Homefront
Home from home?
It began with the image of a child's crayon scrawl stuck to the blistering walls of a makeshift, sun-speckled shelter. By the end we'd seen an army of Koreans lay screaming in a squall of phosphorous, a missile-spewing drone lay waste to its surroundings, and a dizzying cacophony of explosions, death and destruction.
The swift change of pace showcased in Homefront's GamesCom demo highlights the duality at the core of Kaos Studios' latest, possibly greatest, shooter.
The argument goes like this: While the competition pour their energy into bludgeoning you with relentless, bombastic action, somewhere along the line the humanity is lost. They're all hand guns and no heart. Homefront aims to take a more personal approach.
The demo starts with protagonist Jacob coming to in the homely community of Oasis, the air alive with the chatter of families working in unison, and giggling, frolicking children. Plants swing lazily from verandas and communal vegetable patches bask in warm sunlight filtered through leafy canopies. It's the very picture of idyllic American domesticity.
Except it isn't. Oasis is an encampment, a safe haven from which to orchestrate the resistance. The hanging baskets are plastic buckets, the leafy canopies are camouflage nets and the verandas and decaying houses a crumbling symbol of a bygone era. Korea have invaded the U.S.
This is where things get a little politically sketchy. Homefront explores an alternative future where Korean President Kim-Jong IIl is succeeded by a son, who swiftly unites North and South Korea, amasses a formidable army and sweeps aside U.S forces to capture the country. Only small pockets of resistance, such as the inhabitants of Oasis, remain. Cowering in their own back yards. It's your job to fight back.
Tapping in to that darkest of American fears, Homefront's nightmare scenario plays on years of nationalistic paranoia. Employing John Millius as writer, it also borrows from the Apocalypse Now scribe's film Red Dawn, which tells the story of resistance forces amidst a full-scale Russian communist occupation.
Incidentally, Red Dawn is being remade this year, this time with a Chinese occupation of the US, Cold War politics are back in vogue, it seems. Terrorists are so 2006.
So along with the rest of your unit - including a paternal Captain, potential love interest Rianna and a token Korean bloke (presumably to offset any Korean ill-feeling) - you must protect the community and your friends, while reclaiming your country. The hope is that rather than fighting for such abstracted notions as patriotism, you'll fight for characters you truly care for.
And fight you will. The second section of the demo sees Jacob and his allies hunkered down in a strategic vantage point overlooking a crowded military base. On cue, a truck bursts through the gates, stopping with a crash against a low wall, Elvis blaring from the stereo. Their attention grabbed, the Koreans move in, flocking around the vehicle.
It's at that moment that the resistance call in an air strike, a rocket arching through the night sky like a firework, before splitting into deadly tendrils and raining phosphorous down on the screaming, anguished Korean troops. Bodies roll on the the floor, flesh burns, the ground is alive with fire. Rianna begs you to put them out of their misery. It's horrible.
As is being caught in it. Moments later a misfiring second salvo knocks you from your position and suddenly you're dragging yourself through the melting bodies, surrounded by those screams, half blinded by heat and debris.
Emerging from the carnage, you make your way with Rianna to the relative safety of a tower. The respite is short-lived. A helicopter comes crashing down towards you, out of control, swooping helplessly to the ground before exploding. You scramble to safety.
For a fair chunk of the demo Jacob is just running to survive. Not methodically killing everything on screen to progress, or crossing an imaginary line to stem the respawns, but merely taking out those aggressors that impede your bid for safety.
The level climaxes with Jacob turning the tables and taking control of the Goliath, a massive armoured drone capable of spitting multiple missiles at it's victims. Queuing up hits via a secondary mode on his assault rifle, you can lay laser-targeted tags on enemies, vehicles and buildings - then watch them disintegrate as the drone dishes out its devastating heavy weapons.
This section of the demo was overwhelming, a cinematic blitzkrieg of dominoed set-pieces, the seams hidden by what Kaos are referring to as the 'Drama Engine,' a nifty bit of programming that directs the action straight at you. It doesn't matter where in the environment you are, that helicopter is going to come crashing down around your ears.
By this point the warm tranquility of Oasis was a very distant memory.
It's difficult to judge a game based on such a heavily-scripted, eyes-on demo. But make no mistake, when publisher THQ said recently that all their games from now will be blockbusters, they weren't playing around. We await the arrival of Homefront with glee.
