Homefront: The Revolution

 
 

At first glance everything about Homefront: Revolution seems to be superior to the first game. The first homefront game was incredibly generic and boring copy pasted Call of duty clone, very linear and cliche, but not painful to get thorugh or anything

So what does Homefront 2 have to offer?
Well this time around its not a linear level to level corridor shooter like the first. No, instead this time around its an open world style ubisoft clone where you go from city location to city location surrounded by outposts you can capture and a map full of various activites you can conquer.


Now, for the first hour or 2 the game seems very promising. Its got good graphics, feels polished and professional, it has a cool gun customisation system where you can press a button and completely dismantle and change up your gun attachments a moments notice.. but folks, the cracks begin to show VERY quickly.

For starters, a huge glaring flaw that becomes rapidly apparant is the entire game is just a romp of infinitely respawning enemies. Its essentially a shitty stealth game in disguise and the moment you are ever spotted, an alarm goes off and infinitely enemies just run towards your location like Grand theft auto police or something.  So for the entire game you feel punished or like youre wasting your time for simply shooting at enemies, because you know its pointless because they'll never stop coming towards you.
 Instead, you find yourself wanting to just sprint as fast as possible past every single enemy/outpost STRAIGHT to the fucking Objective marker, because the SECOND you hit that objective marker it despawns and deletes every enemy. The combat is so trivial and pointless because of this.  
 I will just reiterate that in a shooting game it feels completely pointless and worthless and a waste of time, to actually shoot at the enemies , in 90% of the scenarios because of this.

NOT to mention that the game is extremely unforgiving ontop of this. You die in 3-4 hits, and theres not regenerating health. You can only carry a limited amount of med kits, and theyre almost impossible to find out in the wild. You need to purchase them at one of the stores.  So what you end up doing is stocking up on med kits, sprinting past every enemy in the game while frantically spamming the heal button, so you can make it to the objective and do some shitty hacking mini game while theres 100 guys shooting at you, so then when you complete the objective they all get deleted and you are free of threat.

 I've tried the route of actually engaging in combat and shooting enemies, but its a waste of time. You do not arrive at your objectives any faster, but the contrary. You just sit around shooting wave after wave of the same generic soldier for infinity, when you could just sprint to the objective and spam health kits. The game is fundamnetally designed like shit. What the fuck were they thinking?

Now, imagine on top of ALL of this retarded design, there are MANY places in the game where you are FORCED to capture outposts to progress. Now, the issue here, is that virtually ALL of them are located vertically, up in some very obscure random window that requires JUMPING PUZZLES to get to every single one of them.

So, you have infinitely respawning enemies/alarms/cameras running towards you, all the while youre trying to figure out how to climb up these obscure jumping puzzles to finally reach some switch in some apartment complex window, just to progress the campaign

Im not kidding, it forces you to do this shit like 40 times. You reach points in the campaign where you have to raise some 'hearts and minds' meter by capturing outposts, freeing prisoners, destroying equipment ETC..  and capturing outposts raises the meter the fastest, but the vast majority of them are so obscure and insane to get to i just found myself looking them up on youtube.  

I cant stress enough how frustrating and annoying and tedious it is trying to jump across these awful jumping puzzle rooftop "where the fuck do I go?" segments while theres just waves and waves of drones swarming towards you. Nothing about this game is difficult or challenging, just tedious and fucking downright annoying.  Not to mention the game does a HORRIBLE job of explaining half of the mechanics to you, there are multiple times where I found myself stuck without a clue how to progress, looked it up on youtube, and apparently I was suppose to know i had to be using some RC toy car with just the right specific Hack tool , or  I have to use a camera picture function in just the right place etc.. just totally crap mechanics that arent explained anywhere.

There are three of these forced 'freeroam'  'hearts and minds Raise the meter'  segments in the game and they are by far the worst and most tedious stuff ever. You can run around like a dickhead being as slow and careful as possible but its just not worth it. Once youre detected you can do some 'assassins creed' type ubisoft garbage like hunting in dumpsters or trying to lose them,  but again, why would I want to be doing that shit for hours on  end when I can just rush to the objective? The mechanics are not particularly enjoying or rewarding to utilize, I just found myself wanting to progress and not dick around playing with some boring geenric mechanics.

So the campaign revolves around some incredibly cliche political bad guys VS revolutionary storyline which is totally forgettable and I just finished the campagin 10 minutes ago and I seriously cant even remember a single name of any of the main characters. I dont even know what my guys name is. I think there was a guy called jack? which was a total stereotype of a typical alpha male grunt war guy. Some really annoying girl who just was over emotional and archetypical as well. I dont know, nothing about the story was at all stimulating it was just a means to an end.

So it tries to be open world, but fails, because you find yourself punished for actually engaging with any of the enemies because THEY NEVER STOP SPAWNING. None of the actual campaign missions are fun or enjoyable, you just get an objective marker and sprint towards it. Most of the time its just shit like "run inside this enemy encampment and hit a switch"

Other times its just "run here and steal this vechile and bring it back"   "rescue the prisoner"   "run here and kill these guys"  "defend our position from bad guys"   its very very boring. The game is boring.

Like I said, the first impression is pretty good. It has kind of awesome graphics and the guns seem fun to use at a glance. The open world at first seems like a cool idea. But then you actually get into the game and find out its designed by a bunch of fucking monkeys who cant figure out what the word 'fun' means. The saddest part of all, is that the first Homefront game is a pile of shit, but its not a tedious grueling slog to get through. Homefront: The Revolution however? it might actually be worst than the first game. purely for the fact that its actually so boring and so annoying and so badly designed that its tedious as hell to get through. Luckily I finished it in four, two hour sessions. But some of those moments where im just staring up towards the sky/rooftops while being chased by endless swarms of enemies and wondering "ok how the fuck do I get up there?"  for 15 minutes straight, those memories wont leave my head anytime soon. That is all I will think of when i think of this game.

5/10