Fighting For Hearts And Minds In Homefront: The Revolution

Homefront: The Revolution goes quite a bit beyond simply being a sequel to the 2011 original. In fact, aside from some shared backstory, it feels as though Dambuster Studios have presided over a root and branch overhaul.

It’s no longer a purely linear shooter, but one which broadens into open-world environments and sprinkles the map with ancillary objectives and tasks to complete. In the best possible way, it feels so very Ubisoft to be skulking down a road and avoiding a KPA patrol, only to have a supply point brought to your attention in a nearby building and tempt you away from whatever it was you were doing before.

After an introduction to the resistance efforts in Philadelphia that drops you, the voiceless Ethan Brady, in at the deep end, you’re forced to hook up with another resistance cell and strike at KPA operations in one of the Red Zones. This is the game’s no man’s land and meant to be devoid of human life, meaning that the Norks will shoot on sight.

That contrasts with the Yellow Zone, where the KPA maintain strict control over an impoverished populace. You’re a wanted man, but you can generally blend in and avoid the cameras and patrolling soldiers with a little common sense. However, you need to strike out at the Norks in ways that will help you win over the hearts and minds of the citizens. You want to push them to rise up and try to overthrow the puppet state, turning the streets to a chaos that looks like a riotous Holi festival of colours, where the only colour was blue.

You have to go hunting around to tune radios to resistance broadcasts, rescue people being harassed by soldiers, and destroy KPA military vehicles and propaganda trucks. You’ll want to strike hard and fast before fading into the background, breaking line of sight and waiting for alert levels and reinforcements to move away. Each act of rebellion gradually changes the attitudes of the populace. They no longer tell you that you’re not welcome, but start to encourage you, and even, once in open rioting, take it upon themselves to kick several shades out of stranded KPA guards.

The game shows a lot more polish than it did when I played its co-op a few months ago, which is very encouraging to see as it races toward release in May. However, there’s still a few oddities to be design. Each open world environ feels both liberating to run around, though they can also be too compact. There are certain events that feel as though they should be dynamic, but actually play out in a loop, resistance safe houses that overlook KPA gantries and sit across the street from a major stronghold, and it’s currently far too easy to sprint through a soldier or a camera’s line of sight without raising any alarm.

But there’s also a distinct feeling of levity to the game, and though the story takes itself seriously, other things are much more outlandish. You quickly earn cash and resistance points to put into expanding your offensive arsenal, so that your Guerrilla Toolkit has several delivery methods, from proximity triggers to strapping pipe bombs or hacking tools to RC cars.

However, over the first couple hours of the game, I made a beeline towards the weird and wonderful array of weapons and the total conversions. Naturally, you can put a laser sight on a marksman rifle or a silencer on an SMG, but that SMG was actually a pistol where you swapped everything out but the handle. These happen on the fly in the field, with a flamethrower that replaces the actual crossbow bit of the crossbow, a limpet mine launcher, the ridiculous red, white and blue showers of sparkles that the Freedom Launcher’s fireworks leave behind… Can I just say how much I love the Freedom Launcher? Who knew guerrilla warfare could be so fabulous?

That silliness isn’t really matched by the story, which is delivered in a more straight laced fashion. Interestingly, the whole backstory to the game has been given the once over, so that while the North Koreans still hold dominion over the US, how they got there is different. Instead of being an extrapolated future, as in the original, the point at which The Revolution’s history diverges from our own has been taken back to the 1970s. What if, it asks, North Korea had managed to become a technological powerhouse after the end of the Korean War? There’s imagery of a Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak-like tech partnership, the unveiling of smartphones and tablets, developed in North Korea for the first time instead of in North America. It’s still somewhat far fetched, but there are certain parallels to Japan’s technological advances in a similar time period, which gives it just that twinge of plausibility.

Of course, it’s thinly veiled parallels to America’s own self assured righteousness in the real work that is its downfall in this alternate reality, with wars in the Middle East that force them to rely more and more on Korean technology and plunge further and further into debt. When they default, North Korea doesn’t bail them out, they simply use a backdoor in every system they sold to the US and switch it all off. Their occupation wasn’t a violent assault, but masked as a humanitarian effort with UN supervision.

There’s some nice ideas in that tale, and from being able to skip through to preview later moments in the campaign, it’s interesting to see the direction that Dambuster are taking this resistance story. It’s not all overwrought bravado and patriotism, but there are moments that can weigh heavily with the morality of what the resistance has to do in order to try and overcome the vastly superior and more numerous forces ahead of them. How far will they go when they are well and truly backed into a corner? How far will the KPA push them?

Sometimes these missions will take place with objectives in the Red and Yellow Zone, but a number of story missions will feature bespoke locations, such as a daring covert assault on a shipyard, to try and hijack a Goliath armoured drone. It’s perhaps not the strongest mission – a few too many of those rough edges of development – but an able demonstration of the different ways that The Revolution will deliver missions to you.

There’s a lot of variety inherent in the way that The Revolution is designed, with the contrasting environments and the different way you have to go about getting around them. Despite the juxtaposition with the serious tone of the story, there’s an emphasis on play, and that’s part of why I’ve remained quite enthusiastic as I’ve seen the game in various forms over the last few years.

Oh, and there’s an arcade machine hidden in a corner of the game where you can play TimeSplitters 2.