If I was confronted by a human who had tucked themselves beneath a rock for the past 40 years, who after embarking upon their self-imposed retreat from society had curiously embarked upon a mission to educate himself on the modern day video game industry, the 2-minute clip I’d show them to effectively summarize the entertainment medium’s current state would be this trailer for Homefront: The Revolution.
Titled ‘America Has Fallen,’ it ticks every single box when it comes to what you’d expect from a video game trailer. Firstly, there’s no in-game footage, with it instead relying on awkward actors and questionable CGI. Secondly, it features narration from a man who sounds like he’s spent the past 35 years sucking gravel through a straw. Thirdly, it tries to seriously and sincerely sell its viewers on a premise so unfathomably dumb that even by modern video game standards, requires Neverending Story levels of imagination to fathom. Finally, it shows us an image of soldiers running away from the detonation of a nuclear bomb. At this rate when all-out nuclear warfare does finally happen on Earth, gamers will be so bored of seeing it that they’ll instinctively reach for their PlayStation controllers and tap X repeatedly in an attempt to skip it.
The game’s premise places players in the shoes of a soldier in America’s “revolution” against North Korea, who have somehow become a superpower rather than the derelict hermit kingdom they are in reality. Because this is a video game, it’s set in a post-apocalyptic world that’s been brought about as a result of N. Korea flicking an “off” switch on all of the US’s military equipment. How did they manage to do this, you ask? Well, in Homefront‘s universe, America bought pretty much all of its technology from the country, and each piece of technology had a “backdoor” that North Korea’s government uses in the year 2025 to plunge the US into darkness. This is surely the video game to end all video games.
Check out the trailer below:
