Homefront is a famously mediocre Call of Duty Clone from 2011. I know this. I’ve known it since the game was released and the buzz was almost entirely negative. I knew this in late 2011 when I apparently ordered the game off Amazon for $20, which seems like an outrageous amount to have spent. I knew this when I popped the disc last night and started playing through the game. Now, having finished it, I still know it. Homefront is bad in all the ways people said it was. It’s boring, predictable, short, a little clunky, ugly in graphics and story, and made with production values that aren’t good enough to be impressive or shoddy enough to be interesting. It’s a generic product that does not come close to the standards of the games it’s trying to copy. It is to Call of Duty what Baron Von Chockster is to Count Chocula. It’s a pair of $15 sneakers with the Nykey Swish on the side. It has big McDowell’s energy, for those of you old enough to remember Coming to America.

The game starts with a reasonably competent blend of real news footage, fake live action material, and CG. It goes through an alternate history where Kim Jong Un takes control of North Korea after the death of his father (an event that had not happened yet when the game was released) and America tears itself apart through a series of foreign wars and domestic disasters, including a pandemic. Given where we are right now in 2020 this alternate history is a bit jarring and depressing, even if the idea of North Korea, a country so dysfunctional it has basically no International trade right now, taking over even a weakened and humbled United States is beyond absurd. Of course North Korea is a stand in for China here, which is kind of perfect because even the enemies in this game are off brand.

After the intro cinematic you are thrust into the boots of a generic ex-military pilot with no personality or characteristics. He’s quickly abducted from his apartment by an angry Korean military guy spouting a bunch of propaganda and put on a prison bus where another prisoner yammers at him for a bit before freedom fighters crash a car into it and he’s freed in a daring rescue that starts with you staring at a giant sign for White Castle. The White Castle sign is, by far, the most interesting character in this opening chapter, though you are exposed to significant brutality in the streets during the bus ride, including a crying child running to the corpses of its parents who have just been summarily executed and a nice splotch of someone’s blood on the bus window. You will later get to go into a White Castle to fight North Koreans and also a TigerDirect store. Going to Hooters is optional, but there’s a collectable inside. That is not a joke.

Homefront is a game that revels in ugliness. Shooters of the era were frequently criticized for using a color palette that consisted of brown and grey with a little bit of green, and Homefront is guilty of that, but it also avoids putting the player in interesting or impressive environments. Modern Warfare 2, a game with a similar premise that tried to shock the player with the image of tanks rolling through an American suburb, also offered a globe trotting adventure that took you from Brazilian Favelas to the frozen depths of Russia. Homefront just shuttles you through the wreckage of the ‘burbs, past endless shot up houses and piles of debris. Later you go through a farm strewn with wreckage and then to a big finale on the Golden Gate Bridge that is probably the game’s best level. The environments are not exciting, they’re mostly just depressing, and while it could work to establish atmosphere in a game with characters you cared about or an interesting story this is not that game. Instead it’s just a bunch of ugly samey environments you travel through while shouty McWhiteguy screams at you, and inspiring Black leader guy tries to inspire. At the beginning of the second chapter you’re in a makeshift base in someone’s back yard. Later you go into a labor camp on a baseball field, where the game’s famous “hide in a mass grave” scene plays out, to no emotional effect. None of this is new. The TigerDirect store catches on fire at one point and that’s as close as the game gets to a set piece. I will give them credit for the fact that most of the civilians you meet hate you and want you to just stop making trouble for them, but having Shouty McWhiteguy tell a 10 year old to piss off when he begs for food seems a bit over the top.

After your bus crash and rescue, you’re escorted by three freedom fighters through one of these burning suburb while various Korean soldiers mill about and occasionally shoot at you, while staying conveniently still enough for you to draw a bead on them or throw a grenade into a clump of them or whatever. Homefront is sort of a mix between FPS and cover shooter. If you try to run and gun you will run and die, and the game instead wants you to pop into the open and kill a few dudes before going back into hiding, like in third person shooters of the time. The guns are very generic. The shooting feels okay but not as smooth as the contemporary Call of Duty games. Enemy AI is just slightly better than braindead You can go prone if you want to. There are grenades. Lots of grenades. The indicator of an enemy grenade is kind of confusing and it’s hard to know where you need to escape to before you get blown up. The game definitely suffers from “who is shooting me and from where?” syndrome, which can make certain sequences where you’re surrounded by enemies pretty frustrating. Your character is very fragile and it’s easy to die without knowing what happened, but that’s pretty standard for the genre at this time.

