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“Do you know who that is? That’s Connor Mason. He’s on the List…."

These are the first worlds you hear as you swim back into consciousness… The year is 2027, ten years into the energy crisis that has turned the old geo-political order upside down, and two years since the North Korean occupation of America.

We’re watching Kaos Studios’ live gameplay demonstration of Homefront™, a First Person Shooter for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC - the demo is running off a standard debug 360, with Lead Designer Erin Daly at the controls. This short segment takes place in Montrose, once a small farming community that now serves as a makeshift camp for the Resistance, and the last safe house in Colorado to stand against the occupying Korean People’s Army.

It’s a tranquil scene at first. Sunlight filters through the blades of improvised wind turbines, and gleams off solar panels – the only reliable sources of power in this energy starved America. You’re guided through the camp by one of the resistance leaders, who barks orders to your companions to pack up and prepare to move out, whilst leading you to their stash of firearms recently captured from the KPA.

Here you’re introduced to the Adaptive Combat Rifle – an example of today’s prototype military technology made real, and one of Homefront’s many near-future weapons. But there’s barely time to lock and load before KPA troops and armoured personnel carriers roll in to capture their target – you.

The tranquil opening transforms to an intense skirmish, as you’re forced fight your way across the street to where potential salvation lies in the form of a gigantic, un-manned military drone called ‘Goliath’ - which sports six car-crushing wheels and a rack of turret mounted rockets.

Fire-fights in Homefront are deafening affairs as bullets chip away at cover and ricochet off the Korean APC’s armour. The right-stick zoom and generic crosshairs found in Frontlines has been replaced with a true iron-sight aim, your ACR boasting a red-dot sight with which to target enemies. Foes react to where your bullets hit, and there is plenty of evidence of dynamic interactions within the environment – in one exchange a sniper tumbles from a top floor window before rolling down a sloping porch roof. In another sequence, you dislodge a soldier by tossing a grenade through a shattered window, which blows your attacker and a good chunk of wall out into the open.

Retrieving an RPG from a fallen Korean soldier enables you to take out an on-rushing APC – the burning wreckage careers past, missing by inches, and neatly illustrates the ‘Drama Engine’ that Kaos have built on top of the Unreal 3 technology powering the game. This ensures that scripted events and any naturally occurring explosive spectacle always trigger within your line of vision for maximum dramatic impact. When we watch a second run-through of the demo, Erin is in a different location when the APC explodes, but the flaming wreck still barrels towards the screen delivering what Kaos call a ‘seat of your pants’ experience each time. The idea is that the Drama Engine will combine the same intensity of a tightly scripted single player campaign with the more emergent gameplay of an open, non-linear experience – and on current evidence, it’s succeeding.

Successfully negotiating the street leads to a dilapidated house where you pick up Goliath. As members of the resistance lay down covering fire, you equip Goliath’s Target Designator and paint your target – another APC – using the designator’s laser pointer. Within seconds, Goliath smashes through the wall and out on the street, taking up position before despatching the APC with a volley of rocket fire. Another target meets the same fate, before the demo comes to a climactic end as a Korean bomber swoops overhead and unleashes a devastating payload...

Clocking in at a lean 10 minutes, this gameplay demo nonetheless shows off Homefront’s distinctive take on the FPS genre – a unique setting which we’re told extends beyond the Colorado farmlands through the strip malls and playgrounds of small town America, to the occupied city of San Francisco and the iconic Golden Gate bridge; an intense cinematic experience fuelled by the Drama Engine; and a host of experimental, near-future weaponry that bring new tactics and gameplay to the battlefield.

We didn’t see any controllable vehicles in the demo, but Kaos have promised that, like Frontlines, there will be a large selection military hardware to drive and fly.

Homefront will also boast a ‘huge’ multiplayer component, and although details are being kept under wraps for now, Kaos’ previous experience with Frontlines and the PC mod Desert Combat points towards epic scale battles combining infantry and vehicle combat.

You can watch some clips from the Homefront demo in our first trailer on THQ TV, and the first screens are also available here on THQ.com.

We’ll have more information on Homefront in the coming months, right here on THQ.com.

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