Homefront

Preview from Luke - Tuesday, 25 January 2011 @ 3:50am

As last year started to wrap up, one game that quickly became one of my most anticipated titles for 2011 was Homefront. I absolutely loved the first trailer that they released for it, showing the timeline of events which lead up to the content within the game. That whole story seems very interesting to me, but sitting beside this intriguing single player experience is a fleshed out multiplayer aspect of the game.


I was invited by THQ to participate in a multiplayer event along with a bunch of other faces within gaming scene. We all jumped in front of a console each, and teams where split into 2 where we would wage war against one other for the next few hours. Before being deployed players are able to select and modify their weapon load out, this includes choosing your primary / secondary weapons, grenade types, weapon addons, perks, etc. You’ll be very limited in your arsenal to start off with, but as you progress through matches you can earn yourself higher ranks, this will eventually allow you to unlock more stuff to use.

Now where Homefront really separates itself from other online first person shooters is the Battle Point system. Each time you accomplish a task like killing an enemy player or completing an objective, you’ll be given Battle Points to use within the current match. These points can be spent on a range of different items, some of which are accessible by pressing a corresponding button on the D-Pad. To start off with at the lowest rank we had available a flak jacket to buy, which will better protect you from dying, duh! The 2nd was an RPG, for those moments of desperation when a group of converging enemies don’t understand the meaning of spread out. Other than the D-Pad for the on the move upgrades that you can get, you also have the option to purchase vehicles on some of the maps. The dilemma here is do I spend the points I have on a Humvee for me and a buddy to ride around in, do I save up for a bit and roll around in a tank, or do I go all out and get myself the top tiered helicopter? It’s a hard choice! A lot of strategy comes into play here, and this becomes even more so as you progress through your ranks. As the day moved on I ended up unlocking a few different items to spend my Battle Points on, including Hellfire missiles and a personal UAV sweep.

So throughout the afternoon we managed to play a few different modes and maps. Previously announced was Ground Control, with this teams are tasked with the mission to capture different locations within the selected area on the map. Upon a team successfully capturing and holding all of the locations for a given amount of time, the battle then shifts to an entirely different area of the map where teams must then try to do the same with the new locations designated. If the same team manages to do this twice in a row, then they are victorious in their efforts and win the match. However if the other team is able to block the 2nd attempt and gain control and hold of all the positions, then the battle once again shifts back to the original location and this continues to happen until a winner can be named.

The other gameplay mode that we dived on into was the newly announced Battle Commander, this is simply team deathmatch with a bit of a twist. Each team has a Battle Commander, whom is a live AI system which helps your team out in specific scenarios. What happens here is if I’m playing very well and on a kill streak for example, the Battle Commander will recognise this and assign me a buff, this might be better armour resistance, quicker sprint, a personal UAV… basically the better your kill streaks the better the type of buffs you’ll get. These kills streaks are ranked from a level 1 to 5, to get to level 1 you might need to take out 3 enemies, then on the screen will pop up the amount of players you’ll need to kill to attain the next level, and this continues until you hit the highest level. Now while your Battle Commander is helping out your team by giving you buffs for destroying all of these players, the enemy Battle Commander is getting a little pissed off about this. So what he does is put a mark on you by showing your general location on the mini map, and also puts a bounty on your head, allowing enemy players to pay more attention to what you’re doing and rack up a nice little reward in the shape of lots o’ Battle Points if they do kill you. What this does is give people a bit more incentive to try and go after the better players on the opposing team, and it also puts a bit of a stop to campers.

Xbox 360 players will be lucky with their purchase of Homefront as it will be coming with an exclusive map which I got to play; this one was called “Suburbs”, and let me tell you that it was by far my favourite map for the day. It’s a circular map with a stack of destroyed buildings surrounding the outside layer that you can roam about in, the center of the map is a bit more open but there is plenty of cover to hide behind, seriously had so much fun with this one.

Also some great news for Aussies wanting to dive into servers lag free, we were notified that the servers hosted for multiplayer are sitting right in here Australia to guarantee the best online experience possible. These guys deserve some big props for listening to gamers and giving them exactly what they want, none of this bullshit where one player tries to host a 32 player game on their local ISP connection.

I had a really great time playing through the multiplayer for Homefront; I think it can definitely compete with the big name online FPS games out there currently. We will be sure to keep everyone updated as the release for this draws near. Homefront is due out on March 10th for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.