Homefront: The Revolution – a definite improvement

The US has been invaded and you have to fight a guerilla war to liberate it, in the new open world shooter from the creators of TimeSplitters.

It must be frustrating when the first question (or second in our case) anyone ever asks you about your game is why you ever bothered to make it. But creating a follow-up to 2011’s Homefront does seem an odd thing to want to do, given how little impact it made in terms of critical or commercial success. But having now played the game, and spoken to one of its developers, we’re glad that all involved has stuck with it.



It certainly would’ve been understandable if the project had just been quietly cancelled, as it’s suffered a string of bad luck from the beginning. It was forced to switch publishers after the collapse of THQ, while the developer had to change their name yet again after being bought by new publisher Deep Silver. A long (long) time ago the team were known as Free Radical Design, when they worked on cult classic TimeSplitters, so it’s both a relief to find they’re still going and that they haven’t lost their ability to make a good first person shooter.

As senior narrative designer C.J. Kershner explains to us in our interview, this isn’t really a direct sequel to the first game but more of a reboot using the same basic concept. That concept being that North Korea has invaded the US and you’re a member of the resistance opposing them. Obviously that’s completely ludicrous in terms of geopolitical realism, but the idea is that this is an alternative future where North Korea became a highly advanced nation following the Korean War of the early ’50s.


Plausibility is not really the concern though, as apart from aliens invading there’s not really any scenario that makes sense in terms of the US being occupied by another country. The idea is simply that the set-up makes for a good setting for a video game, and the demo we got to play certainly seems to bear that out. It was set in a red zone area, where civilians are shot on sight, and involved us trying to patch in to the enemy’s communications systems.

Homefront: The Revolution – help free the land of the free

It’s immediately obvious that the game is very much aware of the Ubisoft formula, and although it doesn’t follow it as closely as some games we’re still basically going on a mission to fill up our map with little quest icons. The reality of doing so is a lot more interesting than that suggests though, as we jump aboard a motorbike and start tearing around the city, doing jumps and pretending we’re a BMX bandit (kind of).



Motorbikes are a difficult thing to get right in any game, least of all a first person shooter, but this handles perfectly and we almost don’t want to get off. Especially as it makes avoiding the patrols and drone craft a lot easier. The game is set in 2029 and although your tech seems very much of the current day the North Koreans have very sci-fi looking dropships and floating camera drones, who are always looking to scan you and call in troops to your location.

The atmosphere is oddly reminiscent of the future war sequences from the first two (i.e. non-terrible) Terminator films, as you try to avoid a technologically superior foe and fight back using guerilla tactics. Patching into the communications system proves to be fairly easy, at which point more of our resistance chums start to appear – although in practical terms nothing else changes.

This is brought home when we’re spotted by a drone and enemy soldiers start to chase us through the streets. This is great too though, as the game very much encourages running and hiding rather than always trying to fight your way out of trouble. Which is a welcome change of pace from most shooters. The game’s cover system emphasises that this isn’t an enemy you can take on on equal terms and we come away suitable impressed with the whole experience.

Whether the game can keep up the tension for its whole running time, and how the gameplay differs in the other zones, we don’t yet know but the demo certainly has us excited to play the full thing. Which is not something we would’ve expected to say if you’d asked us about the prospect of a Homefront sequel back in 2011.


Formats: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC

Publisher: Deep Silver

Developer: Deep Silver Dambuster

Release Date: 2016

GC: I hate it when there’s an obvious question that I know everyone must’ve been asking you already.

CK: [laughs]

GC: Actually, there are two here I guess. So I’ll start with whether you’re worried that you’re going to get hacked by North Korea? Like Sony did with The Interview.

CK: Well, there’s conflicting reports on whether they’re behind that Sony incident.

GC: Yeah, they say they didn’t do it and everyone else says they did.

CK: [laughs] It hasn’t happened yet. The game has been publicised now for over a year, so.. fingers crossed.

GC: Have you taken any special precautions?

CK: No. We haven’t taken special precautions.

GC: Are you sure you want me to put that in the write-up?

CK: [laughs]

GC: The other obvious question is why continue with Homefront as a franchise? I don’t mean that as a slight against the game, but more why you’d want to be associated with that existing IP.

CK: It’s a fair question. I think that the original game perhaps didn’t live up to the power of the concept. And I think it’s the concept that keeps people talking about it, even now. It keeps people excited about it and keeps attracting publisher interest in it.

GC: But why make a sequel to a game nobody really cared about, when you could’ve create your own new IP with the same basic concept or try to get the Red Dawn licence or something.


CK: For what it’s worth, I think it’s important to distinguish that Homefront: The Revolution is not a direct sequel to the original game. It’s a completely new setting, new backstory, all-new characters; it really has very little connection to the original game. I think, again, that concept of occupied America, that is contained within the idea, is what people find powerful and keep coming back to.

