At the height of their popularity throughout the 2000s, military shooters typically emphasized the plight of enlisted soldiers. Most were shooting galleries, wherein players gunned down faceless foes with abandon across many historical or fictional battlefields. Little attention was paid to the human cost of war, including the destruction of civilian life and the emotional turmoil that comes with being on the receiving end of a foreign enemy’s hostility. There were occasional outliers like the controversial No Russian mission in 2009’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 . Yet, a mainstream first-person military shooter wouldn’t centralize the human cost of war on the civilian level until Kaos Studios and publisher THQ unleashed Homefront in the spring of 2011.
Carefully nestled within the core of the original Homefront was a hard-hitting shooter that immersed players in action and occasionally elicited emotional investment. Arguably, for the first time, players felt unbridled hate for their virtual enemies on the battlefield, a field of war that to a lot of gamers, specifically those in the United States, looked a little too much like home.
While Kaos succeeded on this front, and in spades some would argue, a sequel from Dambuster Studios failed to similarly hit the mark. In many respects, 2016’s Homefront: The Revolution neglected to adhere to the framework that outlined its predecessor’s various victories. As a result, this once promising series about a troubling, though implausible, near-future conflict fell flat before it could truly leave a lasting impact on the genre it was designed to reinvigorate.
This is the Rise and Fall of Homefront.
