Homefront: The Revolution was released too early

Homefront: The Revolution is not a good game. When it was launched though, it was a decidedly worse one. Broken, glitchy, and largely uninteresting to play. And that’s a real pity – because somewhere, somewhere really, really deep down in Homefront: The Revolution, there’s a decent game that’s begging to be played.

Here’s what I said of it in my review:

“Homefront: The Revolution is not a very good game. There’s no getting around that. The game is a technical mess, with shoddy frame-rates and odd hitches, poor animation and silly bugs. It doesn’t tell a particularly engaging or engrossing story, relying so heavily as it does on stereotypes and gung-ho, stick-it-to-the-man bravado. The characters have all the personality, charm and wit of an administrative law textbook.

The whole game seems to have been made from a checklist, ticking off the boxes that would make it a Blockbuster AAA Experience (TM) and it succeeds at very nearly none of them. And yet, there’s something about it, buried deep in its core that I found fun to play – but that just makes it doubly disappointing. Homefront: The Revolution could be better, and dammit it should be better.”

Since release, Dam Buster and publisher Deep Silver have patched it countless times, trying to make it in to that something better. Moreover, while it is better, it is still not a good game. It was released too early – and it’s a lesson that Deep Silver is taking to heart.

“We have learnt some big lessons from Homefront,” Deep Silver global brand and marketing director Paul Nicholls told MCV. “You can see in the market at the moment, quality is absolutely king and some big IPs have struggling figures at the moment. We learnt a lot of lessons about what to do going forward. Not just the quality of the product, but when we launch as well.”

“The team at Dambuster did a fantastic job. With what the team there has done, getting the product patched and so on, the sentiment with consumers has really turned around. We’re getting a lot of positive feedback compared to when we launched, so timing was probably the biggest lesson we have learnt there.”

It’s a lesson that many publishers need to learn. Sometimes, it’s okay to delay a game. In the very probably paraphrased or misattributed words of Shigeru Miyamoto: “A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.”

Last Updated: November 24, 2016