In most first-person shooters, the predominant thought during multiplayer usually consists of, "Am I still alive?" or, "Where the heck is everybody?" The answer to either question usually results in me finally encountering someone, and whether I survive the skirmish or not, I then start wondering those same thoughts again. But when I play Homefront, I now have a third question in my mind: "How much money do I have now?"
To rewind a bit, Homefront's multiplayer actually serves as a sort of prequel to the single-player campaign. The single-player campaign tells a modern day version of Red Dawn (a most apt comparison, since that movie's director/writer, John Milius, also provides writing services for Homefront), where Korea gains supreme power and ends up occupying America in 2027. So while that campaign focuses on the guerrilla warfare between plucky Americans and the omnipresent Koreans, the multiplayer focuses on the year 2025 -- when America still has a comparable military force with armor, air support, and uniformed infantry as opposed to ragtag civilians with makeshift equipment.
On the surface, Homefront feels a lot like a
streamlined and polished Frontlines: Fuel
of War. The mode I play, Ground Control, has control points that
shift around the map depending on which team is performing better --
similarly to how Frontlines moved its, well, frontlines during a match.
Whatever map you're playing on, there are defined control points that
you capture by standing near them; whichever team holds onto these
points long enough ends up pushing the battle forward into their
opponent's territory and opening a new set of control points. These
shifts in control point location aren't fixed or permanent -- so a
multiplayer match can have a real tug-of-war style flow (this effect is
most pronounced on large 32-player matches, where the map spans from a
whole farm on the east to an entire steel mill to the west). And like Frontlines (among other modern combat FPS titles),
Homefront features a mix of firearms, character classes, vehicles, and
combat drones. While you can eventually customize your own class with a
set of gear and what seems to be a perk system, the basics I play
include setups like Assault fellows sporting assault rifles and air
assault drones, Ghosts carrying suppressed submachine guns and recon
drones, Heavies brandishing light-machine guns and ground assault
drones, and the like. The first map I play, Cul-De-Sac, is an intimate
16-player affair that focuses on infantry and drones. It's a little
slice of America -- one where I can call in a recon drone to spot and
mark enemies scurrying around the parked cars and idle fences for my
allies, or settle on someone's roof for a sniping run, or hide in a
garage and guide a ground assault drone to tread around and hit fools
with its miniguns. The earlier-mentioned 32-player map, Farm, is where I get to mess
with the vehicles (such as, in layman's terms, an APC, a tank, and a
helicopter) more. Unlike other combined-forces FPS games (ahem, Battlefield),
vehicles don't just spawn in at predetermined map points. You have to
actively spawn into a vehicle -- so whether you're driving or being a
sidegunner, you spawn into an existing vehicle that either you or
someone else called in. No more waiting in line for a vehicle --
vehicles become present as players call for them.
