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Around the time of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2's release, the gaming industry saw this huge explosion of games each trying to get a piece of the pie that Call of Duty had delivered.

Medal of Honor came up with its own take on modern warfare and hell even Bioshock 2 of all games got a multiplayer mode. From the early 2010s, the gaming industry saw the rise of all the games that wanted to butt heads with Call of Duty as the next trending multiplayer first person shooter game. 

All all the countless shooters that tried to emulate the success and formula that Modern Warfare 2 brought to the table, Homefront by THQ in my opinion was one of few games that didn't just emulate but actually improved and actually contributed something unique to the then growing pool of shooters all trying to do the same thing.

The Story

In concept the setting of Homefront's single player campaign is very intriguing but unfortunately its somewhat generic characters and linear on rails delivery does not explore the potential of the game world quite as well as its sequel. 

In summary, North Korea has invaded and occupied both the eastern and middle portions of the United States. The player takes control of Robert Jacobs, a former United States Marine, fighting his way through the Midwest and eventually participating in the Battle of San Francisco. 

Now while the game is no Crisis the graphics are still serviceable and the color direction really helps to add to that desolate post World War 3 vibe. The developers did a great job of transforming the urban, metropolitan, and rural parts of the United States into Korean occupied areas and it was really exciting to battle through the once quiet streets of the United States, a mainland nation that has never once been invaded outside of fictional history. Sure, the concept is a little derivative of the U.S. army missions from Modern Warfare 2 and 3 but with a larger emphasis on guerrilla tactics and smaller settings like the suburbs and  rural towns becoming battlefields between the remnants of the U.S. army and the Koreans. It all adds to a greater sense of immersion and, I suppose, coziness to the environments your thrown in, which in the end made the battles in the campaign a lot more compelling for me than the over the top military power showcase that was Modern Warfare 2 (Which, don't get me wrong, I still love). 

Now while Modern Warfare 2 and 3 did a far better job with its characters being more memorable and iconic, however sometimes I just wanted to see the war from a more grounded level and at the end of the day with Homefront, it was really just neat to see the conflict through the eyes of more civilian characters.

The Multiplayer

Perhaps the bigger selling point of the game, the multiplayer on the surface just looks like a Call of Duty clone with ever so slightly inferior visuals. This, while partially true, would be an irresponsible conclusion to arrive for the game.

What Homefront did was essentially take the winning concepts of Call of Duty, and its fiercest rival, Battlefield, and melded them together in a multiplayer experience that, for me was 75 hours of nothing but good memories. 

From Battlefield, Homefront borrows these ideas:

1. Large scale maps to serve as, well, battlefields

2. Drivable vehicles

3. Emphasis on team play and support gadgets

And from Call of Duty:

1. User friendly gunplay and movement

2. "Killstreak" rewards to give a sense of accomplishment

3. Fast paced, easy to get into gameplay

To this day Homefront has, I would go as far to say, the best killstreak system I have ever seen in any competitive multiplayer gamemode, and you can bet your hide that is saying a lot.

See, in Call of Duty the emphasis has always been on infantry combat with players able to earn the opportunity to sit in the gunners seat of a helicopter or call in an airstrike on enemy positions. Battlefield players would argue however that having vehicles just being part of the map allows for more fair play as it doesn't really make sense for a player who is already on a role with his firearm to be further rewarded with a weapon of mass destruction. While Battlefield's vehicles are balanced to allow infantry to still stand a chance with several tanks and light attack cars in play, Call of Duty's kill-streak rewards are often time easy to use or control air support craft, packing devastating levels of firepower. While the fun factor there for both, Call of Duty's streaks are arguable more fun because of their ease of use, destructive efficiency due to being inherently overpowered, and sense of accomplishment that they bestow. Battlefield on the other hand allows a larger variety of vehicles to play with, ranging from LAVs to jets and helicopters, even attack boats on certain maps.

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Coming back to Homefront, the game pulls the genius move of having the best of both worlds when it comes to the killstreak system. Drivable vehicles and air strikes are earned through streak rewards. As a matter of fact Homefront improves this system even further by making rewards earned not exclusively through kills but points you accumulate by contributing to the team effort. 

This system not only satisfies all parties but also balances out the multiplayer experience as well, allowing both skilled players and newbies to have a good time and earn their streaks. Homefront see, has an in game economy like Counter Strike. Team actions like kills, spotting enemies, and capturing areas all earn points which you can spend on a surprisingly rich list of modern warfare hardware and goodies. Do you want to be more of a team player that supports your team like a CIA agent? Go ahead and spend your points on a recon drone, UAV scan, or anti-air ground drone. Do you wanna hammer the enemy hard with vehicles? Are you hot off a Battlefield game? Go ahead and spend your points on a Apache chopper or an M1 Abrams tank. Are you hot of Call of Duty and wanna focus on infantry combat and not bother with vehicles taking you out of that soldier to soldier action? Go ahead and spend your points on mortar and white phosphorous strikes.

