Right off the bat, this is not an in-depth coverage review of Homefront: The Revolution with video and what-not. However, I will say that there are no spoilers for the story in this review.
Homefronts setting and premise
Homefront: The Revolution is set in an alternate timeline in the year 2029, four years into the North Korean occupation of the United States. The city of Philadelphia, once the birthplace of independence is now a heavily policed and oppressed environment, with civilians living in fear as the Korean People’s Army patrol multiple districts in the city. In the city, a rebellion is brewing, and the resistance grows stronger, being led by Jack Parrish, the leader of the Philadelphia cell, Dana Moore, resistance veteran, and newest member of the resistance, Ethan Brady.
Sounds too good to be true?
Never having played any of the previous Homefronts, that premise in itself would appeal to any FPS fan, more-so to myself being an experienced FPS gamer.
So I bit the bullet and put in my pre-order months in advance, even marked the damn release date in my calendar.
However, top reviewers, IGN, Gamespot and Trusted Reviews received early review copies of the game and seriously went to town on Homefront: The Revolution, they were relentless.
Hell, I would put money on the fact that Deepsilver are kicking themselves for launching the game in such a dire and unfished state. Homefront: The Revolution received abysmal reviews from both users and critics alike, receiving a top score of 54 via Metacritic.
Homefront: The Revolution – A Broken Game
It had huge game breaking bugs on launch, terrible loading times, texture popping, AI vanishing in and out in front of the player and consistent crashing and loading errors. It’s worth mentioning here that these issues were also persistent across all platforms, Xbox One, PS4 and PC, no system was safe!
In my case due to the poor reviews that were piling in a week before launch, I cancelled my order as I’m sure many others did and figured I would just pick it up cheaper pre-owned at a later date.
Hands on experience
Performance issues
Curiosity got the better in the end, and I picked it up a week or so later and found a 20+gb patch immediately that needed to be installed before I could even play the game.
Good news for me as I thought they must have fixed something for it to be that big, but I was wrong, so wrong…
The loading times were still abysmal even installed to my external high-speed SSD. Every time something significant happens the game just stops for 5-10 seconds, and this lasted even longer when installed on the internal drive.
Wait times aside there is nothing about this game that would make an experienced gamer want to keep coming back and play it.
Graphics
Graphically the textures appear muddy,clunky and dull; the whole thing seems to have the air of last gen about it?
Homefront: The Revolution had such an awful time in development woe, probably to the point where graphical fidelity became an oversight, like unfortunately many other features of the game.
Gameplay
The combat system is a narrow duck and fire system, leaving a linear path for progression in most gunfights, despite be touted as “open world game”. The AI is horrid, rigid and cumbersome and can easily be torn down even on
the hardest difficulty settings.
The customisation of the weapon system was perhaps the most innovative feature in the entire game. Woefully with such a small variety of weapon selection, it quickly lost its appeal.
Story
The story itself is bland and uninteresting; the character development is god awful and to boot the dialogues very cliche, like something out of a 90s throwback sitcom.
Homefront: The Revolution features three broken, beat up and even futuristic high-tech areas of the same city. These are broken down into zones in which you are tasked with inciting rebellion within each them, to wait for it… START A REVOLUTION!
Disparingly though each zone becomes a repetitious grind of fetch quests and destroy X object, these genuinely made me want to kill myself before too long.
Cinematics
It is however always interesting to see events unfold once the rebellion starts within these zones, but the best part here are the cinematics themselves, the player sadly isn’t part of the experience. Which is a shame as it is probably the one redeeming feature of the games entire storyline.
Final thoughts
All in all, guys, if you want to play this one wait for it to end up in the bargain pile at under £20, £15 I think is a fair price for this game and it won’t be long before it’s there!
Appreciate the recommendation. Will try it out.