Homefront: The Revolution Reviews
Homefront: The Revolution is barely optimized enough, designed well enough, QA tested enough or balanced well-enough from a gameplay perspective to even be declared finished.
As you can see from this review, video game journalism isn't all fun and games. Sometimes my job is to play bad games so you don't have to. Homefront: The Revolution is one of those games.
Above all, the problem with Homefront: The Revolution is that it, like so many others before it, presumes that whatever freedom is is obvious and transparent, and so can simply be acquired in a transaction like any other.
Homefront's few smart concepts are crushed under the weight of constant glitches and other problems
Homefront: The Revolution is a collection of good ideas ruined by a rushed release, lack of polish and hugely disappointing technical performance.
Homefront: The Revolution wears its troubled design and its unattainable ambition like a scar. There's a decent game hidden in its core, but it would take too much work to turn the Revolution in to something worthy of attention.
"In a market where games such DOOM run at a mighty and smooth 60FPS, technical weakness isn't something gamers will accept or tolerate after parting with their hard earned cash. Sadly, a large percentage of paying customers will be turned off by Homefront: The Revolution's technical issues."
Players who manage to get past the technical issues will find themselves saddled with a generic, emotionless game.
Homefront may look pretty, but it's a monotonous and confused slog.
Homefront: The Revolution is a reboot of a mostly acceptable game. A reboot that brings about nauseating visuals, lackluster combat, and a dull narrative. An impressive customization feature is far from enough to save this sad installment.
With its open-world environment and emphasis on crafting, this is an interesting sequel, marred by glitches and frame rate issues
Homefront: The Revolution started with troubled development and has obviously suffered greatly with changing teams, developers, and ultimately publishers throughout it's lifetime, an issue encountered by a great many games over the past few years. In amongst a largely broken and unoptimised game I was still able to find some fun, albeit it shortlived.
Two steps forward, one step back. I want to like Homefront Revolution more than I do. It's got a good heart and some solid ideas buried behind the mess, and most players won't be willing to put up with it. Those that do will find some solid moments of gameplay strewn throughout, but if it's worth their time is ultimately up to them.
Much like the internal woes that befell titles such as Duke Nukem Forever, it is unknown if Homefront: The Revolution would have benefitted from some stability behind the scenes. What is known is that the result is a title with some potential that was never fully realized for one reason or another. The idea of running guerrilla-style missions and liberating areas in an open Philadelphia may not be new, but it remains appealing. The missions, however, are rather monotonous, and the game drags on due to the lack of a solid story and characters backing it up. The multiplayer meets the same fate, since the co-op experience is dulled by a lack of level variety. Coupled with a number of bugs and other technical issues, it's difficult to enjoy The Revolution since the beginning of the year was unusually crowded with quality titles.
If it wasn't for the bugs and the awful graphical optimization, Homefront: The Revolution certainly would deserve more and it's one of the rare cases in which a sequel is better than the predecessor.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Homefront: The Revolution is game that starts with a lot of potential, but fails to deliver. Given time it can be easy to get used to, but the amount of bugs and framerate drops in the game can make you put it down.
Review in Arabic | Read full review
Homefront: The Revolution was one of the worst games I've played and the open world style of play did not function well for it.
Overall, the general story can sometime be a hit or a miss, with some scenes really drawing me further into the world while others completely disengaged me. The characters are fine and some even have unique personalities but their development is never taken very far. The protagonist (Ethan) never speaks in the game, which is something that I'm generally not much of a fan of since it disengages me from the story in my personal experiences. There are often moments that seem very much like 1984's Red Dawn or 2012's film of the same name, both of which I'm a fan of and I feel that there was a lot of potential that wasn't fully realized in the finished game.
A creative, open-ended game rich in emergent gameplay that's sadly spoiled by technical problems.
Homefront isn't really a terrible game, and if you're a diehard fan of Red Dawn or Far Cry, I'm sure you'll find something here for you.