Homefront: The Revolution has potential, but the beta was a buggy mess

Homefront: The Revolution is the first title in the series since Deep Silver’s purchase of the license from the now defunct THQ.

Under development at Dambuster Studios, the game is set in 2029, two years after the events of Homefront and four years into the invasion of the United States by the Greater Korean Republic (GKR).

Philadelphia has become the GKR’s central base of command, and is heavily policed and oppressed as a result.

It’s there, then, that the rebellion must demonstrate its resilience and strength of will.

With resistance leader Dana at the helm, it’ll be your job to see the liberation of the US through.

The beta we got our hands on was a cooperative one, introducing players to the overarching plot as well as some of the scenarios and enemies we’ll eventually face, but keeping the finer points of the story decidedly hidden.

Homefront: The Revolution places the player and his compatriots in an open world, offering up any number of points of interest as a way of incentivising further exploration.

When taking on missions, out of the convenience the game will drop players nearer to your target, but there’s a lot to do besides.

The ultimate goal of Homefront: The Revolution is to have you and three friends working together to complete the mission ahead, using each player’s selected skills and preferred weapons.

During one mission, for example, we had to escort an armoured vehicle through a set of roadblocks, having just snuck into a GKR base to commandeer it.

On another, we found ourselves hacking satellite terminals and sneaking in and out of buildings silently, picking enemies off one by one.

The game does have a habit of confining you to a predetermined area during a mission, but that’s hardly unique or off-putting. It also never seemed to compromise the variety of approaches we could have taken during each.

On the other hand, the overall difficulty of Homefront: The Revolution got a little obnoxious at times.

To be clear, we set the game to its easiest difficulty, and still, we struggled to clear a number of the missions. Granted, some of it was down to some pretty hefty lag, but it was also a fairly brutal experience.

Too often we found ourselves instantly killed by a single tank shell, having spent all of our ammo trying to subdue the darn thing. All it took was one slip up, and we were done for.

Asymmetrical warfare is certainly appealing, casting the player as a guerrilla war fighter, the odds stacked against us. But it needs to work for the formula to… well work.

The game does allow for a stealthier approach, thereby circumnavigating a lot of the deadlier foes, but the beta was buggy enough to prevent that any time we tried.

Spawn-in glitches were the biggest offender, but the lag certainly didn’t help, and let me be clear that there were a range of glitches beyond the ones mentioned above.

It’s not the smoothest or most polished experience, a buggy mess as many are calling it.

Matchmaking was a headache during the beta, forcing us to play with friends because the game refused to find any available games or free players.

That meant that if you didn’t have friends in the beta, you were likely playing solo. Even then, we were kicked out of our games more often than not.

Perhaps the clearest indicator of the problems Homefront: The Revolution’s beta faced was the fact that it took four hours to completely a single mission, courtesy of connection issues, a large array of glitches and lag.

It may be a beta, but it’s not promising when the game is but a few months from release, a sentiment you’ll see plastered all over the front page of the game’s Reddit thread.

Should you successfully complete a mission, you’ll be rewarded with a bronze, silver or gold medals, the scoring of which comes down fulfilling mission parameters, like additional mission objectives (or challenges), and your overall kill count.

Some of the challenges included a set number of stealth kills, scavenging a number of items or scoring a set number of headshots, etc.

As you fight the GKR and complete missions, you will earn the cash and XP required to purchase new skills and equipment boxes.

Skills unlock new ways to tackle equipment and gear; you gather petroleum and lighters during the mission, but need the prerequisite skill before you’re able to turn that into a bomb, for example.

Other skills allow you to carry more Molotov cocktails or let you revive downed teammates faster.

When it comes to equipment, you need to purchase weapon boxes which range by order of price, each with more gear than the last.

Opening a gear box will reward you with random weapons and attachments, and at times a vanity (cosmetic) item to use on your character.

It’s a Deep Silver game, so you know there are going to be microtransactions, and indeed there are. The good news is that Homefront: The Revolution will have at least a year of free, post-release DLC.