From the Youtube - Homefront Impressions SPOILERS
By RelentlessKnight 3 Comments
Like what I started with my preview impressions of Dragon Age II from the Quick Look Road Show interviewed by Brad. I decided to watch a series of walkthroughs in Youtube due to the fact that the game may not be worth buying or is just interested on watching it rather than playing. One of the first games I fully watched to completion is Homefront.
Homefront was one of my anticipated games of this year because of it being close to Red Dawn (my favourite movie also), the amount of advertising and again expecting so much to be like Freedom Fighters. In the end, after reading up some reviews and comments regarding the game, it was truly a disappointment and a huge flaw of having advertisements being the main selling point rather than fixing the gameplay and to less derivative in the shadows of Modern Warfare 2.
John Milius, the writer of Red Dawn and Clear and Present Danger also wrote Homefront, applying much of the anti-communist and patriotism into this game. Which in fact the script in the game hits the right note of Korean/Commies invaded the US and you're one of the resistance fighters in some small town fighting against it. He also provided a sense of emotion that compensate for so much stereotypes. Such as Connor who is supposedly the stereotypical segregant in a war - I just hate learning his no-nonsense attitude and love the fact that they finally dies at the end. It's so obvious that the annoying, irritating guy dies at the end to sacrifice himself but the other cliche is also a black guy being the first to die, such as Boone who was chained on a swing after Koreans find out your hideout for retaliation of storming the Tigerdirect facility and destroying a tanker.
The AI in the game is garbage and horrible, watching the walkthrough it seems that the AI sometimes freezes and doesn't to some kind of action like knocking down a shelf to open a door, or just freezing until some guy walks to them and wait for a few seconds to do the next scene. It was pretty irritating to see in 2011, AI has not been changed so much and just for a single door to unlock, you just have to wait until the guy goes into position and opens the door. Sometimes it applies to other FPSs, I want a game that you don't have to wait for your fucking NPC to open the door for you, you can do it yourself or walk to the objective and it will trigger. This is one of the biggest flaw in this game.
The environments was nothing different, there are scenarios that provided some drama like in your hideout adding a human side before all of the destruction and some scenery looked great like going to California to seeing the Golden Gate Bridge but seeing advertisements of TigerDirect, Hooters and such made me feel like in Modern Warfare 2. But the fact that the game isn't better than Modern Warfare 2 just made me want to play those missions again in that game rather than watching the aggravating AI on both sides just pisses me off.
The gameplay is derivative but with a twist, during missions like storming the TigerDirect Korean base, you can control goliath, some kind of robotic war machine that a person must control that can shoot rockets to destroy vehicles and such. And through missions, there's often alot of vehicles to attack helicopters for you to use your goliath on. Ammo seem to be scarce from watching walkthroughs, it seems like one of the World at War missions in the last American campaign where you don't have much ammo and have to pick up the enemies' guns. There are a few gun-turrent missions either attached on a humvee that are fun like any Call of Duty game and one that you fly an attack helicopter escorting three tanker trucks to San Francisco to having UAVs raining hell again like in Call of Duty.
I also watched a portion of the multiplayer and there are killing strets like spawning attack robotic buggies to UAVs and it looked alright but remains the same as a game that has experience points and killing-skrees. I'm just disappointed of how heavily this game is advertised and not using the time to fully established the whole game, the AI was horrible and even the ending to this game was rushed and short and stupid.