Kazuki Ferret reviews: Homefront

Well hello there again dear readers, it’s been a while since I actually reviewed anything but by popular request the bum-raping will continue. On the chopping block today is Home Front, a brand new game no less. Unfortunately this means that it hasn’t ruined anyone’s childhoods yet or anything but whatever.

Anyway, Homework, sorry, Home Font is a first person shooter for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. I’ll be playing it on PS3 because I rented it as most newer FPS games are criminally short so I’m not wasting $60 on them, except for Duke Nukem Forever and that’s just to have a piece of gaming history, though it still isn’t here yet. Anyway, I paid $5.27 to rent Home Fuck so here we go, to the actual review, meaning I’ll go and boot the game up and let you, my adoring fans, all none of you, know if this game was worth the walk to the video store and the $5.27 I paid to play it.

Home Boy is set in the future, for originality of course, and follows a world where the US continued over spending and is now a finical wreck, thanks to Obama and the Democrats and to be fair, Sarah Palin. Of course none of that is mentioned but it’s what I’m guessing. Europe is also in finical ruin, due to spending all its Euros on Korean hookers and so now North Korea, led by Kim Jong Il’s son, who I’ll call Ching-Dong Sic in a failed attempt at being politically sensitive has gained power in the wake of older illness’s death and using the money from his global whore network has gained enough money to both reunite the Koreas and aggressively expand. This has led the Koreans, under Ching-Dong Sic to invade America to add to its colonial gains. Also, gas prices started rising because of Saudi Arabia catching fire.

Now let’s talk about what I thought Homefront was supposed to be like, before getting into whether or not the game met any of my positive expectations. Home Grown had one of the men behind the classic guerilla movie, Red Dawn on its team so I am expecting a slowly building Guerilla movement using mostly civilian and captured military firearms and equipment acting stealthfully and carefully throughout a long campaign of hard fought resistance against a far superior foe, one that possibly uses a Jatimatic submachine gun as a sidearm.

Some other facts, the Koreans irradiate the Mississippi River, because you know, that’s not a useful river or anything. They also EMPed the fuck out of everything in America, the greatest tragedy would be the loss of all the Furry Porn I rely on to survive. Also bird flu, bird flu everywhere.

Now to the game itself, let’s see if it was worth it.

The game has seven single player missions, more then I’d heard about so it’s up from four but still not making itself out to be the long guerilla deal I was expecting. Anyway the rest of the review will consist of a synopsis of me playing through one mission and giving an impression of the game and then I’ll wrap it up with a final over all review of the game. I’ll be playing the first mission so I don’t spoil too much for readers who haven’t played the game.

Mission 1: WHY WE FIGHT

This is the game’s first mission and it starts off with you, Robert Jacobs, the man with almost two first names waking up in your shithole of an apartment on your couch, with a faded American flag pinned to the wall. Oddly sleeping directly across the room from your actual bed which has what appears to be a tent pitched on it using a blanket for reasons I cannot fathom. Anyway, your radio drones on about, well curfews and shit, your shitty candles burn slowly in the, well, being that the incoming light appears to be similar to what I see when I wake up… afternoon light. Then there is a knock on the door, and a man asks for you in a bad accent.

Well as you go to answer the door some dudes bust in, looking very blocky for current gen I must say and pin you against a wall while pointing an M4 carbine at you and a man in a beret starts yammering at you about dedication or something and you get hauled off to a reeducation camp, of course not before you get butt stroked in the face with the M4, luckily since the collapsible stock on the M4a1 didn’t break they probably didn’t hit you hard enough to do any damage. So you get thrown down some stairs and put on a bus and you can watch as several people get brutalized by the Koreans wielding M4a1 carbines and AR-15’s (they’re semi-auto only, meaning they have to be the civilian version of the M16, but you don’t learn this until you get one later.). Now while this might be kind of a weird complaint, but why aren’t the Koreans using Korean weaponry? The AR-15 and its family of derivatives and variants are a universally loved or hated combat weapon, not to mention are an awkward weapon to use for someone used to a Kalashnikov type rifle. Also, it’s too easy to forget that they’re Koreans when you see men in heavy armor that disallows you to see their faces brutalizing people with American guns; they pretty much looked like they could be US Army.

Anyway some resistance homies blow an IED next to the school bus to topple it and rescue you because apparently you were a pilot or something and that, well that was worth potentially killing you. Also I wonder how many buses they bombed before they got the right one. Anyway so now you have Connor and some random bitch, they’re armed with and M4a1 (Connor) and an PWS Diablo PDW of failure (bitch). Connor orders you to pick up a dead Korean’s M9 pistol, why the Koreans are using a NATO handgun I’ll never know, they should be using the Baek-Du-San pistol, a variant of the CZ-75. Anyway you then get into a few gun small gunfights against soldiers armed oddly with Bushmaster ACR rifles, M4 carbines and most strangely the only non US gun, so what I can only guess is the standard assault rifle of the United Korean army is the QBZ-03 rifle, which is odd because the North Koreans currently issue the AK-74 with the QBZ-03 being a Chinese weapon. Anyway what’s really odd is that while the Bushmaster ACR, PWS Diablo and M4a1 carbine are all most likely 5.56x45mm NATO chambered weapons, they do not share an ammunition pool, which is odd and very annoying.

