Become A Guerrilla In Homefront: The Revolution’s Co-operative Multiplayer

For all its storied time in development, Homefront: The Revolution’s setting remains relatively unique and interesting. It plays to the underdog mentality, while maintaining the USA as the country of all that is good and righteous, but for the seriousness of waging a guerrilla war campaign on home soil, it’s not afraid to go for the outlandish and unusual.

The co-op side of the game, for example, goes against modern trends. Instead of integrating the co-op gameplay into the story campaign itself, allowing for friends to drop in alongside you in the open world structure, Dambuster have created a separate entity that stands on its own.

Admittedly, it loses some of the freedom of the open world in the process, and while you’re still dropped into the same open environments, the twelve missions included in the game at launch give you clear objectives to work towards. It could be a quick attack to try and realign some satellite uplinks, holding the line so that the resistance can evacuate a safe house, or a daring raid on a Nork facility – yes, the in-game slang for the North Koreans is “Norks” – to steal a pair of armoured trucks.

Even with four of you stood side-by-side, the odds are still stacked against you, with the overwhelming weight of the KPA forces often brought to bear. It’s not just weight of numbers which make things difficult, as the regular and randomised patrols which occur during the single player game can come at you here as well.

You don’t have recharging health bars, for another thing, making health kits a vital resource to avoid being downed and burdening your teammates – though it doesn’t take too much damage to knock you onto your backside anyway. If you don’t pay attention, it’s also very easy to find yourself without the basic ammunition and tools that you need to keep on fighting, so you’re constantly having to loot bodies for ammo and dashing toward recently destroyed vehicles to get the elements you need for your Guerrilla Toolkit.

A nice touch as you start off on your path to becoming a battle hardened guerrilla fighter is the ability to choose your character’s background. There’s a simply huge list of different professions, with everything from teachers and lawyers, to hucksters, baristas, personal shoppers, and carneys. It simultaneously gives you the feeling that the resistance is made up of ordinary people from all walks of life, as well as giving you a small degree of personalisation and a certain boost to your character in one way or another.

Of course, it really is just the starting point, and you’ll earn experience as you complete missions which can be funnelled into choosing skills from the Brains, Brawn, Fighter, and Survivor categories. With our team of four lacking a little cohesion and getting too separated at times, I felt it wise to invest in reducing the time it took for me to revive a teammate, for example.

There’s more to your character growth than just experience, though, and Homefront wants to keep you coming back and replay those missions time and again in order to earn Resistance Crates, answering one of the question marks over the appeal of retreading the same ground more than a few times. They borrow the FIFA Ultimate Team card packs model to deliver everything from cosmetic clothing items, to the necessary attachments for making some of the game’s more outlandish weaponry.

You can swap weapon parts on the fly, so that while you might go into battle with a bolt action rifle, it very quickly becomes the Freedom Launcher, which sends fireworks straight for your enemies, leaving a vibrant shower of red, white and blue sparks. This aligns itself so well with the basics of the Guerrilla Toolkit, which allows you to put together molotov cocktails or throwable hacking devices to temporarily turn KPA drones to fight alongside you, or strap and explosive to the back of an RC car for a very precise form of bomb delivery.

While it would be nice to be able to jump into the open world areas of the the single player with a few friends alongside you, that form of co-op can end up as an aimless foray into chaos. With a more guided experience that still tries to keep the essence of the single player, Homefront: The Revolution could be on to a winner.

Check back a little later today for a video look at Homefront: The Revolution’s co-op in action. It’s worth it just for the fireworks…