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Homefront

October 22, 2011

Home­front is a THQ brain­child that uti­lizes the Unreal Engine and shows what beau­ti­ful art and per­for­mance on lower end machines can do. I fell in love with this game being my first play-through I took my time and lis­tened to every­thing I could, read every arti­cle I could find and all. The cam­paign for Home­front is by far one of the truly epic. Although excru­ci­at­ingly short it is absolutely mind blow­ing. The video in this arti­cle is the open­ing cut scene for the game, watch it to get an idea of where you are start­ing your mission.

This game is bru­tal. If you get sick eas­ily, don’t play this as some of it is a bit grotesque for patri­ots or vets. Though the story makes for a good game it is a bit hard to not imag­ine it as pos­si­ble. The game also dis­plays ad space pur­chas­ing from TigerDirect.com in a long chap­ter where you are run­ning through their main facil­ity all you see is the name all over the place.

Graph­ics — 9

The Unreal Engine has granted THQ the abil­ity to run super high end tex­tures and graph­ics with­out the need for huge caches of video mem­ory and thus has let me play at max set­tings on my sys­tem at min­i­mum 20FPS (Sys­tem specs at the bot­tom). I, being an Unreal Edi­tor user and map cre­ator myself know from expe­ri­ence how won­der­fully you can tex­ture to make the appear­ance of three dimen­sional object with­out the need for fully three dimen­sional poly­gons, and this is what help with the ample beauty even on low end machines. THQ could not have done bet­ter com­bin­ing the Unreal Engine with Havoks’ physics engine has given them the abil­ity to out per­form and enhance oth­ers with a smaller bud­get in place for the titles.

Playa­bil­ity — 9/4

I gave two rat­ings for this for one rea­son, the dif­fer­ence in cam­paign to mul­ti­player. The cam­paign if you couldn’t tell by now has had me enam­ored. The mul­ti­player, how­ever, is lack­ing any­thing dif­fer­ent from the past few CoD releases. To call the mul­ti­player a MW2 clone would not be a far pull. It is run almost to the T exactly the same with the amount of guns/items even less then half that of CoD. I can­not accept a new release that is a car­bon copy on a more pop­u­lar game with­out some sort of com­pen­sa­tion. The fact that even had a mul­ti­player at all seemed to be more or less an after­thought. It is so weak in com­par­i­son to what was expected after play­ing through the cam­paign that I could not even get past level 5. This in turn is why I believe the com­mu­nity has fled. They would have done much bet­ter to copy a bet­ter plat­form for mul­ti­player, say.… Bat­tle­field for exam­ple. Either way, the playa­bil­ity in the cam­paign is awe­some. Even on the nor­mal dif­fi­culty I died about 50 times before fin­ish­ing it. The game is not hard to the point that you want to quit but it is also that which makes it a bit odd. I would die only to see the AI to fol­low the exact same pathing and I could play a scene 10 times and finally find where to hide, how to shoot with­out ever get­ting shot. Trial and Error.

Audio — 7

The game is all voice acted and done well with the mouth work­ing in uni­son with words. It is about as good as expected, though some of the gun sounds are a bit fil­tered or sat­u­rated. They seem to vary gun to gun and have an off queue sound to fir­ing if only by the small­est frac­tion of a sec­ond though that may be my lack of a proper sound card.

All in all the game is a great suc­cess and for the price that you would pay at our friends, IntKeys, you can’t pass up this title.  Get a bonus 5% off their already low prices by using the TGB dis­count code: 224c76cae8

I would rec­om­mend it to any FPS fan for noth­ing more than the sto­ry­line. Oth­er­wise, wait for MW3 as the mul­ti­player is a match to it with a ruined community.