Also, the M4a1 holds only 20 round per magazine for reasons I cannot understand, also, both it and the ACR and PWS can use the same magazines, STANAG magazines. Why these weapons have different ammunition pools and their magazines cannot be used by one another is somewhat perplexing and shows a massive display of ignorance on the part of game developers. Unless of course the M4a1 is a 6.5 Grendel, the ACR a 6.8 SPC and the PWS a 5.56x45; this of course would create the problem of who in their right minds would issue to a standing army such a mutant hodgepodge of calibers? The QBZ-03 is available in 5.8x42mm or 5.56x45mm and since it doesn’t share an ammunition pool with any of the other assault rifles I have to assume it’s a 5.8x42mm but then that means, in order for the ammunition pools to make sense the KPA is issuing and supplying 5.8x42mm, 5.56x45mm, 6.5x38mm and 6.8x43mm and possibly others. This would be a logistics nightmare with as large a scale area of operations as the KPA is operating and supplying in. Again, this shows a substantial amount of ignorance on the parts of the developers.

Also later you run into a tank while escaping through the suburbs, it’s a Chinese Type 99 Main Battle Tank, which the Koreans also probably wouldn’t be using. The North Koreans use their own MBT, the Chonma-ho or since this is the future likely they’d be using their new design, the Pokpung-ho. This again shows incredible ignorance on the game developer’s parts as this information can be found on Wikipedia and took me all of four minutes.

The people who made this game are very ignorant people. Dirty, stupid, ignorant people and they should be ashamed of themselves.

Anyway, back to the game.

Wait, dammit now I got a SCAR-L which also doesn’t share ammunition or magazines with the other assault rifles. Seriously, what the fuck? Also, why does it fire in three round burst? The SCAR has a safe-semi-full selector. Oh, I climbed into a tree house which got troll missiled by what I believe to be a Blackhawk helicopter. This is just getting more and more confusing.

More running and gunning; me, bitch and Connor are about as stealthy as Duke Nukem, we’ve got like half a garrison of troops after us and we aren’t dying. Yeah you try taking three people against a garrison of troops in a stand up gun fight with the enemy having air support. You’ll get three very well ventilated corpses, that’s what you’ll get. Also, shooting works okay in this game, easiest way to kill enemies is to shot them in the leg because they game doesn’t seem to have getting up from falling down programmed into the enemy AI script making these soldiers very vulnerable to tripping.

Also this is easy as fuck.

And I just ran into a KPA LAV-25. Again, really? This one I can somewhat understand why they’d have it but it’s still a stretch as to why they’d be using it. Anyway it was easy as piss to kill, the Koreans put a cache of C4 right next to where they park it in game. Also, as far as I can tell the C4 has no detonators in it and being that my character is a pilot who’s been in the resistance all of ten minutes he’d have no demolitions experience, so him using these blocks of C4 against the LAV in reality would be about as effective as throwing phonebooks at one. Also just throwing C4 at an APC and detonating them won’t do any real damage; they’d just explode next to it and scare the crew.

So to wrap this mission up they had me controlling a rather stupid drone killing Humvee’s because you know, that’s a difficult task, hell, ask the Iraqi insurgents, not a tough beast to fell. But this fucking thing dumps like 5 rockets into each Humvee. And then the KPA sends in an oddly large and low flying predator drone to kill your group, and the mission ends.

Other all it was rather short and very, very fucking easy. The only times I died where because the character doesn’t crouch to get behind cover so much as bend his knees slightly, allowing KPA easy access to your head while in cover. And the game so far has displayed woefull ignorance on a great many very basic concepts. Namely the North Korean policies of self reliant arms procurement, the North Koreans have been following a policy of very strict ‘it has to be made here’ arms procurement and usage over the last 20 years and the sentiment is only gaining strength in the North Korean military. For those dense people who can still manage to understand some of the pretty symbols on the screen that make up this review that means it’d be highly unlikely that they’d be using a Chinese assault rifle, an Italian pistol, American APC’s, drones, helicopters and trucks. To say nothing of the awkward assortment of weapons carried by their soldiers, maybe I’ll find less to complain about in the other six missions but, I doubt it.

Well after finishing the game, I am disappoint. Five hours to beat. And worst resistance group evar, EVAR! They had all the tactics of a rusty spoon, the common sense of a cockroach and something that at one point could have been loosely described as the ‘plan’. The vehicle sections were awkward, namely when I had to have my friend look up the controls for the helicopter, get fucking game design right there. There’s a part were the resistance has its tech wizard (who apparently can control a combat drone with nothing but his positive thoughts) operate a 120mm Motar loaded with white phosphorous rounds, now being that he had no training on the weapon predictably fires half the resistance with it. Connor goes nuts and nearly gets the whole team killed after a rather pointless raid to get tracking devices from a labor camp, as tracking devices are very easy to make. They also at one point, send me, their only pilot in a mission where the job was to steal a helicopter which also doubled as the escape vehicle on a mission to clear out a church, by myself because you, that couldn’t go bad or anything. You know sending the pilot off by himself couldn’t result in him getting killed or anything and leave them stranded, totally not a likely scenario. The game is also disgustingly linear with little to no replay value.

Long story short, it’s a half decent Call of Duty clone but a poor resistance game with a criminally short story, half-assed execution and more plot holes and stupidity then Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 and Call of Duty Black Ops combined. The game is also shorter than the Call of Duty games, which is a sad, sad statement. The game wasn’t worth the $5.27 I paid to play it, if you paid $60 for this game and are reading this, please kill yourself. You paid full list price, in fact you paid enough money to pay for four months of game time for World of Warcraft for 5 hours of content, you sad, sad bastard.

Also, fuck multiplayer. Multiplayer for first person shooters is one of the easiest things one can make in a game, in fact it’s what most game art student learn to do first after they learn to model environments and texture, ect. It’s an easy exercise and the amount of work one needs to make a competent multiplayer game these days isn’t worth paying $60 for.