Homefront offers large scale vehicle combat intertwined with infantry in a range of different environments that pit a unified Korean army against the United States. Most people will find
everyone comparing Homefront to multiplayer mega franchises like the Battlefield (BF) or Call of Duty (CoD), other popular First Person Shooter (FPS) games like Medal of Honor (MoH) or Frontlines: Fuel of War (Kaos Studio’s first game). While the majority of the time, these comparisons yield inappropriate conclusions or unfair expectations, this time I feel it is completely justified. After all, the core team from Kaos Studios was formerly Trauma Studios who got their start in the mod community developing the very popular Desert Combat Mod for Battlefield 1942.
Being a true hybrid of CoD and BF, this game finds itself benefiting from both game styles, trying to be a jack-of-all-trades. In the end, a reasonable or casual CoD/BF fan should be able to find Homefront has a lot to offer them. Unfortunately, for Kaos Studios, rabidly critical CoD/BF elitists and fanboys might not.
INFANTRY AND VEHICLE LOADOUTS
You’ll find yourself trying the endless different combinations in the Homefront armory, equipping your 5 customizable player kits with:
Primary Weapons, Attachments and Camouflages
-
Holographic, Red Dot, and ACOG scopes, silencers, and under-barrel attachments. 14 total.
Secondary Explosive
1st and 2nd Purchase Slots
Infantry Perks (18 total) and Vehicle Perks (9)
-
Increased hip fire and rifle accuracy, to better drone armor and faster soldier health regeneration or extra grenades, higher explosive radius or damage rates.
-
Vehicle armor and damage increases, to faster turret rotations and vehicle speeds
Ranking to level 75 will unlock these customizations incrementally. In game you’ll find an assortment of vehicles ranging from a HUMVEE, to an APC, Tank and Scout or Attack Helicopters. Homefront steps away from traditional vehicle based BF gameplay with four types of drones for use in combat, very similar to Frontlines: Fuel of War. Two are ground drones with either a gun or rocket turret, while two are air based with one being a spotter and the other a rocket equipped heli.
INFANTRY GAMEPLAY
The infantry combat in this game is very well polished. With more recoil, infantry gameplay in Homefront would be near perfect. Players proficient in other multiplayer FPS games might find the running and jumping to be too fast or too high, but it only takes a small amount of time to adjust. The damage modeling in Homefront is comparable to Medal of Honor, and a little bit more forgiving than CoD’s Hardcore mode. All around, this is the best feature of Homefront, and with the exception of the two sniper rifles, the infantry combat is stellar. The sniper rifles unfortunately are a tad bit too strong, and in the wide open maps with infrared vision, they outmatch everything else. Even ignoring the strong damage output of the sniper rifles, hovering over an enemy soldier brings up their name in bright red, this is overly revealing and gives an edge to snipers.
I wondered why there are no smoke grenades as these maps force you to trek across open ground, roads and rivers. The only recourse is to return fire, fortunately, hit registration is excellent, and the hit boxes seem to reward head shots well enough, so accurate players will outperform others. The last thing worth noting is the laughable flash bang. In a game like CoD, the flash is brief and innocuous, if you know how to handle yourself it can be a survivable event. In Homefront, the flash is an extended period of time that makes you completely vulnerable. The flash bang simply doesn’t belong in this game.