I played a lot of first person shooters. If there’s a new Call of Duty, I’ll buy it. They’re a guilty pleasure of mine. Why? Because they’re fun. I can zone out. I was excited to see Homefront coming to the Xbox One because I was a fan of the first game. I did know one thing though, it’s a new generation of consoles, so I expected some new things from this new game.
While fellow writer Robert did a review on the PS4 version I’m here with the review of the Xbox One version. Is it worth picking up? Let’s find out in my review!
Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love, unfortunately in Homefront: The Revolution there isn’t much love to go around. What do I mean? Well let’s first get you into how this game came to be since it has been a rough road for this game. During E3 2014, it was announced that Crytek would be working on Homefront: The Revolution and Deep Silver would be co-publishing it. Later on in 2014, Crytek announced that due to an internal restructuring, it would sell the Homefront intellectual property to Koch Media who happens to be the parent company of Deep Silver. Deep Silver then created Dambuster Studios to have the game finished. Before completion, there was a delay that pushed release from 2015 to 2016.
Homefront: The Revolution has a great looking, yet brutal cinematic opening. After that you are thrown into a linear tutorial, then thrust into an open world. In this new game, we follow new Resistance member Ethan Brady. This particular Resistance cell is awaiting the arrival of Benjamin Walker, who happens to be the leader of the national Resistance against the Korean People’s Army (KPA). I would like to go into more details, but I’d rather you find out yourself.
Just after the tutorial you are tossed into an overwhelming open world. Homefront: The Revolution tries to introduce new mechanics while you are under fire and at times it becomes too much. The game suffers from trying to incorporate stealth while at the same time telling you it is ok for all out firefights. It makes for mixed messages–that’s for sure. The gunplay is pretty straightforward with a nice addition of being able to upgrade your weapons with modifications. There’s a motorcycle which adds for some vehicle action, but to be honest, I found it hard to use. One time I ended up leaving a mission area, then I got back to the mission area just as the timer hit zero. When the mission restarted, the motorcycle was missing and I couldn’t proceed further.
That was just one of the few glitches I encountered while playing. Deep Silver has released a statement saying they are looking into the frame rate issues players are experiencing but by this point will it do any good? Fixing frame rate issues doesn’t fix the gameplay or lackluster story.
Overall, Homefront: The Revolution has amazing promise, but just doesn’t deliver on any of it. This alone makes me sad to say because some of the team who worked on this game created TimeSplitters, which is among my favorite games (spoiler, you can play the first two levels of TimeSplitters 2 in Homefront: The Revolution). What does this mean for you the customer? You may want to hold off on picking up the game until the price drops. This might be one of those games that I pick back up a few months down the road to see if any of the problems were fixed but as of now, the revolution is over.