Homefront's battlepoint system has all the fun of Call of Duty's but minus the frustration. Nobody likes it when they die one or two kills off their helicopter because of lag, random mines, a camper, or some other horse crap. Sure Call of Duty Black Ops 2 tried to fix this with their own score streak system but you still lost your score on death so in the end it was really no different. Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 and Call of Duty Ghosts both had a support streak roster (streak rewards in which progress toward is not lost upon death), however to balance the fact that they were easier to earn, the rewards were typically pretty lame compared to the assault streaks and were unfairly labeled as the "Streak rewards for noobs". 

Homefront's system does away with all those frustrations simply by allowing the player to accumulate points over the course of a match and spend them as they see fit in the spawn screen. There isn't as much pressure to stay alive and doesn't encourage people to hardcore camp for streak rewards, allowing people, quite simply just play the game without these nagging anxieties. If you suck with your aim its really ok because you can earn your points by shooting down drones with rocket launchers, capturing flags, and scanning enemies with drones. And like I said the variety of streak rewards is really something that exceeded my expectations, especially for a title that probably had a fraction of the budget and marketing of a Call of Duty game. There are remote control drones with machine guns, drones with heat seeking missiles, Humvees with miniguns, thermal googles to make snipers even more deadly, and as I mentioned before, tanks that are easy to handle weapons of mass destruction like Call of Duty streak rewards, not the, while realistic, clumsy and sometimes underwhelming tanks of Battlefield. 

 Multiplayer Weapons

Now while the weapons variety is just ok. The balance is actually handled quite well. The guns all are easy to handle and all have this sort of faded look to them, which adds to the overall resistance and post World War 3 vibe of the game world. 

One small thing that I will differently not shut up about is the knife attack. When your player is within the appropriate range your character automatically plunges his knife without fail on button press. This seems like a tiny thing to be enthusiastic about but considering how inconsistent the melee attack is in many Call of Duty and Battlefield games, this quick and auto lock on melee attack, supplemented with a satisfying animation and sound effect really is just one less thing to grind your gears or give you anxiety. I mean really its just stupid how terrible the knife attack was in Black Ops 2. If you ask anyone whose played the game they will sigh and likely have a fair number of instances to share in which their character just lunged an inch off their target and struck at thin air. Or perhaps their knife just passed through the enemy as if they were a ghost. If anything just copy the knife mechanics of Homefront into your next Call of Duty game Activision, I really shouldn't have to sweat when I move into CQC because I'm worried if I'm about to have another phantom knife moment. 

Multiplayer Maps

Like the campaign setting the maps in this game's multiplayer mode have this great post war aesthetic to them. Too many competitive games take place in environments that could easily have been from another modern military shooter. I mean sure Homefront's maps are just urban and rural environments with some post apocalyptic run down buildings and set pieces thrown in but its still different enough to actually stand out in a good way and is consistent with the world set up by the single player. 

Once again Homefront combines the winning concepts of Call of Duty and Battlefield together by having maps that are bigger than Call of Duty's but not too big where it slows down the action or overwhelms new players. While the structures aren't destructible they are still more traversable and dynamic than Call of Duty's maps. Helicopters would grant you access to rooftops and vantage points your wouldn't otherwise have access to and the play area on the map moves based on which side is winning akin to the way the defenders in Battlefield's rush mode are pushed back to another section of the map that was previously inaccessible, which really helps to keep the gameplay fresh within the same match.

Closing Thoughts

While the sequel to Homefront, Homefront: The Revolution, did bring out the potential of the alternate historical setting, a large part of me really wished they had brought back the competitive multiplayer that was just so kick ass. Its a shame that this game was just written off as a mediocre Call of Duty clone when in reality it actually greatly improved the formula it was trying to emulate with real clever and innovative design choices to single player and even more so the multiplayer. 

Its a shame that only a handful of players still touch this game on a daily basis and THQ shut down the servers a few years ago. While it is unlikely that the franchise will ever climb out of the ashes, my hope is that other multiplayer focused shooters or developers of those type of games will borrow the great ideas that Homefront brought to the multiplayer and continue to seek to break into a market that seems to be dominated by only two franchises.

My Personal Score: 9/10