14 DAY TRIAL // What we know
THQ has not had a serious player in the first-person shooter space for some time and Homefront is their effort to get access to a at least a slice of the huge number of gamers who have been playing Call of Duty for the last few years while delivering an experience which aims for some innovation on top of the traditional shooting.
Homefront will be built around the idea of guerrilla combat, with the main characters always outnumbered and outgunned by the North Koreans, forcing them to rely on unconventional means of achieving their aims.
The hope is that the move away from pure military tactical movement will infuse the game with a feeling of experimentation and will make the gameplay varied enough to avoid boring the player half way through the narrative.
Developer Kaos Studio has also stated their aim of creating believable, grounded characters that can sustain the series in the long term and can make the backstory, which involves American decline and a nuclear armed North Korea, believable.
Why it matters
The way Call of Duty crushed Medal of Honor from Electronic Arts in the fall of 2010 suggests that the Activision blockbuster can take out any rival in the first-person shooter genre that is not at the top of its game.
Homefront seems to aim for innovation as fall as familiarity, trying to create an experience that offers the familiar adrenaline fire fight moments while giving them more weight beyond the immediate jolt of combat.
I remember the reaction that gamers had to the levels in Modern Warfare 2, where America was in need of defense and as long as it makes its shooting action solid and manages to keep the story within the realm of the possible, Homefront has a chance of becoming a spring season hit on the scale of Call of Duty, something that THQ could really use.