Find Homefront Xbox 360 at Amazon
69 of 81 people found the following review helpful. Here’s the campaign in a nutshell: A quick montage showing Korean unifying, US deteriorating, Korea taking over the world and occupying the US. Things are bad, very bad, Cut to you (a faceless person that has hardly any back story and barely talks) getting arrested by the Korean regime, you’re shown horrifying scenes as you’re taken away, members of the Resistance (who somehow know more about you than you know about yourself) free you, barely introduce themselves, throw you a gun, and tell you to just start shooting. All of this happens repeatedly with small scenes interspersed to try and make you feel emotion and hate the Koreans. It fails miserably because you’re never given much back story on anyone you’re fighting for, so when they die you have zero emotional attachment to them and you’re just left waiting for the next shootout. Cut to maybe 4 hours later (not the 5-10 hours they promised), a very abrupt ending occurs that leaves you confused because you expect more. The game starts off decently strong, but as it progresses and weakly tells a story you start to lose interest. Towards the end I didn’t care any more. I found myself trying to shoot my one teammate, Connor Morgan, who just swears constantly and yells at you. You have no real clue who he is, but he hates Koreans and loves mindless profanity. I think the biggest disappointment for the campaign is the possibility the game had. I often found myself wandering off, completely ignoring what my teammates said because I didn’t care at all, and trying to find the newspaper clippings because they had more story to them and informed you more. It’s supposedly written by John Milius who wrote Red Dawn and co-wrote Apocalypse Now. Either he just came up with basic plot ideas and not full dialogue or he was just completely uninspired. If he did write a full story I have trouble believing Kaos used it all considering how much this pales in comparison to the classics he is known for. The game had the perfect setting to build a great gut wrenching story, but it just doesn’t deliver. It’s like ordering a pizza and getting uncooked dough, sauce, and cheese. You have all the right ingredients, but not the finished product you paid for. With the multiplayer you fight for either the US military or the Korean army. The Resistance is not a part of this. The play is very familiar as in it’s setup pretty much just like Call of Duty. The gameplay is seemingly smoother than the campaign. The battle points currency is the coolest part of it which allows you to spend them in game and buy weapons. With my limited time spent on the multiplayer it seems like Call of Duty and Battlefield Bad Company 2 had a baby. That’s not necessarily a bad thing at all, but other than the battle points it doesn’t bring much new to the table. That doesn’t mean it can’t be enjoyable though. All in all the game just comes across as average and a letdown considering what they could have done. It’s certainly not worth $60. If I didn’t preorder at Best Buy and get the free Turtle Beach headset with it I would be a whole lot more upset. If I look at it as I paid $30 for the headset I only paid $30 for the game and I think I can get $30 worth of enjoyment from it. It’s still hard to shake how much promise this game had. 95 of 118 people found the following review helpful. As for the multiplayer, it wasn’t anything spectacular, but I did have fun playing it. It just doesn’t seem like its going to have the staying power of some of the other big release FPS games out today. The game comes with a code that unlocks the full multiplayer and its a one time use code. If you sell your game to a friend, you can purchase a new code through XBox Live. I’m not sure why they added this feature. It seems unnecessary. All in all, Homefront is a fun game that is certainly playable. It suffers from feeling to old and not really bringing anything new to the genre other than the storyline touching a little closer to home than most. If the game studio doesn’t get discouraged by the middle of the road feedback they’re getting on this game, there is definitely something to build upon in the future. 26 of 30 people found the following review helpful. The story is visceral and engaging but not for the faint of heart. Much of the imagery is disturbing and gruesome. What was there was pretty well done for an initial release, but there just wasn’t much there. I was just getting the feel for the game when the campaign/single player ended. I was in shock as it was only my second session with the game, meaning I finished it in under 5 hours. At this point I moved on to the online campaign. After selecting XBox Live I was prompted for to purchase or redeem an online code. What?! I just bought the game why would I need a code. Its not a PC, its a console, this is odd. But sure enough I found in my game case the required online access code. Without this code you can only play up to level 5 in multiplayer. So with a 5 hour campaign and a required code to play online this game is going to be a real bummer for anyone who buys it used. They will have to pay to be able to play it online. If there are multiple people in your house with different Live accounts, they will each have to buy their own code. This is the most absurd thing I have ever seen with a console game. With all the compromises that I deal with for console gaming, the one thing I expect is a level of trust that I am not stealing the game, but apparently that is now gone too. A couple of other pet peeves with this game. The game would have been even shorter if I had not had to sit and wait seemingly forever for the NPCs to open a door and walk through it, at times right after a checkpoint so that you get to enjoy it multiple times if you die. That is even if you know exactly where to go and what to do, you have to wait for the NPC to open the door and saunter through it, and then the next NPC to follow before you can then walk through the door. If you try to go earlier you just get in the way, are not allowed to proceed and slow the progress of the NPC, and ultimately your own progress. Another annoyance was points of infinite spawns in the game where if you attempted to pre-clear an area you would never finish, had I just moved up at first try the game would have been even shorter and I would have had more ammo. Finally, there is a sniper mission where you must wait for the NPC to identify the target, and finally give you the OK to fire. If you shoot anytime before the final OK, you will have to restart the mission. While this might be OK, it is not made clear until you drop the first target. |
Good idea, but you’re never given a reason to care.
A big let down