Should Homefront: The Revolution Be Delayed After Mediocre Beta?

If you’ve heard anything about the beta for the Homefront: The Revolution we’re betting it’s not exactly positive. If you’ve played it, then you probably have even stronger feelings about the quality of the game as things stand. The beta runs from 11-14 Feb and is expected for full release on the 17th of May. Unfortunately, that’s not May of 2017, that’s the May coming in just over 2 months. It’s immediately apparent that the build of the game avaliable for the closed beta is just not up to scratch for the quality that is expected of AAA games and while we understand that the developers have the time leading up to May to optimize the game, we seriously doubt that the improvements that are imperative to make this game worth the price tag just simply cannot be implemented in the space of time between now and May.

The game is set two years after the original and, unsurprsingly,  sees a resistance group made up of US freedom fighters taking on the soldiers of Korea after the ‘Battle of San Francisco’. Generic plot aside, the new co-op mode that’s avaliable in the beta allows for you and a group of 3 other players to undertake a variety of co-op missions that actually show some form of promise come the games full release in May. However, Homefront: The Revolution’s problems lie with the technical or performance side of the game. To sum it up, even calling the game ‘mediocre’ feels a little too gracious.

Putting the technical issues a side for the moment, another issue we have had with the game is just how drab and dull the whole art style is. Everything from the character creation to the city environments just have a bland and lifeless look to them which really hurts the game’s ability to immerse the gamer. The character attributes are also very strange: with the choice of selecting your job before the invasion which includes stereotypical roles such as a cab driver. The characters, while we appreciate they are possibly trying to add a layer of realism to the game, lack the sort of appeal you’d come to expect from a heroic battle for San Francisco.

Before we get into our own comments on the performance of the closed beta we’d like to share with you a few comments from other users on this thread on Reddit who sum up our experiences quite nicely:

• “I don’t even know what it where to start with. With the release coming in 3 months, I can only assume this is pretty much the final product. My ONLY good compliment is the guns sound solid but everything is just…wow. level design is shit, movement are clunky, slow, and feel heavy. Can’t pick up enemy weapons, HUD is very simple with no effort to make it exciting and the graphics and textures are just garbage. There is no way in hell somone can defend this game”
• “Yeah…it seems to run at under 30 FPS, the controls are VERY clunky, and everything in motion stutters around. Even for a BETA this is despicable.”
• “Everything is wrong, from sound design to weapon proportion (marksman rifle looks like an anti tank rifle) Graphics. Wow. Don’t need to comment on that. You all know. AI ? Complete trash, they’re confused like they were just born 10 minutes ago. No situational awareness and just run around guns blazing like morons. I mean, someone shoots a weapon next to me, sounds like he’s 200 feet away. The enemy barely cares about cover.”
• “I played for 10 minutes. My SO came into the room and said “What the hell is that?” I honestly don’t know. Turned off and uninstalled. I’ve played several betas so I know they are not a finished product but good Christ… The graphics… so bad… Controls are heavy and choppy as hell. The only plus was the gun sounds. But I don’t know if they were bad as well, just less terrible than the rest of the game so they seemed better.”
• “After finally getting into a game, it was quickly realised why not al ot of people are playing. The gameplay is bad and simplistic and just overall I don’t see this game being played much after release.”

Trust us when we say that you’ll be hard pressed to find nicer comments about the beta anywhere on any internet forum. Our bigget gripe with the beta is just how very clunky and unintuitive the controls felt. The camera was bobbing all over the place and the beta just isn’t a very nice experience. The graphics present in the beta are also very mediocre. Nearly everything seems really washed out and textures don’t add any depth to what or who’s in the world. While this is only representative of the multiplayer portion of the game for now, it’s hard to imagine that the singleplayer mode is dratically better. In fairness, the gameplay they showed at E3 was fairly impressive but, again, that footage was only on the PC and who knows what kind of a beast PC they had running that segment.

Further, on top of how clunky and “off” the controls, movement and camera feel (which is especially noticeable when trying to climb ledges or get into cover) the game also seems to have a problem with the ‘hit detection’. We noticed that enemies take a fairly standard amount of damage to be downed that is quite expected in modern shooters but the hit detection often led to an unstatisfying experience when killing our enemies. Similarly, the sound of the guns also sounds very weak and lack the ‘punch’ that you’d expect from real rifles.

Ultimately, the beta feels a long way off from being a full product that I’d be happy to spend my money on. We appreciate that the game has gone through development troubles ever since the game was in production at Crytek who were suffering from finanical difficulties and many departures of the original developers, such as game director Hasit Zala who resigned from his position at Crytek UK and stopped working on Homefront: The Revolution. At the time, a person connected to the studio said that “Everything is just continuing on a downwards spiral.”.

Eventually, the rights to the game and the game itself were sold to Deep Silver but even though things seemed to recover, it seems (at least from what we’ve played in the beta) that this game will need a fairly lengthy delay in order to produce a product that is up to today’s standards otherwise we feel that the game will not perform very well at all. We can’t help but feel that is improvements can’t be made that it might have been better to let the game die when it was suffering from a whole host of issues but we have hope that Deep Silver can make the changes necessary and, providing they do, Homefront: The Revolution could actually be a decent game, instead of the rather mediocre beta.

As everyone’s favourite psycho Immortan Joe would say:

Have you had a chance to try out the beta for Homefront: The Revolution? Let us know how you feel about the game in it’s current state and whether you think the game deserves a delay!