Ahead of its Closed Beta stress tests that will be held over the next several weeks, Deep Silver allowed me to sit down with some members of Dambuster Studios to go hands-on with their newly announced 4-player “Resistance” co-op mode for the upcoming Homefront: The Revolution.
Whereas Revolution’s main campaign will follow Ethan Brady—one member of the underground opposition against the occupying Korean People’s Army—Resistance mode allows players to become a wholly unique foot soldier in the guerilla fighting force that challenges the KPA in 2029’s Philadelphia. In Resistance mode, players will be tasked with taking part in special missions with various objectives across several difficulty levels in an attempt to help remove the KPA from the City of Brotherly Love.
Upon first entering the mode, players will be able to customize how their soldier looks, along with what weapons they carry. You can even choose what job your character had before the invasion started, a decision which offers varying bonuses to skills. (For example, in a nod to the team’s own lot in life, video game developer gets a boost to hacking.)
As you play, you’ll earn in-game currency that can be used to buy packages that vary in contents and cost, and which reward random gear and weapons. If you’re impatient, there are microtransactions that allow you to purchase more currency—but nothing is guaranteed. So, if you’re looking for a sniper rifle, you could pour a ton of money into the game and never get what you’re looking for, or play a mission or two and get it on your first package.
It may sound unfair, but part of this revolves around the idea that supplies are limited when you’re fighting a larger, more powerful occupying force and are resorting to hit-and-run tactics—in that world, beggers can’t be choosers. In fact, it even carries over into your missions. You’ll always have to scrounge for bullets mid-battle, because you’ll almost never have enough ammo to get through an entire mission, especially if you fight the KPA head-on.
Of course, this is where the idea of being a guerilla fighter becomes even more important. Communication between you and the other members of your cell—whether found through matchmaking or paired up with three buddies—is critical to winning the day, especially as missions get harder to handle. Scavenging for supplies on the outskirts of town is one thing; taking on a fully-stocked KPA outpost is another. Speed and stealth are critical to helping you even the odds, and learning the lay of the land may be the only advantage you can have over the KPA, as they’ll almost always outgun and outman you.
In my first mission with the team, we had to hack satellite relay towers around town. To make matters easier, we found motorcycles at a resistance drop point that allowed us to whizz past patrols and get to our objectives before the enemy knew what hit them. The next mission was completely different, however, and had us trying to steal APCs from a KPA checkpoint. Using the shadows to our advantage, we first moved along the rooftops, knifing snipers along the way before then heading underground via sewers to come up on the other side of the gate. Admittedly, I spent most of my time following the devs because of my unfamiliarity with everything, but I was impressed by the tactics we were using. When we didn’t try to fight like genuine guerilla fighters, the odds became too much, especially for our low level characters.
As great as this occupied Philadelphia looked, and as well as the game handled as a first-person shooter—aside from some twitchiness with the motorcycles that I attribute to the sensitive keyboard and mouse controls—there are still a couple lingering questions surrounding Homefront: The Revolution and its brand new mode.
A lot of games try to do 4-player co-op, and while the two missions I played were a lot of fun (even with relative strangers), is there enough here to keep people coming back for more? We know the game is launching with 12 missions, but what might make the mode is that Dambuster and Deep Silver are releasing 20 more missions over the course of the game’s first year, for free, for everyone. That could offer a lot of replayability.
The other question, though, is whether or not Resistance mode will play into the story of the Homefront series. Will achieving a series of victories over the KPA influence the game, or future games, in any way? Will there be large-scale community events that bring all the 4-person cells around the world together to rise up and take Philadelphia back? It seems that only time will tell, since as fun as my play session was, it clearly only scratched the surface of something deeper that we’ll have to wait to explore when Homefront: The Revolution comes out for Xbox One, PS4, and PC on May 17.
RayCarsilloWrites.com 