Homefront: The Revolution – we hope there is a BMX in it

GC: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, so I’ll just ask simply what other games were you taking influence from here?

CK: I think if you look at open world games in general they have sort of a common DNA, and I think we are definitely a strand of that DNA. So, you’ll find a lot of very similar, or familiar, features and mechanics in Homefront: The Revolution. But you’ll also find a lot of things that you won’t find anywhere else.

GC: To be honest I was going to suggest Half-Life 2. As soon as I got on the bike that’s what I was reminded of.

CK: Actually, I can say that Half-Life 2 has been a huge inspiration for the team. And it’s not just the bike but also the City 17 of Half-Life 2 and the Philadelphia in our game are almost sister cities, in some ways.

GC: But as you’ve intimated there are a lot of open world games now, and most of them follow the Ubisoft formula to the letter. Your game already has the climb-up-somewhere-high-and-fill-in-your-map bit.

CK: Obviously in our demo we are showing the map reveal, because it’s a great way to introduce new players to see all the things that you can do in your immediate surroundings. One of the concepts that’s a little more subtle, that is not easily communicated in a quick three second clip, is that when you do capture that data transceiver, and you reveal your immediate surroundings and that section of the map goes blue, you haven’t captured that block of buildings. It’s not like you can walk out on the street now and there’s no patrols, and everything is sunshine and friendship.

There will still be enemy foot patrols and vehicle patrols and drones in the air. What you’ve done is make it easier for the resistance to operate in that sphere of influence. And then you’re sort of connecting those spheres of influence and gaining more in each zone. And you’ll see the world change to reflect that. So, you’ll see more pro-resistance posters on the walls. You’ll see people have spray-painted over the official occupation curfew postings and things like that. You’ll see the people becoming more disobedient in the streets as well.

Homefront: The Revolution – maybe North Korea actively likes the idea of a US invasion sim

GC: So if that was the red zone, how do the other zones work?

CK: The red zone is a no-go area for civilians, it’s shoot on site. Which is why as soon as the enemy sees you they immediately engage in combat. We also have yellow zones, which we’re not talking about too much today, but it’s where the majority of the civilian population lives. And It’s not a shoot-on-site zone. So the gameplay there is very, very different. It’s much more cat and mouse, as opposed to the running street battles that you’re finding in the red zone demo from today.

GC: A lot of open world games also have the concept of liberating a city or area, everything from Far Cry to Batman, but it always seems very artificial. The way suddenly whole blocks of a city change from total control to freedom simply because you beat up a couple of bad guys. While the rest of the occupied areas completely ignore you.

CK: I think the way that you set the context of the objectives does an enormous amount to make it feel less artificial. So for example, in our demo we also have a number of other strike points that you can complete and it’s not anything as arbitrary as ‘Climb up to this thing and flip the switch’. It’s, ‘We’ve got this train yard and there’s a generator in it somewhere. Find it, restore power to the train yard, and that allows us to move supplies into the area’. And again you get more resistance presence on the streets. You start to see the world change around you.

Or, as another example, there’s a block of apartment buildings that overlook a very important intersection, that are filled with snipers. So if you go in there, you eliminate all of the snipers, you claim that apartment block as resistance territory and you have a bit more control over that intersection. That to me feels a lot less game-y than ‘I’ve just flipped the tile on my map from red to blue’.

Homefront: The Revolution – the beta starts this year on Xbox One

GC: In terms of multiplayer what have you announced so far?

CK: We’ve announced that we’re going to be doing a four-player co-operative multiplayer mode and that’ll be coming to Xbox One exclusively this winter. The beta that is. You and your friends can join up, form a resistance cell, go out on missions, complete objectives.

GC: Is that within the campaign map?

CK: That is a separate experience. But we’ll reveal more about that in the coming weeks and months.

GC: I assume there’ll be other vehicles? I hope so, because I really liked that motorbike.

CK: The bike is basically all we’re showing off for now. One of the nice things is that the game doesn’t really restrict you in where you can go with it, if you want to drive it into a stairwell or onto the roof you can do that. Sometimes there’ll be a jump to another rooftop or a pipe that connects to another building and you can drive on the top of buildings, which I think is something that is generally discouraged in polite society.

GC: I’ve seen James Bond do it.

CK: Exactly, if he can do it. But you are… also not quite James Bond.

GC: [angrily] What?

PR women: [considerable laughter]

CK: [back-peadling] No, not you personally! I just meant you as a player! [laughs]

PR women: [still laughing]

CK: I meant in terms of James Bond could walk into a room filled with eight guards, kill seven of them and literally charm the pants off the final one.

PR: woman: That’s my made day.

CK: I’m sorry! Oh my goodness. [laughs] That’s going to be the headline, isn’t it? ‘Your are not James Bond!’ [laughs] So yeah, motorbikes are great.

GC: This interview is over! [laughs]

CK: [laughs] Thanks, thanks a lot.

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