Homefront: The Revolution Review

Written by: Adam "ManKorn" Korenman, CC2K Video Games Editor

People, places, things

One area that runs a little rough is the character development. Your character, Brady, is a faceless, voiceless murder-bot. You’re never given much of an explanation for your soldierly skills, or your overall motivations (aside from being an American in an occupied America). Worse still are your psychotic companions. In an early sequence, you are captured by resistance fighters. You followed a breadcrumb trail into the subway, jumped down into an abandoned station, and were immediately beaten to within an inch of your life. Then, a Hot Topic employee sits on your lap and sadistically taunts you with a knife, saying she’s going to enjoy hearing you screams. Five seconds later, all is forgiven and you’re on board with this group of psychopaths.

Look, I get it. Writing is hard. Writing characters and dialogue is harder. Making it all believable and interesting is downright maddening. But laying on these cliched tropes of “rebel soldiers,” especially when you’re supposed to be rooting for these guys, feels a bit lazy. I honestly could not tell you the names of the other characters in this story without looking them up. They are all just roving bags of meat waiting to die to “move the story forward.”

Mostly, after a few hours of stabbing the enemy and blowing up checkpoints, I just found myself pulled out of the story so much that it didn’t really matter. The NPCs on the street barely had enough personality to protect, and the enemy was presented as 80% robotic so I wouldn’t feel bad mowing them down by the truckload. Compared to other games in the genre, or especially to the stellar Spec Ops: The Line, there really isn’t much meat on the bones here.