As with the stealth sections, it's fun at first - but this is largely due to your limited starting arsenal. Getting caught and forced into a firefight never feels particularly dangerous, either, especially once you realize you can just round a corner and wait for enemies to come at you one at a time until you’re waist-high in corpses. Beyond the ability to hide in dumpsters and create distractions with various crafted bombs, incendiary devices or hacking tools, it’s very basic stealth – you can’t even stash a body.
Sneaking through alleys and checkpoints is fun for a bit – the first few times I narrowly avoided detection were legitimately exciting – but doesn’t hold up for long thanks to a lack of any unique stealth mechanics.
Neither style of play is worth writing home about. “The repetitive sabotage missions are a familiar combination of first-person stealth and shooting. Yes, I was provided with a “point of no return” warning, but I haven’t been locked out of revisiting an open world after the credits since Fallout 3 - it was especially odd considering that there are no custom save slots. Bizarrely, you can’t go back to finish anything you may have missed, even if you wanted to. And again, and again, until The Revolution just sort of… ends, in an underwhelming finale. Once the district has revolted, there’s some rioting and a lengthy (but forgettable) story mission or two, then it’s off to the next district to do it all over again.
The Revolution could’ve used a lot more diversions like these to keep monotony from setting in. There were also unexpected bits of platforming that would unlock a new outpost for the resistance, which were a welcome breather from the routine. These can range from blowing up trucks and fuel tanks with bombs strapped to RC cars to hacking security terminals with the same idiot-proof minigame every time. You arrive in a district and complete enough “Liberation Activities” to inspire the population to rise up and take back their neighborhood. The good news is that blowing up military police stations isn’t inherently awful it's just extremely repetitive. There are no meaningful decisions to make, which makes me wonder why they didn’t give the main character his own voice if his path is set in stone. While there are plenty of discussions meant to make us ponder the fine line between freedom fighter and terrorist, any weight these moments might have had is lost when our boring, mute protagonist silently nods and blindly agrees to blow up the next power station, drone factory or whatever else the Resistance points you at. Classic eye-rolling moments like “Tertiary Character Gets Bonus Emotional Investment Upon Death” or “Curse Your Sudden-But-Inevitable Betrayal!” are presented by a cast of characters who spend all their time yelling over one another with groan-worthy one-liners. There were several times that I hoped I might be surprised by an interesting reveal, but alas I was merely treated to yet another facepalm-inducing "twist". The story of Homefront: The Revolution is nothing more than a string of forgettable mission objectives sewn together with cliches pulled from the Big Book of Military Shooter Tropes. It’s a shame that such a well-crafted world is squandered on such a ponderous and uninspired plot. While on a technical level the graphics may be underwhelming, the streets of Philadelphia feel world-weary and lived-in. Ashcroft, on the other hand, is where the American KPA collaborators reside, and the alleyways between brownstones are always alive with resentful chatter from the rest of the downtrodden population. It’s dirty, the people seem miserable, and it must smell awful. Earlston, which you visit early on, feels like little more than a glorified refugee camp. “The populated Yellow Zones, however, are much more diverse and each tells its own story.
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