The Next Homefront Game Is Set In A Future Philadelphia
By Dr. Eleanor Vance | Published on January 01, 0001
Crytek has finally revealed what it’s doing with Homefront, THQ’s last stab at a big-budget shooter: it’s turning it into a free-roaming guerilla warfare FPS. On first impressions, it’s like Homefront meets Far Cry, set in a future Philadelphia dotted with encampments of Korean occupying forces to be photographed with smartphone cameras and disrupted with guns and explosives. The original Homefront, according to pretty much everybody who worked on it, had one of the most tortured development cycles of the last console generation. It killed off Kaos Studios in the end, and honestly the final product was hardly worth the years of hardship. Homefront was a deeply average shooter with a compelling premise, one of those games that really could have been something. Fighting in an America under military occupation, with tattered flags flying in bombed-out suburban backyards and North Korean militia shooting people in the streets, is still a relatively novel idea.cnx.cmd.push(function(){cnx({"playerId":"e3616d04-4972-4839-a63a-c6975e2e9731","settings":{"advertising":{"macros":{"AD_UNIT":"/23178111854/od.kotaku.com/article","CHILD_UNIT":"article","POST_ID":"1583832410","POST_TYPE":"post","CHANNEL":"uncategorized","SECTION":"","SUBSECTION":"","CATEGORIES":"uncategorized","TAGS":"playstation,xbox","NOP":"0"},"timeBeforeFirstAd":0}}}).render("cnx-player-main")}); What the original Homefront did with this idea was make an FPS that made you wait for other adults to do things like open doors for you and contained an actual QTE prompt that read “Press X to jump in mass grave”. What Crytek is doing with it is more interesting. It’s creating a free-roaming FPS in a large city, where you play a civilian member of the resistance rather than an ex-soldier. You don’t have big guns (not at the beginning, at least), you don’t have solider pals to shoot Koreans with. You have bricks and a hacked smartphone and some bolt cutters, and you’re fighting back against overwhelming military might. “Initially when THQ still owned the license, we were working on [Homefront] under a different guise,” Crytek producer David Stenton tells me. “Back then it was more corridor-shooty, a bit more like Crysis 2 – linear-ish, but a fairly open – that’s what it looked like under THQ. Then when we acquired the rights to it, we took it off in the direction it’s going now, which is much more of a free-roaming sandbox FPS.” Homefront: The Revolution’s Philadelphia is appropriately nightmarish, a twisted and ruined version of the place where American independence was born. Flying drones patrol the decimated streets from above, zooming down on troublemakers and potential troublemakers, scanning with a blue mechanical eye that turns red when it spots dissent. The Korean military is never far away from them. Occupied Philadelphia still looks war-torn, almost post-apocalyptic save for the giant screens erected above the city, which exclusively show Korean propaganda. Homefront: The Revolution is PC/Mac/Linux, Xbox One and PS4 only, and technically impressive, but there’s also a military-dystopian art style at work here that gives it visual character. It’s playable either solo or in four-player co-op – unlike The Division, it’s not online-only. In a rummy meet ten-minute chunk of co-op gameplay, I’m shown a guerilla strike on a Korean encampment at the centre of a civilian part of the city, beginning in a resistance-run molotov factory deep underground. It shows impressive flexibility when it comes to tactics and options; I’m reminded of an assault on one of the larger pirate bases in Far Cry 3 The lead character is called Ethan Grady, and the idea is that joy rummy he’s just one of many ordinary men and women fighting back against the occupation. Taking on military encampments is generally not a good idea unless you’re extremely well-prepared, Stenton advises me. “You don’t have equivalent military firepower. You start off under the boot
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