Homefront: The Revolution

DEVELOPMENT HELL
Things haven’t exactly gone smoothly when it comes to Homefront: The Revolution’s development. Crytek UK was initially developing the game under the custodianship of THQ. After THQ went bust, Crytek bought the rights to the game, but unfortunately ended up suffering from financial problems of its own. As a result of that, Deep Silver then picked up the game and created its own studio, Deep Silver Dambuster, to finally finish off the development.

IN WEST PHILADELPHIA…
Now this is a story all about how the US resistance is trying to overthrow the North Korean People’s Army that now controls the Eastern States of the USA. This follows on from the first Homefront game in which the KPA was successfully ousted from their control of America’s West coast. The game features a new protagonist, Ethan Brady, as he battles the KPA in the city of Philadelphia.

A BIGGERFRONT
The most significant difference between The Revolution and the first Homefront game is that this iteration is open-world, as opposed to being linear. We don’t know exactly how much freedom you’ll be given within the game, but we’d expect the game to have campaign and side missions littered around the game that you’ll be free to tackle when you please. The game was shaping up to look impressive from a visual standpoint during development with Crytek and we hope the transition to Deep Silver hasn’t affected that.

SCROUNGING FOR SCRAPS
As a resistance fighter, you won’t have access to the same tech as the occupying KPA force. What you’ll have to do instead, is scavenge resources while you’re travelling through The Revolution’s fictional Philadelphia and use those materials to craft weapons of your own. The example we’ve seen in gameplay footage is that you can use materials to make yourself a remotely detonated explosive, strap it to an RC car and then drive it towards your target. Pretty neat.

GOING GUERRILLA
The game’s developers have said that while they want to give players the freedom to approach objectives as they see fit, they also want to encourage players to use guerrilla tactics that play into the fiction of Homefront: The Revolution. This presumably means that you will sometimes have to be cautious about taking on enemies head to head, using the game’s larger environments, stealth and crafted weaponry to turn battles in your favour.

SHOULD WE BE WORRIED?

Given that Homefront: The Revolution has something of a troubled history having passed through so many hands, concerns naturally emerge about how that turmoil will impact on the game. After all, games that go through these kinds of struggles normally end up suffering.

It’s easy to imagine how the financial struggles of the game’s various owners could have demoralised those working on the title and you wouldn’t really think that will have created an ideal working environment in which to make a game.

The other concern is that as rights to the game passed between different hands, the vision from the top about what Homefront: The Revolution should be changed, potentially pulling the team in a variety of different directions and causing the game to lose focus.

That’s not necessarily the case, though. Indeed, our hope is that those working on the game have been free to pursue their vision. In that respect, it would seem that Deep silver Dambuster’s core is composed of ex-Crytek UK studio members, the studio that previously had custodianship of the game, so hopefully the transition hasn’t been too painful.