Official Homefront Review *Warning, Graphic Game Content*

Sunday afternoon I realized starkly that I had a big test the following morning in Criminal Justice. Talk about a gun-to-head moment. Frantically I printed out the 28 pages of study guides (the ones I should have filled out over the past couple weeks so I could actually STUDY them for the test) and wondered how I would even fill them out in time for the test, much less actually study them too. Luckily a friend of mine came to my rescue and gave me all the answers, essentially saving me hours and hours of reading through the textbook. Now I could focus on cramming for the test itself... which took me hours and hours. And my intensive, panicked studying came through for me! I pulled through and think I did very well, actually. Hoorah for cramming.

Alright, so I've logged double digit hours playing Homefront and I'm going to present my official review/opinion of it now. It was essentially Call of Duty with the widespread feel of Battlefield. The visuals were very much like Call of Duty, if somewhat better. The game would probably pin its claim to fame on its reputation for brutality, and for its vision of the destructive Korean occupation of America. It is an experience of intense warfare literally in our own back yard. The first ten minutes of the game are a fairly accurate depiction of what to expect throughout the remainder of the game. You are loaded onto a prison bus and treated with a slow roll through a terrorized Colorado town with a front row seat to the oppression of the American people. You see men lined up against a wall and shot down. You see a soldier throw a bag over a man's head to strangle him. You see two soldiers beating a man to death on the side of the road with their rifles. You see a weeping child forced to watch his parents shot down in front of him. This is a very, very brutal game. At one point later on, you uncover mass graves where tractors simply dump dozens of bodies into holes in the ground. You are very shortly thereafter forced to jump into the pile to hide from the enemy. I was continuously struck by the sheer graphic nature of the game. I believe the point to this was to instill a feeling of nationality, or a rally-around-the-flag way of thinking in people. I believe it was intended to bring up sympathy and heartache for the game's characters and these poor American people. The impression I got, however, was one of almost distaste. The brutality was just that: brutality. Yes, it was all very tragic. But I wasn't emotionally stricken with grief for the game's characters. They were angry and gritty and heartbroken, but fickle. They seemed almost to switch personalities throughout the game. And while the single player gameplay was very fun and environmental, much of it was unbelievable and some of it was even a little repetetive. The multiplayer was a vast disappointment. I think the biggest thing I liked about it was the fact that when you shoot at someone, you die a lot faster than in any other games of the kind. There isn't any of this emptying an entire magazine into someone and finally killing them, if you're lucky, nonsense. Four hits and boom, down you go. The emphasis is on vehicular combat; you can literally spawn into a vehicle, and that's your assigned vehicle. You can get out of it, but if you stay outside of it for X amount of seconds, you lose the ability to get back in and now you're an infantryman always on the lookout for other infantry and hiding from enemy vehicles.

In short, it was a fun game, but I found that it tried to compensate for its lack of ingenuity with its shocking brutality.

J R Williams