Yet another mediocre game with amazing marketing!

User Rating: 5.5 | Homefront PC
Boy oh boy, THQ definitely missed the train with this one! How could they have messed it up this bad?! I mean, THQ isn't exactly some small-time new player in the industry, so I wonder who or what contributed to such a mediocre effort in taking a first-rate quality plot, coupled with exceptional opportunities and yet decide that this game was good enough to publish as it turned out to be. The opening movie is phenomenal - but as exciting as that was, the game turns out to be the opposite. Well, in saying that, I admit that there were parts that I enjoyed. But, in every single instance I felt that it could have been way better. There were even some parts that were totally missed which would have been absolutely awesome to see in this game. Such as, more tunnel fighting, more espionage, more covert stuff - but this game suffers from the exact same misunderstanding of guerrilla warfare as what Call of Duty did with Black Ops - both games have completely neglected to take into account the nature of their respective plots. The weapons in this game were all first rate quality military issues - and while I get that they picked up dropped Korean stuff (and some domestic weapons), why not have some strange "home made" things also? To truly set a distinguishing factor between the brute force of sheer military power versus the underground resistance.

This game felt a lot more like a rail-shooter than I think it should have been. It felt so restrictive that it carried the hallmark of a truly low budget piece of work. The A.I. are dumb, oh my God, how terrible! Soldiers hiding behind pipes and hand-railings - and by that I mean that there was just the one hand-railing ... yes, that surely protected them. :S Using Goliath was a pain! After each shot you had to reactivate the view - and even though the reticule was red and you were pressing the fire button, it wouldn't fire unless you clicked a 2nd time - odd, it just didn't feel like a well deployed idea, though, that was yet another great idea they messed up.

The graphics are a little hard to explain. Some parts look good and modern, but others reminded me of old games. The textures in some instances were 2003 quality. Yes, I'm serious. But, to be fair, there are some nice parts I admit were impressive. The voice acting is typical and unimpressive, though it has it strong points. The ending was so abrupt that it left me actually going through the entire credits just to see if perhaps there would be some short post-stage, like an end teaser or something. Nope. I wonder if someone actually quit around that stage of development because in all honesty, not even a bad game ends that way - or, another possibility is that the accounting department actually consolidated their financial statements and realized that they ran out of money so they sent out a memo telling the guys and gals in programming to wrap it up by 5 p.m. No way that anyone creative or artsy (or anyone who actually had some pride in their work) would ever settle with an ending like this. I know the inner workings of management, and i guarantee that this was some last minute fiasco involved with the way this game ends. And if you think I'm spending way too much time on this one point, you'll appreciate it better once you finish the game.

I was really looking forward to this game, but I feel really disappointed in it. Ah, one really interesting component of the game are the collectibles which provide a fictional (sometimes actual) news bits of what led to the turn of events we're witnessing in the game. Some stuff were really frightening because they are really happening in the World, and it's so easy to imagine a lot of it leading to something much, much worse down the line. If you want a bit of depth to the whole experience, I highly encourage you to seek these out and read them! Once you read a few, you'll actually find them really appealing and you'll be actively seeking them out. This is perhaps the single one idea that THQ got perfectly!