After Modern Warfare’s breakthrough success with blockbuster emotional manipulation, the stakes of similar games rapidly escalated. When Infinity Ward themselves needed to up the ante for Modern Warfare 2, they went for an invasion of American suburbia, craters and armoured vehicles next to houses flying the stars and stripes. Without the reputation or budget to compare, THQ subsidiary Kaos Studios needed to do something even more attention-grabbing for their own FPS Homefront. What they came up with was subjecting the US to a hostile near-future occupation, introduced via a combination of real video and mocked-up news footage. Rather than following the military, its action has your main character recruited into a homespun resistance movement, a small but crucial piece of the turning tide of war. It’s far from the only way in which Homefront operates from an even more limited perspective than the average war shooter.
The action starts with you being ferried around on a bus. You get to hear and see someone shot dead in front of their young child, every anguished moment audible at a volume rather higher than the distance would suggest. In its smallness, it is distressingly horrible in a way few games manage. There are more hints that there was an attempt to stand out through being serious and grim. A couple of hours later you find yourself having to hide in a mass grave, rendered in similar detail. Even by that point, though, the horror feels more typically ostentatious, not least because you need to have killed a mass grave’s worth of enemy soldiers to reach that point.
The shooting has little to make it stand out beyond the setting. You sprint and duck behind cover and occasionally snipe your way through the usual prescriptive set-pieces. Homefront is a very short and linear game, even if the lines are through gardens with overturned fences as one way ramps. Eventually you get to fly a helicopter on a ridiculous trip through a tunnel, and fight your way across the Golden Gate Bridge, any sense of small-scale realism abandoned completely.
Before that, the early stages have some weirdly half-hearted walking simulator bits where you can experience the hard-won peace and humanity of the resistance’s base before it gets ripped away. Mostly those bits are an annoyance of unclear objectives and waiting around for people to amble their way ahead of you. Even more detrimentally to the intended effect, when things do flip, the game has little to say about it, as it drives you onwards to action. The squad’s reaction to the death of the resistance leader Boone gets barely as much screentime and emotion as the loss of their remote-controlled armoured vehicle.
This lack of depth is widespread, and even more apparent when it comes to the enemy, the Greater Korean Republic. In the game’s timeline, after Kim Jong-un came to power in North Korea (an event which had not yet happened at the time of its release), he managed to reunite the peninsula in 2015. Korea then expanded further in Asia before invading the US, setting us up for the game’s events in 2027. Homefront provides the soldiers of the Korean Republic with less characterisation and motivation than, say, the aliens in Resistance: Fall of Man. It does have a bit where the Korean-American member of your team gets to respond to racist abuse with “I was born in Oakland, asshole”, and another bit around some burning buildings where a squad member says “I thought I smelled Korean barbecue” and another says his name in weary shock. Having successfully given the both sides treatment to racism, the game returns its focus to plentiful killing.
The whole Korean invasion concept seems confusingly under-utilised until it comes to the one place where the game does fill in a bit more depth. In the few deviations from the path you can find, there are collectible newspapers, handily abandoned over a twenty year period. Each one you pick up gives you an article, and those gradually fill in Homefront’s alternate history. They are very short on explanation of some elements, like how Kim Jong-un ends up winning cross-Korea democratic elections by 2017. Predictably, they have a lot more to say on the American side of things.
“United States begins phased withdrawal from Middle East”. “US Military to scale back, refocus”. “US Pacific Fleet consolidated to Pearl Harbor”. There are other fictional stops along the way to invasion, including a devastating pandemic in 2021, but the narrative is clear. It’s summarised on the radio towards the game’s end. “Once upon a time in America, our military was a well-oiled, well-funded machine, capable of projecting massive power anywhere in the world. The crumbling of our nation, finished with the hammer blows of a cunning enemy, changed all that”.
It’s a familiar destination: justification of American military might as right and necessary. By getting there through an inverted route, not showing that strength but catastrophising about what might happen if it was ever to be relaxed. It also starts out with real footage of Hillary Clinton talking about North Korea, the better to set its cautionary tale as a real fear, the xenophobia and exceptionalism stronger and more pernicious than ever. That is ultimately the only way in which Homefront stands out from an increasingly busy crowd.
Top of the charts for week ending 19 March 2011:
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