War’s a staple setting a huge chunk of the hundreds of big-budget video games that come out every year. Last year’s best-selling games–Halo: Reach and Call of Duty: Black Ops–both took place in the midst of military actions.
But there’s one thing most war games fail to communicate and that’s the tragedy that results from all the shooting. Oh, you’ll almost always get the dramatic death of a character the developers want you to care about. But it’s rare that a game tries to channel the way that war affects a society.
For example, Killzone 3 ends with players essentially annihilating an entire planet. All you get before the credits roll is a few grim sentences, nothing that really grapples with the enormity of what just happened. It just seems like the juiciest part of the narrative just sits there unjuiced.
Lots of FPS combat games place players in foreign lands (or planets, even) where most everything seems exotic, foreign and, by design, hostile. Maybe the reason that tragedy and consequences remain elusive in war games is because publishers–and gamers, too–cast these games as escapist entertainment, with scant commentary on sociopolitical situations or human nature. So, part of what intrigues about Homefront is that the game starts in that conceptual space. (“Homefront” Isn’t Your Typical War Video Game)
As previously noted, Homefront posits that North Korea goes on a run of unchecked aggression in the near future, when America’s weakened economy leaves the U.S. unable to do anything about it. Ultimately, the Greater Korean Republic invades the States and you play as rebel pilot Robert Jacobs helping the Resistance repel the Korean People’s Army from the country. A video clip at the start of the game sets up the sociopolitical dominoes that lead to Korea running rampant over the globe and subsequent interstitial sequences show rebel radio stations efforts to counter the Korean occupiers’ propaganda. Homefront‘s by no means a primer on foreign policy but you will learn tidbits about the Juche philosophy that helped establish the North Korean dictatorship. The real-world-gone-wrong approach makes impactful in a way that, say, Halo may not be for other people. You may not be a former fighter pilot like Jacobs, the character you control during the game, but you’d still ask yourself what you’d do if your community came under siege.
From there, Homefront goes out of its way to be programmatically manipulative. Children’s drawings of “Mom Dad + Me” abound. The resistance cell you first hole up with has carved out Oasis, a survivalist idyll with solar panels, victory gardens and wind power. It’s even got pink flamingoes! Missions take you through labor camps, with intimations of wartime rape and a prisoner performing salat, praying in the Muslim way. (Sadly, you couldn’t talk to him.) You’ll even jump into a mass grave to hide from occupation patrols. (On the Brink: Hands-On with 2011’s Experimental Shooter)