Occasionally Homefront tries to mix things up by giving you something slightly different to do. Use some C4 to blow up an enemy APC. Use a targeting system to send a weird autonomous vehicle with rockets after some enemy vehicles. There are turret sequences. There’s an incredibly boring stealth sequence where you have a silenced sniper rifle and take out the targets when the giant arrows over their heads change from “wait” to “eliminate.” There are text based collectables that flesh out the events prior to the occupation through some very boring faux newspapers. Standard FPS variety stuff. It’s a little odd that your companions insist you do all these things even though they’re resistance soldiers and you’re just a pilot, but such is the burden of the protagonist in an early 2010s FPS game. At least they do pitch in from time to time by actually killing some enemies, which is sweet of them.

The 6^th level (out of a total of 7) consists entirely of a mission where your pilot guy actually gets to fly a helicopter. This section shoddy in a lot of ways, including being touchy about how far you get from the convoy you’re guarding, having lousy controls for increasing and decreasing altitude, and having laughably bad PS2-quality animations when your compatriots leap out of the chopper to hijack the trucks. Despite these issues the core control is pretty responsive and there’s a decent amount of arcadey fun to be had maneuvering the chopper around in the first person perspective and raining rockets and bullets down on the ant-sized troops and vehicles below, and I’d even go so far as to say that it’s one of the better vehicle sections I’ve played in a military FPS. In a way this level encapsulates much of what Homefront is. Many parts of it are pleasant enough to play, but it never reaches the heights of a big budget thrill ride and it’s incredibly short. Devoting an entire 7^th to the game to this short chopper section seems an odd development priority when the game desperately needed more content.

Homefront is not an aggressively bad game. It looks okay for a 360 game, though it has extreme screen tearing. The sound quality is fine. Voice acting is not notably bad, even if the script seems to have been written by someone with all the creativity and ambition of a piece of wet cardboard. Checkpointing is fair. The soundtrack is actually quite good for a military shooter, even if the sound mix is sometimes overly aggressive. I might go so far as to say that the soundtrack is the game’s strongest element, which is a weird thing to say about a military shooter. The licensed music is nothing special but the original compositions feel like they would be at home in a Hollywood war movie or…a better video game. Homefront is the kind of game I would normally listen to a podcast while playing, but I didn’t because I liked the music so much. It was consistently surprising and impressive.

The Xbox 360 actually had a lot of exciting and creative shooters. In addition to the big budget spectacle of the Call of Duty series, it also featured games like Bioshock, 2006’s Prey, 4 Halo games (if you count ODST), Singularity, The Darkness I and II, Borderlands, Bulletstorm, and a bunch of other fun stuff. Those games all had interesting weapons, appealing environments, and better stories. Call of Duty was and remains a sales phenomenon, which is why so many companies tried to copy it, but there really was no market need for third tier shooters on a system that had so many of them. Zool for the Atari Jaguar is fondly remembered by some because it was kind of a competent platformer on a system with very few good games. If you’d put it on the Super Nintendo nobody would have liked it. Homefront on the 360 is Zool on the Super Nintendo.

So why did I buy it? I have no excuse for plonking down $20 for this game in 2011. I like collecting games and I was kind of interested in these kinds of ill-conceived generic shooters at the time, but $20 is too much to pay for a game I knew was bad. I also played both Medal of Honor games on the 360, which means that I have now played as many bad Call of Duty clones on that system as I did actual Call of Duty games. Sometimes these forgotten misfires are more interesting than the polished gems. Sometimes they’re Homefront. I picked this up this week because I was in a bad mood and just wanted a game that would let me turn my brain off and shoot stuff in a linear forward crawl. This game did that fine, I guess, but I have a bunch of COD games I could have played instead. I was also curious about the decline and fall of THQ, which put a lot of money into this thing in the hopes that it would be a big hit. I can’t imagine why anyone thought that would happen.

These are the types of games that get lost to history. Homefront is destined to be remembered because it played a significant role in taking down a major publisher (though it was not the primary cause) and because of its particularly stupid plot and incredible poor taste with the mass grave scene, but nobody is playing it. The online mode, which was apparently respectable, is of course completely offline at this point.

Homefront reminds me of a TV movie. It’s a disposable pale imitation of a better thing. Not necessarily an unpleasant way to pass the time, but utterly inessential. The big difference between Homefront and an actual TV movie is price. TV movies are either free or provided as part of a subscription. $60 for a mediocre 4 hour campaign and a multiplayer that was competent but underpopulated and done better in other places was just absurd. It’s on sale right now on Steam for $4, which sounds about right, and if it ever hits Game Pass (though it’s not backwards compatible so it seems unlikely) it is arguably worth downloading if you find yourself in the mood for something short and workmanlike. There are still lots of bad games being made, of course, but these days very few as downright unambitious as Homefront are sold for anywhere near its price. In that way it reflects an aspect of the prior generation that is definitely not missed and deserves to be forgotten.