Home is where the war is. In a series of surprisingly adept maneuvers, North Korea has managed to invade and occupy the entire United States west of the Mississippi River. It's now up to you to get fuel to the remains of the US Military. Woooooooo.
1. Gameplay _
_I’ll pause here while you finish laughing. _What? You don’t find that idea hilarious? The idea that the US Military, with its overwhelming superiority by land, sea, and air, would be bested by high gasoline prices and GPS failures? Okay, I suppose that might be a possibility, but thinking of North Korea as the country that would take advantage of our shortcomings is about as plausible as The Mouse that Roared. Yet this is the premise of which Homefront works, a premise that unfortunately creates a very unstable start. _But I can overlook that. Implausible premises aren’t exactly new to video games. Homefront puts the player into the shoes of a former helicopter pilot who has seen combat somewhere (the game never says where) and who is sort of forcefully recruited into the resistance. The resistance force has a home base just outside of San Francisco. _Which brings up my first serious problem with this game: It took me three chapters (out of seven) to learn my character’s name (which I promptly forgot by the end of the seventh chapter). In fact, I never learned the names of any of the other characters. I knew there was the old black leader who gets shot and eventually killed, the gruff second-in-command who has a serious grudge against North Koreans, the random token female who has a caring heart even while watching thousands of Americans slaughtered by the North Koreans, and the random Asian guy who gets treated poorly because everyone thinks he’s North Korean. _That’s it. That’s the entire main cast. The game hints at an antagonist but that never really comes up again. The only character I even slightly cared about was the Asian guy because I thought he got treated poorly because nobody knew the difference between “North Korean” and any other Asian nationality. The guy was from Oakland, spoke English without an accent, and was the only character that wasn’t a blatant stereotype. _Fortunately, the game wasn’t long enough to allow me to get annoyed with the shallow characters. The entire campaign felt like a single mission. You get rescued, find out you need to bring gasoline to the US Military, and then set out to do so. The end. _Seriously, that’s the end. The final chapter of the game is a short battle across the Golden Gate Bridge as the US Military invades San Francisco in an attempt to retake the city. Why are they retaking San Francisco? Is there a serious shortage of clam chowder bread bowls or rainbow flags? The game never says. For all I know San Francisco could have the US’ entire supply of ICBMs, but I would never know because Homefront never even bothers to answer the most basic questions. _I paid $5 for this game and still feel like I got ripped off. _
_The multiplayer mode for this game is one of the main draws, but it doesn’t really provide much in the way of innovation. If you really want to play a multiplayer with vehicles, pick up Bad Company 2 or Battlefield 3 instead. _
_I quickly learned not to trust my AI allies. 2. Parental Notices _
_If an enemy’s head his shot when they are close to a wall, a smear of brain matter will splat on the wall behind them. _The lone exception is the amount of times people will be lit on fire. The scene where the resistance uses white phosphorous mortar rounds is the most obvious example. In it, the mortar round explodes in the air just above a parking lot full of North Korean soldiers. The explosion rains down fire onto the unsuspecting soldiers. _Unfortunately, the second mortar round ends up coming straight down on the resistance infiltration team, causing them to light on fire as well. _All units that burn, both resistance and North Korean, will scream and shuffle as they burn to death. It’s not a pretty sight. _
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_Some of the survivalists also talk about cigarettes and how one of their friends must have stolen a box off of a dead body. _
3. Other Factors _
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_However, the community itself was civil on both the PC and Xbox 360. It certainly wasn’t the worst gaming experience I’ve ever had. _
_There is also one entire chapter where the player will fly a small attack helicopter. During that scene, the player will have to pull alongside three moving fuel trucks as his passengers jump from the helicopter onto the trucks in order to hijack the trucks. _
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After the invasion, the North Korean occupation force makes a habit of brutalizing the civilian population. There are a few instances early on of executions that are presented in a way that is clearly supposed to be controversial. _One notable example was a father and mother who were shot to death by the North Koreans in front of the parents’ small child. The mother keeps telling the daughter to stay there even as the North Koreans shoot her. While watching the short scene I kept thinking “My mom would have gouged the eyes out of anyone who threatened to hurt me in any way”, but maybe mothers in San Francisco are different. _The “survivalists”, groups of Americans who have formed their own societies, have a habit of torturing North Korean POWs for sport. One North Korean was forced to dance as the survivalists shot around his feet. _Other North Koreans were hanged by the survivalists. _There was one North Korean who was tied to a wagon wheel and then impaled with throwing knives. _Genocide Take the executions mentioned above and multiply that by a few thousand, and that’s what the North Koreans have been doing during their occupation of San Francisco. In the game there are so many bodies the North Koreans have to use bulldozers to push the bodies into mass graves. _Oh, and while I’m talking about mass graves, there’s one scene where you have to hide under some dead bodies in a mass grave to escape some North Koreans. _As a result of your destruction of a North Korean fuel depot, the occupiers decide to get some revenge. First, they massacre the resistance force at the home base known as “Oasis”. _Second, they use fighter jets and attack helicopters to slaughter innocent civilians in the suburbs outside of San Francisco. The sounds of people screaming can be heard as the attack takes place.
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