Fired UP! HomeFront, 2011 Biggest Disappointment...So Far...

When games are hyped up, it is usually for good reasons. Games like Call of Duty, Halo, and others are hyped up a lot and sometimes over-hyped in terms of COD, but that is a different story. Homefront on the other hand, was hyped to the highest without any kind of merit. THQ after this release, again has failed to deliver a game for hardcore FPS gamers. In the past they've tried with games such as Frontlines: Fuel of War and Metro 2033. In this review, you will see exactly why.
Homefront is a game that has all the potential in the world. It has a great format for the multiplayer specifically, but fails to execute anything worthwhile. The multiplayer was crippled the very first day with servers being down and the matchmaking taking 10-15 minutes to find a match. Once in a match, the game was not bad at all...at first... I will give the game good merits for the battle points system and the fact that bullets actually hit your opponent and didn't go over peoples head(Looking at you COD). The multiplayer maps were well laid out and flowed well. The problem is just like many other games, your team mates do not know what to do. The game sort of fails at making things obvious for new players to play and understand what's going on and what they are suppose to do and how to properly manage and use the battle points. For the most part, when you do have a team that knows what to do, the game is quite enjoyable online. All in all the multiplayer for the game was actually pretty good, but it is held back by many other things that will be discussed very soon.

The single player for the game is suppose to be about the US being occupied by a United Korea. The framework was there to create a great story, but yet there are so many flaws in what Kaos Studios tried to do with the story. First, the story fails to give us a real sense on how and WHY any of this is happening. For starters, the story started VERY slow, and we do mean SLOW! During the first 4 missions, it seems that you spend more time walking around even slower that molasses talking with Conner and others(Don't get me started on Conner...OK I will later). The game tries really hard to tell a good story, but it fails on all "fronts". The voice acting is not the best ever, the story flow is just not there. Throughout 90% of the SP, you are either following Conner, rendezvous at this spot or go here or there. There is never any reason why you do any of the things you do in the single player at all. The game just says, do it and you go. The story did however get better when with reached the end of mission 5 when you where sniping off the top of a church and steal a helo and your character finally gets to put their pilot skills to use. The final two mission were pretty action backed and stellar. But when you get to the end, I actually wanted to play more because the actually got pretty good. But the end of the game came too soon and was really a bummer.

A lot of negative things for the game really drag it into the dirt and prevent it from being a really good game. For starters, I'll go ahead and say the graphics are not the best and some Xbox 1 games actually looked better. The voice acting was very simple and poorly executed. The character animations where poor and were not engaging to the player. And the story as I said before was a bore and didn't pickup until later missions. The multiplayer was great in concept, but ultimately failed with the poor server support and team mates not knowing how to use battle points.

Homefront was a game that had all kinds of potential, but Kaos Studios failed to package the game together as a true competitor to the likes of Battlefield and Call of Duty. The game did use elements from both games, but most of those elements were poorly executed and just didn't mesh well together. Maybe for Homefront 2, the developer will get all of their ideas, which most were great, and fine tune them and make the game have its own character and leave its legacy on the gaming communities. If Kaos studios is just going to use other ideas from other game properties and fail to make the most of them, then the future for Homefront 2 is very bleak.