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[Preview] HomeFront 2011[PC-PS3-XBOX]

Zeon®

By Zeon®
in Consoles General Discussion

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Zeon®

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Some Infos About The Game:

 

Homefront begins with players waking up in a shabby room as a radio alarm turns on. It's 2027 and players are in Denver, Colorado where the North Koreans control most of the West coast. One of the mantras for developer Kaos was to make familiar settings feel alien. Instead of having epic fights at the Empire State Building or on the front steps of the White House, Homefront will have you fighting through ruined suburbs, neighborhood schools, and strip malls filled with Hooters and Lumber Liquidators.

 

I got a trace of adolescent nostalgia as soon as the level began. I'm not married and don't have a family so my most immediate memories of suburbia come from childhood. It was a surprising and personal association. It was easy to see my own street where I had biked and tossed football when I look out the second story window. Then an armored North Korean transport rolled by. The dingy, patched walls reminded me of my own bedroom walls, thin enough to hear what everyone in the house was doing as soon as I woke. Now those walls were reverberating with the angry voices of North Korean soldiers pounding on the door.

 

On opening the door the Koreans stormed into the room and cuffed me for reasons that weren't clear--an eerie reminder of the constant and capricious terror that occupied people must always endure. The Koreans dragged me into a waiting bus where one other luckless American had been cuffed. The next few minutes consisted of a slow drive through downtown Denver, giving glances at the harsh Korean military in rough poses, interrogating civilians, and at one point executing a mother and father while their child is held back in tears. Gore splattered onto the window of the bus and visible chunks of bone and brain slowly moved down the glass as my fellow prisoner talked about rumors of resistance movements.

 

It's a traditional beginning for a first-person shooter, a long scripted trawl to set the atmosphere and context of what's to come, but it was effective. The sights were terrible and there was a sense of powerlessness in watching it all from a prison bus. After a few minutes, the bus came into an intersection and was suddenly rammed by another vehicle, tipping the whole thing over in a tumble. Two rebels entered the flipped bus, shot the Korean guards and freed me.

 

From here Homefront adhered to a traditional shooter model as I fought my way through the alleys of downtown and back into the suburban quarter where the rebels had their stronghold. One of the rebels tossed me a handgun and asksedme to shoot a pair of Korean soldiers in an alleyway. After I killed them, the rebel leader said I'm officially one of them now that I had Korean blood on my hands.

 

Kaos wanted the shooting elements of Homefront to be a contrast to the super soldier stories of Halo and Modern Warfare. Players are supposed to feel the overwhelming uncertainty of a regular guy not used to shooting weapons and not trained in military tactics. As the team explained this, I was looking forward to seeing how this theme would apply to the shooter mechanics. I was already thinking of wobbly aim to reproduce the bungling uncertainty of a civilian firing a machine gun. I wondered if there'd be any audio visual moments of shock or nausea in realizing I'd killed my first soldier. Would there be a more tactical approach to gunplay, used first as a way of clearing space, forcing enemies to retreat into cover rather than just headshoting one after another?

 

 

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The answer is no on all counts. The game's controls, movement speed, and enemy volume are pulled directly from the core of first-person shooter design. The camera moves quickly and easily and there is no hint of hesitation or incompetence in firing, entering iron sites, nor in quickly reloading all of the guns scattered about. Likewise, the volume of enemies you'll need to kill to advance is unnaturally high from the beginning.

 

After the back alley shootout with two guards, I moved to a gas station where 10-15 enemies flooded in from transport vehicles. Then there was a sprint through suburbia and another shootout around the wreckage of a downed airplane with 15-20 enemies, which culminated with the arrival of a Korean armored assault vehicle. It was too powerful to shoot with regular weaponry so I flanked it, sprinting along the edge of the ruins and climbing into a house. Inside there was a supply of C4 that I used to explode the vehicle.

 

There were some interesting twists along the way, foremost of which was a conspicuous lack of ammo. The opening mission was played with a constant thread of desperation. Aside from the pistol, I had to get all my heavier weaponry from killed soldiers, and their guns were usually short on ammo. I found myself out of bullets after three-five reloads with each weapon. This was a conscious choice to amplify the sense of desperation and limited resources.

 

It's a great systemic limitation that enhances the overarching themes while adding both emotion and a new tactical layer to the combat. There was another scene that surprised me in a powerful way. After the crashed plane shootout, I rallied with a rebel leader in someone's yard. The Koreans appeared and I made another dash across the suburbs to get to the rebel homebase. But first I retreated into this woman's house, drawing Korean fire into her shelter as she crouched in the corner with a baby screaming in her arms. As the clatter and muzzle flashes erupted, the baby's wails added a constant subtext to the fight.

 

 

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I felt like I'd made a horrible mistake drawing the Korean attack into this woman's home, imperiling her and her child without any benefit to them. They weren't fighters or rebels, and my reckless scramble across the city was costing them the remnant shelter they had kept for themselves. THQ's Danny Bilson challenged Kaos to create a shooter with a real sense of consequence. Whatever disappointment I had with the linear and predictable shootouts, I can say there was a palpable sense of terrible compromise that runs beneath all of those familiar set pieces.

 

The end of the level introduced a new piece of machinery called the Goliath -- a long, quick moving vehicle with a mounted machinegun and remote controlled missiles. Pressing a button brought up a special aiming overlay that allowed me to lock-on and fire missiles. I couldn't directly control the movement of Goliath or its auto-firing machine gun turrets, but the missile blasts were at my discretion and they're incredibly powerful. After an entire five minute shootout built around the arrival of a Korean armored vehicle, the level's ending had me and the Goliath fighting five of them combined with waves and waves of Korean foot soldiers, all easily destroyed by a few Goliath missiles.

 

Homefront is a hard game to reduce to a single impression. It's a game flooded with ideas, the most interesting of which are constrained by Kaos's intention to also make a game that long-time shooter fans won't be frustrated by. Some of its biggest design mandates of humanizing the environment and adding real emotional heft to each set piece is a direct contradiction to the incomprehensible war fantasy that John Milius (the writer of Red Dawn, Conan the Barbarian, and Apocalypse Now) has helped dream up.

 

War is hell.

It's a game that seems conscious of itself, one in which the left hand continually challenges what the right hand is doing. It's neither too sopped in the melodrama I'd want for it, nor is it brain dead to the layers of tragedy that come from fighting in people's homes. There's no right or easy answer to any of the questions Homefront prompts, but the game feels alive to the fact that even in imaginary worlds hard questions need to be confronted. No easy or pithy dictum for what games are or should be will survive it unscathed. Bring it on.

 

 

Minimum System Requirements:

 

OS: Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7

Processor: Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz or AMD Athlon X2 2.8GHz

Memory: 1 GB RAM (XP) or 2 GB RAM (VISTA/WIN7)

Hard Disk Space: 10GB of free hard drive space

Video Card: Shader Model 3.0 graphics card with 256MB of memory; NVIDIA GeForce 7600GT or ATI Radeon 1600XT

Other: Internet Connection

 

Recommend System Requirements:

 

Processor: Quad Core CPU(AMD/Intel)

Video Card: NVidia GeForce 460 / ATI 5700

 

 

At Steam Stores Available At : 11 March 2011 For More Informative http://store.steampowered.com/app/55100/

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuCcZnVPDpc

 

 

 

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