Philadelphia Best

Glitches and wobbles aside, Homefront: The Revolution is an adequate shooter that features some interesting moments. It isn’t bad , but it isn’t good either. America was invaded by North Korea in the events leading up to the original 2011 Homefront . In this sequel, you play as Ethan Brady, part of a guerrilla resistance that is trying to take back Philadelphia from the Korean occupation. This occupation was achieved by North Korea adding backdoors into military and communications technology that America purchased in bulk, then using this to sabotage the country’s defenses and infrastructure. Benjamin Walker, apparently the centerpiece of this whole revolution, is captured in the beginning of the game, and you spend a lot of your time trying to get him back by going to neighborhoods where he isn’t and shooting enemies who have nothing to do with him. Through the campaign, things explode, plot twists happen, resistance is fomented, and it’s really hard to care. I found it tough to be interested in a plot I had little hand in. Brady is a silent protagonist who’s new to the movement. You’re not the hero, but you’re not a dramatically interesting antihero either. All of the game’s climactic moments are non-interactive. You ride in a tank while enemies fire at you, but you don’t fire back. You breach a much-touted area entirely in cinematics and then are praised for your bravery. While I don’t believe that games exist to make players feel powerful, there were cool weapons or pivotal battles that I watched in cutscenes or barely participated in. The game feels like a bunch of sidequests that are peripheral to whatever Benjamin Walker is up to. Advertisement Most of the campaign is spent running across the multiple zones of the game’s open world map. Red Zones are burnt-out urban areas where enemies will shoot you on sight. Yellow Zones are populated with neutral NPCs you can blend in with as you undertake guerilla strikes against North Korean strongholds. You can turn all of these areas friendly by capturing points or hacking into transceivers via a simple connect-the-lines minigame. Performing successful hacks or clearing all the enemies in an area converts them into bases of operation where you can resupply and recruit resistance members to fight alongside you. The bases also serve as save points, since Homefront: The Revolution doesn’t allow manual saving. Dying on a mission sends you back to the nearest base, which can mean a long trek back through the map if you haven’t turned enough areas friendly along the way. While getting sent back is frustrating and time-consuming, it’s a pleasure to move through the maps. Red Zones are visually indistinct, all greys and browns, but there are plenty of paths, places to hide, and motor bikes for faster travel. The game has an oddly unpredictable day-night cycle, allowing the cover of darkness to help you avoid patrols. I felt like a guerrilla fighter as I ran along fences, clambered through buildings, took out passing armored cars and soldiers, and then faded into the rubble. Even as I swore at how much progress I’d lose when I died, making my way through the Red Zones was engaging and occasionally pulse-pounding. One of the game’s Red Zones. Yellow Zones are differently enjoyable. They’re full of opportunities for small acts of sabotage: freeing prisoners, hacking television monitors, and tuning radios to broadcast resistance messages. These acts add to the accumulation of a “hearts and minds” score. Reach 100% and you can inspire the people to rebel, filling the town with resistance members who battle the North Korean occupiers so you can do your own thing. The several Yellow Zones in the game are visually distinct from each other. One is a burnt-out residential part of Philadelphia, while another was the clean, bureaucratic area where American collaborators with the invaders were housed. While “hearts and minds” missions dragged, especially when they were key to the plot, it certainly wasn’t due to the map. I often grew tired of the Yellow Zone missions, especially the “hearts and minds” ones, because they were somehow both maddeningly obtuse and drearily straightforward, made all the worse by the game’s many glitches. Homefront: The Revolution lacks a coherent visual language, instead filling the game with mixed signals and poor signposting. A door to a key safehouse late in the game, for instance, is designed just like every door you can’t open–except this one you can open. In my game, the door sometimes remembered its roots and refused to give me the prompt to open it. Items you can loot have a white sheen, but environmental debris sometimes has it too, meaning I quickly picked up the bad habit of spamming my E key at most everything. The game froze between missions, sometimes failed to count my “hearts and minds” score until I died, and often left completed…

Comments

Comments are disabled for this post.