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E3 2009: Homefront Impressions

by: Chuck -
More On: E3 2009
The folks at Kaos studios don’t exactly think we’ve got the brightest future ahead of us. Their last game, Frontlines: Fuel of War had you fighting in a war for energy resources after peak oil was reached.  In Homefront, you’re trying to help free the US from Korean occupiers twenty years in the future. In this future North Korea has become a nuclear power, taken over South Korea and is now occupying the United States. As you progress through the game you’ll learn how this happened.

Like Frontlines, the game uses the Unreal Engine 3 but adds something that we haven’t seen in a lot of FPS games lately…color. That’s right there’s a full spectrum of colors out there besides gray and brown and the game fully takes advantage of them.

In Homefront  you play Conner, who wakes up in the last safe area right before the KPA attacks the settlement. The first part of the game shows off the Drama engine that the folks at Kaos have built for the game (this shouldn’t be confused with the unnecessary drama engine that powers all ex-girlfriends).  The drama engine’s goal is to make sure that players have a fully cinematic experience. This means that when something explodes, the game is going to make sure it lands at your feet or that you’re aware of it. What this ends up doing is creating a Michael Bay like experience for the player which is a sharp contrast to something like Operation Flashpoint 2 which is going for pure realism.

The game will be based on weapons that are in development by the US military and like Frontlines you’re going to be controlling robots along the way. We got to see the Goliath (seen below), a six wheeled APC like machine in action during the demo. To control the Goliath you just laze a target and he rolls into action to destroy it with its gun.

There’s no official information on multiplayer yet but the folks at Kaos are promising a “large scale” experience. Given the success the team had with Frontlines I think it’s safe to say we’re going to get a nice large scale battlefield to play in when the game comes out.

Overall I was fairly impressed with what I saw and I think there’s quite a bit of potential if the game can live up to what they showed us today.