Homefront Review (Xbox 360/PS3)

I want to talk about nineteenth century literature for a moment. No, hold on, don’t go anywhere. Wait…. Stop… Just… Okay, just me and the crickets then. But back in the olden days, there was a fad genre of novels known as invasion narratives that depicted in often-extreme detail the horrors of military occupation and its socio-political ramifications. It began with a short story called The Battle of Dorking – which told of a German invasion of England – and took off to include accounts of similar invasions by Russia, by England themselves and by Mars.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the genre transmogrified into visual form and gave us certain versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Red Dawn, The Patriot, a Doctor Who story entitled The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Independence Day, Tom Clancy and most recently Battle: Los Angeles. Of little surprise is the American fascination with the genre, as we are a nation defined largely by an adherence to militarism and armed aggression; we fight for our right to bear arms as stringently as our right to free speech and we valorize war and those who fight it. We are a nation born of conflict; the first act of America was one of war and we’re proud of this fact, we sing songs about it, it reverberates down through the ages and convinces us today that there is no problem in this world so great, no evil so mighty, that we can’t pull ourselves up and kick its ass.

...or something similar.

But despite our predilection toward war, America hasn’t experienced armed conflict on its own shores in over 150 years (200 years if we’re talking about foreign invaders). There isn’t a single person alive today who knows what it’s like to have troops pull them out of their homes, to have tanks and soldiers plowing through their neighborhoods. Despite our two – kind of three – ongoing wars, the majority of America is able to remain comfortably detached because we’re half a planet apart, fighting enemies who don’t have the means to come knocking on our doors in the dead of night. Despite the hype of the news media, we are kept pretty safe from our own dispositions.

And therein lies the value and the power of invasion fiction: it brings home and makes explicit the realities of war-centric foreign policy. All the violence that we engage in – for whatever reason – across the globe is no longer across the globe. It’s here and it’s real and we suddenly have to deal it.

That’s not to say this is a noble genre, though; it is in fact quite perverse – a geopolitical rape fantasy if you think about it – and always, always propagandistic. This is a genre mired in the “Us versus Them” mentality that frequently paints Them as unrepentant assholes who must be exterminated for the greater good. And by focusing Their destructive acts on familiar landmarks and settings it creates a very palpable sense of violation, a resonance that has historically been shown to touch and guide reality. After all The Battle of Dorking and its ilk were contributory to Britain’s participation in World War I and it’s because of War of the Worlds that we’ll never again know peace with the Martians (They’re still so very angry, very angry indeed). The invasion narrative is – as I said – a very perverse genre, capable of fostering the very fears it exploits.

But perversity is severely underrated in fiction (or in the case of modern horror severely misconstrued) as it helps to unsettle its audience, keeps them from getting complacent and draws them into a visceral and memorable emotional experience. And unfortunate subtext is easy to ignore once you know it’s there. I do it with The Dark Knight and Dirty Harry, both of which have very pro-fascist connotations buried in their premises. And it’s even easier to do this with Homefront because it doesn’t give two shits about its premise, which… uh… kind of should mean it sucks, right?

This game is completely unrealistic. Everyone knows the world is going to end in 2012.

Homefront is superficially an interactive update to Dorking, replacing the British with Americans and the Germans with North Koreans (thus replacing the Prussian Bogeyman with the Axis of Evil); and it is similarly laced with multiple levels of propaganda. One such level consists of scattered newspaper clippings that sometimes outline the background of this conflict and sometimes just point out the inherent hypocrisies and failings in the governmental systems of current North Korea. True or not, these factoids are presented in a directly negative fashion in a way designed – from a narrative standpoint – to further the Koreans’ role as villains in this story.

And of course the “Us versus Them” mentality is deeply ingrained. More so because it’s a videogame and there are only so many enemy character models, which helps to deny the enemy a sense of self (there are of course no North Korean-allied characters in this game); it’s the same reason every war in history is met with a new racial slur (Kraut for the Germans, Gook for the North Vietnamese and Norks for the North Koreans here): a spoonful of dehumanization helps the killing go down.

Of course, this is all pretty minor stuff really. The character model one in particular is a trait Homefront shares with not only every shooter but every action game ever made; and there’s really nothing propagandistic about Mario (unless you believe in an anti-mushroom conspiracy). But that’s the thing: an idea this sadistic should leave you feeling something — whether it be horror, dread, anger, righteous outrage or even simple disgust – but instead it just leaves you feeling kind of bored. For better or worse, you never really get drawn into the war-torn America or the atrocities of Homefront; it never even tries to pull you in, it’s too busy trying to be a generic, paint-by-numbers, ho-hum, average, bog-standard, run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen, been-there-done-that traditional first-person shooter.

Open up those golden gates, California here I gun.... or was it pun?

Its story – this perfunctory, pointless, plotless story that critics have been inexplicably praising it for – is a framework so simplistic that better games would use it to setup a single level, but Homefront uses it for its entire campaign. Your goal is to grab a helicopter, attack a convoy and bring it to a base for use in a single, indecisive offensive. Not only is that one level, that’s a first level, that’s a tutorial, that’s the opening of a game, not the game entire. And – worse yet – there’s no ending either, the game just decides to stop randomly like it heard the ice cream truck outside and ran off to purchase a delicious snow cone. It must have taken thirty seconds to write this thing and it doesn’t take much longer than that to play it. The newspaper clippings – if you find them – add some substance, but it’s substance that never makes into the actual gameplay.