At a recent event in NYC, THQ personnel pose a real doozy of a question: "Could North Korea occupy the United States of America fifteen years from today?" The answer is no -- not in real life. Come on. But it could in a video game. In fact, it will when Homefront (the next FPS from the studio that produced Frontlines: Fuels of War), hits stores later this year.
Homefront happens in an America that, a decade and a half from now, is poorer, more fragmented and less protected. A lot has taken place: a mysterious flu killed millions of Americans, a second financial collapse left millions on the bread line and an army all but dissolved, and CBS canceled Two and a Half Men. No nostalgic VH1 show for the 2010s; heck, probably no VH1 altogether.
North Korea, on the flipside, has risen to power through a number of unbelievable events that I can best summarize as, "They took over everyone in Asia that's not China or Russia." I don't know how really, they just did. So, what does a "Super North Korea" want more than anything else? To crush American freedom, duh! Which is easy enough, if you follow North Korea's Guide to Crushing Ignorant American Swine below:
Step 1: Use weapons, satellites and shipping routes of homogenized
territories.
Step 2: Trick dumb-dumb-stupid U.S. into letting Super North
Korea dock on California shores (Silly America, so trusting and stupid!).
Step 3: Terminate American power grid with a massive EMP. An EMP you
launched into space 15 years earlier because you are Super North Korea and your
intellect is bar none.
Step 4: Pour weapons-grade nuclear iodines down the
Mississippi.
Step 5: Invade with ground troops.
Step 6: ???
Step 7:
Success!
So that's Homefront's introduction, which gets summed via a Michael Moore-esque micro-mentary and the early bits of the game that THQ shows off. The demo begins with the protagonist waking up inside a traditional American bedroom. But as life comes into focus, we see that the room's well-worn, while the world outside the window lies devastated.
The demo takes place in The Oasis, a slice of the (now abandoned) suburbs that's been retrofitted for a different type of life -- one with a simple goal: survival. A large tree and some tarp acts as a canopy from North Korean drones. Children study on a busted chalkboard. A man does leg lunges on a workout machine that's been repurposed to create water pressure in a nearby latrine. No one fires any guns. They learn, they chat and they eat. Life, it seems, goes on -- even under occupation.
But this isn't the American dream, which is what our hero and his companions fight for in the second portion of the demo. The stage is set outside a Lumber Liquidators. A group of North Korean soldiers are bivouacking in the parking lots. The Americans take advantage of the open-air vulnerability by launching a nighttime firebomb. Of course, things go south, quickly, and the hero must save the day by improvising in close quarters combat.
When THQ showed off Homefront during E3 2009, the developers emphasized using indirect action and support from various machines during combat -- something that persists in this demo. As the enemy soldiers begin to overwhelm the hero, he whips out the remote control to a mini-tank, which rolls onto the scene and obliterates the North Koreans. Lumber Liquidators: retaken. Next up, Hooters. And the demo ends.
If this all sounds like a combination of Red Dawn and Apocalypse Now, well, that's because it partly is; John Milius, the story man on Homefront, wrote both films. Homefront, weighing off our brief time together, borrows liberally from both flicks: the concept is all Red Dawn, but the tone (and especially the grim dialogue) is Apocalypse Now. This is to say, the story looks good so far. As an aside, for Red Dawn fans, a piece of concept art features a high school football stadium; the team name? The Wolverines.
Do I buy a North Korean invasion of the US? No. But I don't really buy a Soviet invasion either. Or that a group of men could ride a dory up the Nung River (which is fictional to begin with) in the middle of the Vietnam War. It's not important if we buy it in real life; it's important that we buy it in the story. Do I buy the story of Homefront? Absolutely.
