
Ammunition is also scarcer than in most shooters – you’ll need to loot corpses after most scuffles, particularly if you make a habit of shapeshifting your gear (naturally, ammo doesn’t transform along with the gun). All told, it’s a question of bloody trench warfare with occasional bouts of Far Cry-style flanking and athletics. And stupidity. At one point Dorothy wheel-plants a foe just as a friendly clips him with a Molotov cocktail. Have some of that, Evel Knievel.
The second mission, a series of wave defence battles, isn’t quite as memorable, but the third is a gripping jaunt into stealth territory. It’s also, unfortunately, the point at which Dorothy gets her hands on the Inferno Launcher. The objective is to infiltrate a base at night and make off with a couple of tanks, a feat we accomplish by sneaking through a sewage pipe and hitting the KPA in the rear.
From there, we manage to blow up the tanks we should be escorting a couple of times (see also: carpeting a position in fireballs). At long last, we secure the prize and set off through the ruins, Dorothy riding in the back of one tank with an LMG. It’s a potent blend of white-knuckle chaos and suspense. There are flashes of Gears of War, even, to how KPA reinforcements appear out of the night, catching our convoy from all angles like Locust emerging from their sink-holes.
We sense The Revolution’s longevity will depend not on how creatively you play, but on how creatively the KPA fight. Right now the opposition is made up of familiar faces – run-andgun stormtroopers, snipers who are given away by their laser sights, the aforesaid heavies, and various drones that can be temporarily recruited to your cause using electronic grenades. Mix all this together and you get the basis for some diverting systemdriven scraps, assisted by fairly mobile, aggressive AI, but there are no surprises worthy of a shooter in which every rifle is a minelayer in disguise.
This speaks to the larger issue with the new Homefront. The game has endured many cataclysms since reveal, but its greatest problem remains that it’s a decent yet (right now) inessential alternative to Far Cry, much as its predecessor was billed as a substitute for Call of Duty. Such comparisons have their uses for marketing, but only up to a point. The Revolution has the makings of an entertaining and substantial blockbuster, but also one that hits a little too close to home.