Homefront Review
After taking about 5 hours to finish the Homefront campaign, I feel like there was so much more story that could have been told but Kaos studio just did not have the time to create enough game to explain it all. The story was a well written one that has rarely been seen in video games, and especially in FPS games.
The game play of Homefront left a lot to be desired. I liked how the bullets you shot killed an enemy after only a few shots, giving it a more realistic feel which was the aim of the game. The movement of the game was a little heavy but not as heavy as the Killzone games, which left it in the middle of Call of Duty's fast movement and Killzone's heavy ones. At some points it felt fine but at others I felt like it was very robotic and threw me out of the immersion in the world that writer John Milius.
The graphics of the game are not the worst but are far from being acceptable when it is being released near graphical juggernauts like Crysis 2 and Killzone 3. At times you could see what the team at Kaos wanted to do but then you would look at something else and see what went wrong. Of course I don't expect Kaos studio to be able to pull of the level of detail of those games but what would really help the campaign and the execution of the story would have been if the characters and the environment were able to represent what the story was telling. Too many times during the game would I look at something in the environment and have to wait for its textures to load up. The characters animations and detail also took away from the emotion that the story was trying to deliver. During many keep points in the game where the story was looking for an emotional response from me, I would look at the characters and be immediately taken out of the moment because the characters movement and face looked like it was a step behind in its graphical execution.
The story of Homefront is the shining star of the game and without it, would make Homefront a terrible game rather than a good game. Kaos studio decided not to have an in house writer write the story for Homefront but rather reached outside of the industry and found John Milius who was a Hollywood screen writer that has written both Red Dawn and Apocalypse Now and the quality shows. The story was well written and brought the world to life. My only problem with the story is that there wasn't enough of it for me to care about the characters and the dialogue between the characters ranged from being incredible to mediocre. Overall though, I would love to see more studios look outside for their scripts because it makes for a different perspective on the video game.
Homefront has a good, if very short, campaign with a unique story that many shooters lack today but with mediocre game play i can only recommend this as a rental if only to see the awesome story.
