Why Homefront is a bad game

It's been a while since I've written one of these. In fact, I left a series on Battlefield vs Call of Duty half-finished. I am done with that now, though! There is a new whipping boy, and his name is Homefront.

For those wondering whether they should pick up this near-future, Korea-Invades-US, Red Dawn Redux FPS, let me save you the trouble: don't.

(The next sections may contain spoilers. But you shouldn't buy the game anyway, so it won't matter...)

It's not that it's bad. I have played worse FPSs in my time. But it is painfully average. And, in some very key respects, it's very broken. Not 'this game is full of bugs' broken, but 'this game is badly designed' broken.

Here are some examples:

Level Design

The levels seem to have been designed to give the impression of space and openness, but are inherently linear in nature. That's fine if the open space naturally leads toward the next section, but in Homefront there are sections of level that lead off in the opposite direction to where you want to be going. Not only is this wasted space (if a large percentage of your level is pointless, then you're better off without it), but it's also potentially confusing for the player. It also makes any firefight that happens in that area more annoying (more on that later).

Scripting/Mission Design

This is what really, really annoyed me. And in many ways prompted this rant. This one if mostly for the designers out there:

If you are going to split up the player from the small squad of 3 soldiers that he was previously with, and if you're going to make the player (as part of the mission design) go to the other side of the map to them, and if said group of soldiers then end up waiting at the mission end point, and there's a platoons of enemies in between the player and the squad, and if you're going to force the player to fight through all of those enemies in order to get to the squad, do not have the squad telling the player to 'Hurry up' because the squad is 'taking fire'.

You know what, squad? There's 3 of you. There's one of me. YOU SENT ME TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MAP IN THE FIRST PLACE. And, despite the fact you 'are being overrun', you're making me fight through the very enemies you are complaining about. And I even have to kill an extra few on the way.

That just doesn't make any sense on any level. You want me to hurry, because you're being attacked. But I have to kill my way through those same enemies to get to you. And you're expecting me, on my own, to kill my through despite the fact that, seemingly, the three of you can't deal with it? Last time I checked, 1< 3.

This is just some bad, bad script writing. And it really pisses me off.

And another thing: objective markers are there to let the player know where to go next. It is not big or clever to put an objective marker somewhere that is designed to draw their vision to a particular point in order for the enemy to get the drop on him.

At one point, I was guided to some doors. I ran right up to those doors, for they were my mission objective, expecting to be able to interact with them in order to get inside, to where I knew my next objective was. The next thing I knew, I was being shot in the side and I was dead. Enemies had spawned on both my flanks while I was staring at a wooden door. Because the game gave no indication that there was danger about, and every indication that where I was supposed to be was in the firing line for two enemies that spawned to the side of me.

It later transpired that killing one of these enemies seemed to trigger the door opening. Although perhaps it didn't open first time because I was standing in the way of them. It's hard to tell. Either way, the game directed me to a point, and then cheaply shot me in the back. This happened more than once (sometimes as a result of the poor level design).

It doesn't make your game 'too easy' or 'too dumbed down' if you lead the player toward each enemy, so the player is always facing their attackers. It just makes your game well designed. And if you absolutely have to attack the player from behind or the sides, give some audio/visual clue to it happening, so the player has time to react. If your game is completed by the player dying repeatedly and learning the spawn locations for each enemy for each part of a level, you have failed.

Combat/AI/Your Friends

I mentioned earlier the poor level design. This impacts the game on a number of ways. The most annoying of this is in the AI.

It seems in all games of this nature, there are unwritten rules, so that:

a) your allies are always dumb, and unable to shoot,
b) on the highest difficulty level your enemies are all crack shots and will always shoot you all the time, ignoring even seemingly immediate threats,
c) even your allies are often unaware of how to progress through a mission.

The poor ally AI and the open level design meant that often I would be flanked by enemies that, by rights, should have been shot by my allies. In some cases, they ran right past each other in order to get to me.

Or I'd be hunkered behind cover, taking pot shots at other enemies, safe in the knowledge that my AI allies had my back. Only they didn't. And often let enemies through to kill me from behind. They literally may as well not have been there. At least going in solo wouldn't give me the false hope that someone had my back.

Stupid allies/killer AI also manifested itself in a very amusing way on what I believe to be the final level of the game. As my laptop was booting up, and indeed as I started writing this, my game was happily running without me. I was, at the time, hunkered on a flatbed truck, behind some cover, while the tanks that I was rolling with were supposed to destroy some light armour.

For between 90 seconds and 2 minutes, I just sat staring off into nothing while the AI fought without me. I was waiting for the dialogue cue that told me the Humvees had been destroyed and it was safe for me to press on. I was forced in to doing this because the heavy machine guns on the Humvees always target me, and are crack shots (as mentioned above), and are heavy machine guns. Even a split second out of cover would see me lose most of my life, if not kill me outright. That split second out of cover is not enough to actually do anything useful (like kill enemies), so I found myself doing nothing.

I knew I could not destroy those vehicles myself; that's why the tanks were there. And I knew the tanks would kill them eventually. It was only a matter of when. Unfortunately, these tanks seemed to have a very odd idea about threat leves. I can only assume, from my hidey-hole, that they were aiming for anything but the lightly armoured vehicles, because it took them quite a while (up to two minutes!) to eventually destroy them. But I had nothing if not time. I could hide there all day.

But I shouldn't have to. If your enemies are going to aim exclusively for me, rather than attempting to put fire on the tank, or other allies, and if when they shoot they're going to injure me to the point where I feel the need to cower until all threats are taken care of, don't make your large, heavily armed tank take 90 seconds to kill one Humvee. That's. Just. Stupid.

And I'm sure there are other things, too. The story isn't fantastically interesting. The characters are almost all completely annoying (and the few that aren't either die early on, or actually change their character part way through).

There are good things, though! Health regeneration is nice and fast, so you aren't hiding for half the fight like in recent Call of Duty/Medal of Honor games.

Er...

It's short, so you don't have to put up with it for long.

...

Can't really think of many others.

So it's frustrating and annoying, and falls in to the same traps as every other modern console FPS, while managing to fall harder and more awkwardly. The things it doesn't do badly, it does averagely.

If you haven't played it yet, save yourself the bother.