There are a few base guns which can be modified on the fly into other weapons. And I like shooting, though Homefront doesn’t exactly fill the act with flavor and variety. Since detection feels inevitable, it’s simpler and easier to shoot or run away than to quietly crouch-walk around. You can sneakily drive an RC car up to a patrol and detonate it, but in my experience the dumb things just got stuck on rubble. Stealth is limited to throwing distractions and hiding, and the enemy AI can be overbearingly eagle-eyed, or sometimes oblivious to your presence, so I couldn’t find any consistent fun from that approach. There just aren’t all that many ways to approach Homefront’s missions-certainly not the variety you find in Metal Gear Solid 5 or Far Cry 4.
I appreciate that death isn’t frustratingly punishing, but in a better game dying would teach me a lesson. The populated yellow zones are at least a little more lively than the red zone rubble yards.
I lost some valuables I’d looted-which I didn’t need because I got plenty of cash from missions-and spawned at the nearest safehouse with the progress I’d made toward objectives preserved. If a fight was looking bad, I’d just rush to the objective marker to capture the base and trigger the cutscene. But once you do whatever needs to be done to capture a Strike Point-turning on a generator, hacking something-everything resets and you can start fresh in your new safehouse. On the standard difficulty setting I’m pretty fragile and I run out of ammo quickly, so I’m constantly scrambling between cover and corpses to loot, and the deep ‘bwah’ sound when I score a headshot is a nice touch. Strike Points are also a chance to get some shooting in that doesn’t feel futile, and that can be fun. One had me jump a motorcycle onto a rooftop, though after getting frustrated with the slippery bike, I found I could just run up the ramp and leap on foot. To get into a future safehouse, you often have to scale a neighboring building to get onto the right bit of scaffolding, then scramble over and through a window.
They’re pretty quick to do, and there’s a good variety of simple challenges. The main activity, secondary to whoever the next story mission wants you to meet up with, is capturing Strike Points, which involve mini-platforming puzzles and combat encounters. There are lots of useful things to do in both zones, though.
The best way to get around is simply to run while ignoring enemies. The story is fine and acted well enough (people shouting at each other about whether violence or pacifism is good), but it fails to pair much originality with the still-fresh premise of a Red Dawn-style US occupation. It’s done just well enough to not be a total wash-I had fun for a good five hours or so of the 10-plus hour campaign-but its bleak tale eventually becomes a bland smear of muddy buildings, uninteresting guns, and repeated objectives.
Homefront: The Revolution is a mash of the past 15 years of shooters, full of story contrivances and designs I’ve played and criticized before: the goofy graffiti, the bad NPC chatter, the ‘keep the tank safe’ mission, the ‘break out of the prison without your equipment’ mission. Then there’s the voice on the radio that congratulates me for acts he couldn’t have seen, like when I silently sneaked up behind a soldier and took him out with my knife. NPC dialogue is fun too, especially the guy who simply yelled “America!” at me after I captured a police station.