Homefront: The Revolution review: Blood-spattered banner

Revolutions are tricky. Ostensibly, they are the end result of the frustration and desperation of a group of people. They are upwellings, the last recourse of a downtrodden nation. In practice, though, they’re often among the most brutal sorts of wars. While oppressors stand as the intended targets, the collapse of a reigning social order and the construction of a new one never comes without moral compromise and collateral damage.

Homefront: The Revolution captures the compromised morals dead-on. Given the haphazard execution of the rest of the game, though, I’m not sure that’s intentional.

A muddy revolution

In this guerrilla war, you play as Ethan Brady, a recent recruit for yet another American Revolution. This time, North Korea, not England, is the occupying force. The Revolution opens with a series of brutal scenes that show your chosen band of freedom fighters as bordering on psychopathic.

After being captured by the Korean People’s Army (KPA) while making bombs, you end up finding your way back to the revolutionaries. Under suspicion of espionage, your former band of brothers beats and brutalizes you before threatening to tear into your flesh with knives and torture you for information. Your main tormentor even goes so far as to suggest that you scream so that she’ll get her fill, all without a shred of indicting evidence.

That's disturbing enough. Even worse, though, the whole thing is dismissed minutes later as a misunderstanding, and you’re welcomed back into the arms of the eponymous revolution. It’s an odd string of events—one that not only strains your suspension of disbelief but also leaves the main protagonists as wholly unsympathetic. From the outset, you feel as though you're fighting for a bloodthirsty, aimless lot instead of a band of noble liberators.

That kind of flawed anti-hero motivation isn't impossible to pull off, of course. But Homefront muddies the message by constantly pressing a narrative that you’re doing good and that your fight is a righteous one. From the troubling introduction through many mediocre narrative follow-ups showing your compromised nature, that’s a tougher pill to swallow than it should be.

Off-target shooting

Plot aside, there’s not much interesting gameplay to hold this outing together. What's on offer here is a melange of occasionally clever design and aggressive mediocrity.

For most of its 20-hour runtime, Homefront is a bog standard first-person military shooter. You have a swath of guns and explosives that are nearly indistinguishable from those in any other military shooter—pistols, shotguns, molotov cocktails, and the like. The conceit here is that you can modify and augment your arsenal with an array of attachments on the fly. You can turn your sidearm into a submachine gun with a quick trigger press and a slide of the analog stick, for example.

It’s a nice enough system, but it’s not enough to make up for Homefront’s chintzy gunplay. Weapons lack oomph and aiming is loose, leading to unsatisfying shooting. Those problems are compounded by an ethereal lack of presence from the game’s world. Enemies don't seem solid and tend to just flop over in an unnatural way after taking fire (even when you consider the whole just-being-shot thing).

As far as incoming fire goes, it’s hard to get a sense for when you’ve taken damage. Your health bar is an inconspicuous white band in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, and when things heat up, it evaporates without much warning. Roaming around war-torn Philadelphia, firefights come quickly and frequently. Without a solid grasp of how much health you’ve lost or where threats are coming from, death is common.

Those frequent gunfights are a bit odd, too, given your role as a revolutionary. Your movement is supposed to operate underground, but the KPA’s drones are constantly following you, and they’re quick to alert nearby soldiers to track you down. It comes across as a poor use of the game's narrative premise, which would support stealth action and infiltration more than public skirmishes with the KPA.

The whole game suffers from this kind of inconsistent tone. You're just an average person drawn into an insurgency, not some demi-god in power armor. Yet the game never really lets you hide from your heavily powered foe or blend in to prep for silent assassinations. While you can theoretically avoid the ire of the KPA by not venturing too close to their patrols, in practice this tactic just doesn’t work. Just about every mission and safehouse lies along a route that directly intersects with the KPA. The result is a game that feels like a messy, cut-down rendition of Tom Clancy’s The Division.

A failed overthrow

There are moments that do work. Running between main missions in stolen motorcycles is a thrill, giving the whole campaign an appropriate on-the-run feel. That's one of the few pieces that really feels at home here, though, and it’s not much for the game to hang on.

In addition to the underlying narrative and gameplay issues, there's a litany of technical problems that take Homefront from mediocre to downright bad. The KPA’s AI is terrible, arbitrarily losing track of you and often forgetting you were ever there to being with. If you take pot shots at a vehicle and even dash down stairs, they’ll have a hard time figuring out where you went. Spotty AI isn't the only technical issue, either. Bugs are frequent, causing everything from framerate dips and crashes to errant controls.

These problems are disappointing for a game that needed something—anything—to keep it at least minimally interesting. As it stands, Homefront: The Revolution is just casually bad—a confused mess that tries a handful of interesting ideas but fails to pull those disparate pieces into a coherent whole that's worth anyone's time.

The good:

• On-the-nose presentation of many revolutionaries
• Occasionally engaging motorcycle sections show sparks of intelligence

The Bad:

• Threadbare plot comes off as jingoistic and makes its heroes unsympathetic
• Frequent firefights give no opportunity to make you feel like an underground revolutionary
• Levels are cluttered messes
• Bugs, poor AI, and a litany of technical problems stall the experience

The Ugly:

• Being forced to team up with uncomfortably sadistic comrades

Verdict: This sequel utterly fails to establish Homefront as a solid franchise. Skip it.