Homefront: The Revolution

Homefront: The Revolution has more problems than I can list, including some illogical design decisions I couldn’t wrap my head around. But it truly executes on some of the good ideas it presents, and redeems itself in its latter half to an extent.

The biggest issue with gameplay was the autosave feature. We’re all used to autosave these days; the swirling icon that either means you’ve just added something to your character or that presages an encounter. In H:TR the autosave feature also means that the game will freeze for a few seconds. It’s an ugly glitch and one that ruins that feeling I described earlier of dashing from cover and hoping that the patrol won’t see you. It’s a pretty big glitch and I am surprised it hasn’t been patched out yet.

Homefront: The Revolution is barely optimized enough, designed well enough, QA tested enough or balanced well-enough from a gameplay perspective to even be declared finished.

Homefront - The Revolution is spectacularly broken in a way that very few games can get away with and offers very little redeeming features to justify playing through it.

Botched and broken, irritating and offensive, this samey, soulless sandbox fails to overthrow the old regime's ruling shooters. Good guns, mind. [July 2016, p.75]

As it is, you’re merely left with a badly scraped old junker. Combat may offer passing pleasures, but in every other respect, this is more devolution than revolution. [August 2016, p66]

For me, leaving a game unfinished is like suffering an itch I can’t scratch. But I don’t think that’ll be a problem with Homefront: The Revolution. I’ve muddled my way through six of its eight open-world zones, and I’m just not interested in playing any more.

Homefront: The Revolution is not a very good game. It could have been an okay game if it weren't for the atrocious technical performance on consoles and the forgettable plot, which is filled to the brim with unironic and extremely patriotic nonsense from beginning to end. It's almost a parody of itself.

Despite all the technical problems, I still managed to finish Homefront's campaign, but I can't say I had fun. All of the game's ambitions are undone by its flaws, offering only the rare glimpse of what could have been. Dambuster has already stated they are committed to improving the game with additional patches, but given everything that's currently wrong, the studio faces a greater uphill battle than Homefront's desperate underdogs.

Sometimes my job is to play bad games so you don't have to. Homefront: The Revolution is one of those games.

It is a dull game that fails to offer more than passing enjoyment, hitching and glitching all along the way. It offers a middling co-operative mode in a field filled with games trying to innovate in that space. It struggles to say anything--even something bombastic and cartoonish--about crisis, nationality, or revolution. It tries to roar America, but instead coughs out a few, unintelligible grunts.

Homefront: The Revolution feels like it's arriving a decade late and under-dressed, and although it reaches for the heights, it never approaches them.

The first-person shooting genre is aching for some innovation, and Deep Silver’s foundation could have been that trailblazer. Unfortunately, the storyline, game mechanics, and the audio-visual quality issues just don’t cut it. Homefront: The Revolution is better suited for the bargain bin rather than the hefty price tag AAA games are known for.

Homefront: The Revolution has some good ideas and it has its moments that engage the player. But there are also too many technical issues and bugs for me to recommend it until they've patched the game.

Homefront: The Revolution is a reboot of a mostly acceptable game. A reboot that brings about nauseating visuals, lackluster combat, and a dull narrative. An impressive customization feature is far from enough to save this sad installment.

A messy jumble of broken parts. [Aug 2016, p.112]