E3 2014: Homefront: The Revolution is sneaky open world chaos [Preview]

The year is 2029, four years after North Korea invaded North America and took it over. The location is Philadelphia. The place where independence was born is now a slum, where surveillance drones and armored patrols keep the people at bay. Streets and subways once filled with people are now abandoned and empty.

But within the badlands of the Red Zone, a resistance is forming.

That is the setting that Homefront: The Revolution takes you to. In this open-world sequel to THQ’s FPS, you must lead the resistance movement in guerrilla warfare against the NK military force. Yes, Homefront is an open, breathing world for you to roam around built on the power of CRYENGINE. The way that the devs describe the game is almost Assassin’s Creed like, where we are pointed to go and create chaos and then hide so that enemy forces would stop constantly looking for us. We have a huge city to explore and complete missions in, and remaining clandestine becomes a big part of it.

But it does lead me to a silly question about how the people of Philadelphia are still going about their day if we — the resistance — are blowing things up around them all the time. You would think they would want to live in a safer area if they don’t want to get hurt. Just a thought.

In Revolution we play the part of Ethan Brady, an “average guy” described to us during our presentation of the demo at E3. We are part of the resistance with limited military knowledge, yet the ability to blend into the crowd to hide — and cause quite a bit of commotion for the military to investigate. Our technology usage ranges from throwing a brick at a security camera to planting a bomb on a RC car and blowing open doors with it. There are also custom weapons in the game, but I wonder how will be making it if Brady really is an “average guy” with that limited military knowledge.

One of the things that I notice in the demo is the amount of use Brady’s cell phone gets for various activities. Tagging enemies, using an RC car, and looking at maps are just a few of these. Don’t get me wrong, and I do not plan on being a dictator or anything any time soon, but if I were to be an evil dictator my first order would be to disable the public cell phone usage and only limit it to those close to me. It’ll be interesting to see how this gets spun into the plot and design of the game, or if it gets addressed at all.

Early gameplay looks like there will be open world design with flashes of linearity in the story-telling.  The open world part is what has me most excited me at the moment, and may remind us a little of what Red Faction: Guerrilla achieved in the past. With the huge size of the city, I want to see how moving from one part of Philadelphia to the next will be tackled. I am intrigued with the game and looking forward to seeing and hearing more about it, though it may fly under the radar for a while until it actually releases.

Homefront: The Revolution is scheduled to be released in 2015 and will be available for PlayStation 4, XBox One, PC, Mac, and Linux.