I am anything but bored as I wait to enter the theater at the THQ pavillion for the Homefront presentation.

 

A barbed-wire fence protects the entrance to the indoctrination center, and is patrolled by New Korean Federation soldiers toting AK-47s and dressed in blue combat armor. A sign tells me to get my papers and identification ready for inspection, but I am thumbing through a pamphlet entitled “Subject’s Guide From Your Glorious Occupation Of The New Korean Federation.”

 

I was relatively unaware of Homefront when I first arrived at E3. I’d seen the trailer which reminded me of the excellent intro to Operation: Flashpoint, but the concept of invasion by North Korea of all countries struck me as kind of silly.

 

John Milius, the screenwriter of Conan the Barbarian, Apocalypse Now, and Red Dawn, was tapped to write the story for Homefront.  Giving American audiences a cause to fight for which they can relate to in a first person shooter is an extremely interesting proposition. It’s an idea that Modern Warfare 2 seized upon but only used in a very shallow manner, with the real horror of civilian casualties only hinted at in radio chatter during the Washington evacuation scene. 

 

Rex Dion, the lead Level Designer of Homefront, welcomes us to the presentation after we are seated in the theater, and explains that Kaos Studios had two central design pillars for this game. First, the familiar will become alien. This is a war which will be fought in the strip mall you shop at, the house you grew up in, and the high school you went to.

Second, to show the human cost of war. What happens to civilians with no combat experience or training when the war hits home?

 

The demo proper begins as our eyes open to a white tiled wall decorated with two children’s crayon drawings. An American resistance fighter named Boone walks in, shotgun shells lining the bandoliers over his shoulder. His clothing is a patchwork of dull greens and browns, and an American flag hankerchief is tied around his right arm.

 

Boone tells us that there’s an operation coming up, and that they’re very short-handed and could use our help. We get up to follow him and catch a view out a window to our right. We’re looking at what used to be a model American middle-class surburb, but the houses are abandoned and boarded up, beaten and dirty. Long-abandoned cars sit in some of the driveways, trash lies in the front yards…it’s an “end of days” scenario.

 

 

We follow Boone out the back door of the house and now we’re in an area the size of four backyards, cordoned off with fences. “From the outside, it looks like just another boarded-up, suburban failure,” he says as we see children playing on a swingset, next to a small garden “But in here, we’re free.”

 

We turn to our left to follow him and there’s a chalkboard up against the back of the house, with two rusted school desks. The English alphabet is written on the chalkboard in cursive and print, and next to it is a sign that says “No Lights.”

 

“The camo screens keep us hidden from the KPA,” Boone says, pointing up at the nets strung above us between the trees. “Solar panels and windmills supply most of the power we need.” He pauses to receive and answer some comms over the radio as a member of the community says hello, and then we proceed into another house.

 

 

There’s a fire blazing in the fireplace and two children are sleeping in front of it. One them is wrapped in a sleeping blanket and coughs sickly. A woman is lying on a worn, dirty couch, holding an infant. Another resistance fighter, Connor bursts into the room, and he’s pissed. “We only have a short window to steal these tracking devices,” he shouts. The woman scolds him and Boone tells Connor to relax. Connor stalks away, muttering under his breath “Those dog-eaters are gonna get it.”

 

Boone tells us we’re going to be heavily outnumbered and to grab all the weapons and ammo we can. Going to do so takes us through a “command center,” just a small room with radio equipment, weapons blueprints and other papers scattered over a desk. One wall is covered with a map of the United States, big red circles and lines ostensibly denoting Korean positions and movements…and in the middle of the map, between Texas and Louisiana, is an area filled in with blue cross-hatches and clearly marked “Radiation Zone.”

 

Before we descend into a tunnel beneath another house with Boone and Connor to join the equipment raid, we walk across the rest of the backyard and see someone cooking up an evil-looking concoction in a pair of huge metal pots, someone else using a step machine to pump running water into the plumbing, and an old man milking goats. Rex Dion tells us that we’ve just seen what the development team calls a “Why we fight moment.” I’m curious as to how a foreign audience is going to react to the scene, but including the children is a powerful dramatic tool to accomplish the goal.

