Homefront drops you into a Colorado suburb in 2027, where North Korean troops have taken the town and American resistance fighters are pulling survivors off the streets. The game came out in March 2011 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, developed by Kaos Studios and published by THQ. It scored a 4.8 out of 10 across 22 outlets. That number is fair. Homefront is a shooter with a striking idea and almost nothing built on top of it.
Trailer, via Connor.
The Greater Korean Republic
The backstory is the best thing here. In 2013, a year after Kim Jong Il died, his son Kim Jong Un led a peaceful reunification with South Korea, creating the Greater Korean Republic. The GKR combined the North’s military with the South’s economy and became a global power.
Then came the collapse. A war between Iran and Saudi Arabia in 2015 wrecked the global oil supply. Gas hit $19.99 a gallon. Economies crumbled, the U.S. financial system failed in 2022, and an Asian bird flu epidemic killed six million people. By 2024 the GKR had annexed much of Southeast Asia, and in 2025 it launched a satellite that disabled the U.S. power grid. The occupation followed.
That is a real piece of world-building. It is also the only part of Homefront that feels finished.
Robert Jacobs and the Bus to Alaska
The single-player campaign opens in 2027, two years into the Korean-American War. Robert Jacobs, a former U.S. Marine Corps combat helicopter pilot, wakes in his apartment in Montrose, Colorado, and gets ordered to a re-education camp in Alaska. He watches North Korean troops seize the town, take residents into custody and execute anyone who resists.
His bus is ambushed by resistance fighters: Connor Morgan (Tom Pelphrey), a former Marine, and Rianna (Hannah Cabell), a hunting expert. They take Jacobs to Oasis, a hideout run by former policeman Boone Karlson (Jim T. Coleman). Boone knows Jacobs can fly, so he recruits him to help recover fuel for scattered U.S. military forces.
The squad is rounded out by Hopper (Joel de la Fuente), a Korean-American technical expert, and an inside man named Arnie (Scott Sowers). The plan is to steal tracking beacons from a school used as a labor exchange, plant them on fuel trucks, and hijack the trucks once they can be followed.
Arnie betrays the team to protect his children. The squad kills him and wipes out the camp forces. Then they find a mass grave in the school’s baseball field and escape Korean reinforcements by hiding among the bodies.
A Campaign That Ends Before It Starts
That mass grave is the one image Homefront earns. It is a genuine horror, staged without flinching, and it lands because the game has spent its first hour establishing what the occupation costs ordinary people. The problem is what comes next.
The rebels assault an occupied warehouse store. Jacobs, Connor and Rianna find the trucks and plant a beacon. They return to Oasis to find Boone and everyone in the base dead. The campaign then runs out of road.
The whole thing is short. Critics at the time said so, and the complaint holds up. Homefront spends more time explaining 2013 through 2025 than it spends letting you live in 2027. The story is credited to John Milius, who wrote Apocalypse Now and Red Dawn, and you can feel the shape of the idea he was reaching for. You cannot feel much of the execution.
Infantry, Vehicles and a Divided Reception
The game is a first-person shooter. You play as infantry and can take command of a range of aerial and ground vehicles. The modes are single player and multiplayer, and the two halves of Homefront are not close in quality.
- Single-player campaign: short, atmosphere and story divided critics
- Multiplayer: generally well received
- Platforms: PlayStation 3, PC (Microsoft Windows), Xbox 360
- Developer: Kaos Studios
- Publisher: THQ
- Release: March 2011
- Genres: Shooter
The multiplayer is the part that held up. It was the part reviewers liked at the time, and it is the reason anyone kept playing after the campaign credits rolled. The campaign is the part that gets remembered for the wrong reasons, and the split between the two is the whole story of this game.
What the 4.8 Actually Measures
A 4.8 out of 10 is a harsh score for a game with a multiplayer mode that worked. It is also the right score for a game that sold its premise and then refused to dramatize it.
Homefront wants to be about occupation. It sets gas at $19.99 a gallon, kills six million people with bird flu, and puts a mass grave on a baseball field. Then it hands you a rifle and points you at a warehouse. The gap between the world it describes and the game it asks you to play is the entire problem.
The atmosphere divided critics because the atmosphere is genuinely good and genuinely thin at the same time. A suburb under foreign military control is a strong setting. Homefront uses it for one ambush and one hideout and then moves on.
Crytek, Koch Media and the 2016 Reboot
Homefront did not stay with THQ. After the publisher’s bankruptcy, the rights were sold to Crytek and later to Koch Media after it restructured. A reboot, Homefront: The Revolution, came out from Deep Silver in 2016.
That history says something about the original. A game gets a reboot when the idea outlives the execution, and the Greater Korean Republic outlived Homefront’s campaign by a wide margin. The premise was worth another try. The 2011 version did not earn one on its own.
The Verdict on Homefront
Homefront is a first-person shooter with a strong setting, a short campaign and a multiplayer mode that carried more weight than the story ever did. It came out in March 2011 for PlayStation 3, PC and Xbox 360 from Kaos Studios and THQ, and it scored a 4.8 out of 10 across 22 outlets.
That score is not a knock on the premise. The Greater Korean Republic is one of the better alternate-history setups a shooter has had, and the Montrose opening does real work. But a setup is not a game. Homefront explains a war and then forgets to fight it, and the mass grave in the baseball field is the only moment that closes the distance between the world it describes and the one you are standing in.
The multiplayer is worth the time. The campaign is not. Homefront is a game you admire from the outside, and the 4.8 is what that is worth.
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