My main problem is that it's a game with a single player campaign that is under five hours long advertised as a AAA title, much in the same way ODST was released with a campaign that could completed in three hours or less, and a single game mode besides. While I've seen that homefront has decent multiplayer, its not something that will tempt me away from Bad Company 2 or MW2. In many ways, its a derivative of those two games, with more then a dash of the second modern Warfare's over the top plot.
But what bothers me about Homefront's plot is that it wields imagery such mass graves, massacres and dead civilians(and children) with a certain heavy handedness that doesn't really do it any favors, and in truth is just bad writing. To put it simply, those are images that in some ways have to be earned; a character's death must have meaning, or to see a base ruined (such as the suburban hideout of the resistance) by the enemy must have some value to the player as both a refuge and a 'home'. Freedom Fighter, a game that operates on much the same thesis as Homefront (except its Russians led by Ivan Drago's and Georgi Zhukov's clones, and is basically Red Dawn in New York ) does to a much better degree when your sewer hideout is invaded by the enemy, and its unsettling to be betrayed in such a manner, because it signals that there is no going back, and the final confrontation has begun.
I know they wanted to make the North Koreans (or Norks as the game throws out)the unquestionable bad guys, but using imagery like that to create an atmosphere not only doesn't work, but its in truth more disquieting than anything else, and not in the intended manner. It doesn't inspire patriotic feelings to resist these foreign invaders, but instead questions the game designers taste.It's trying for pathos but its not getting it because of a clumsy narrative.
Further, they make the American character's hard to empathize with primarily because they're you're standard band of cliches, and the Connor Morgan is a psychopath. The white phosphorous mortar strike was again, disturbing because it makes a character even harder to like or empathize with, while you watch people burn to death right in front of you, screaming for mercy.
I just think it's been done before, done better, and the writing is right of a survivalist's nightmare, the pacing is poor, and the character's are cardboard cut outs fulfilling the bad shooter party roles ( 'likable' meathead, tech guy, woman with bared mid riff in a gun battle, mentor/leader killed dramatically by villain to raise the stake)