 

 

The screen fades to black and Rex tells us that we’re about to be taken into the climax of the first act of the story, using what he calls their “drama engine.” When the scene fades we see Rianna, a female resistance fighter, strangling a Korean guard, dressed in the same body armor the actors outside the presentation area were wearing. We follow her out of the house and we’re overlooking the parking lot of a huge Lumber Liquidators store.

 

 

The entire area is enclosed with barbed wire fences, and a pair of guard towers stand on either side of the lot. Stacks of equipment crates are guarded by foot soldiers at sandbagged positions, and rusted out hulks of cars still sit in some of the parking spaces.

 

Rianna tells us to get ready, and a burning minivan hurtles through the front gate into the parking lot. The guards walk up to investigate and a rocket screams into the sky above them. It hangs in the air for a moment, and then bursts apart like a MIRV warhead.

 

 

Multiple rockets hit the parking lot and it bursts into flames. Rianna tells us to cover Connor and the other resistance fighters attacking through the front gate and we snap our M4 assault rifle into firing position.

 

The Korean soliders are burning, staggering out of the fire. Rianna exhorts us to put them out of their misery and we begin taking them down with head shots. Someone yells to “Let the bastards burn!” Another rocket launches into the air and we hear “Misfire! Misfire!” over the radio. Rianna tells us to get down and the rocket explodes, and now we see nothing but flames.

 

We get up and hold our hand in front of our face we follow her out of the fire. The smoldering bodies of Korean soldiers surround us, and it seems like we barely stagger up the stairs to one of the guard towers. Connor is already there, and tells us to stay low, take short breaths through our nose, and keep it together until the phosphorous burns away because we’re not going to get another shot at this. The guard in the other tower is firing rockets at us from a shoulder launcher and we snipe him just as a helicopter gunship slides into view and hits our tower with rockets. The tower is hit, and collapses, hurtling us to the ground and the screen goes black.

 

 

When we come to, Rianna and Connor are lying on the ground to either side of us, dazed, as a Korean soldier slowly approaches us with his weapon in the firing position. As he looks like he’s ready to fire, a six-wheeled APC runs him over. The calvalry has arrived, and its name is Goliath. We get up and start marking targets for Goliath through our LED gunsight. Red diamonds mark the positions of the Korean soldiers and Goliath’s gun turret mows them down viciously. “Take out the EMPs!” Connor yells and we switch our aim to the soliders on top of the Lumber Liquidators, aiming some nasty-looking shoulder mounted weapons at the APC.

 

We’re ordered to fight our way to the front of the store and we wade into the enemy in classic FPS gunplay, aiming down the sights of our M4 and taking the Koreans down. We mark more targets for Goliath and the helicopter gunship streaks overhead, ready to get back into the fight. We acquire the gunship for Goliath and the APC unleashes a volley of missiles into the sky which hit home, but the flaming gunship is crashing straight in our direction. That’s where the demo ends.

 

 

It’s difficult to tell much from a presentation versus a hands-on, and there are some aliasing problems I’ve seen but the graphics otherwise look tight. I’m convinced of the story’s quality at the conceptual level and have faith in the pedigree of its author, and THQ is pushing the game very hard at this year’s E3. I find out later that they had an event with 100 New Korean Federation soldiers outside the Los Angeles Convention Center, and as I’m walking down the street to catch a cab back to my hotel I pass a boarded-up building with American flags painted on it.

 

Just as I’m asking our site director, who is walking with me, whether or not those are part of the ads for the game, I realize that the parking lot across from the convention center has barbed wire over the fences and New Korean Federation flags on top. Guard booths with raised gates, and sandbags with more barbed wire, stand at all the entrances and there’s a sign that reads “Slow Checkpoint Ahead.” I even find out later that all the cars parking at my hotel have been running New Korean Federation flags on them.

 

 

This level of hype machine only gets rolled out in one of two cases: either the game is depending on that hype to sell pre-orders and release day copies because it isn’t actually as good as it portends to be, or it actually walks its talk and the publisher wants to make damn well sure everyone knows it.

 

Homefront has all the signs of being a game that nobody saw coming, but which nobody forgets when it arrives. Homefront will be released on the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 in early 2011.