Everything I hear about Homefront makes me want to hit my head against a wall.
In case you haven't heard about this game, it's a gritty, no-nonsense first-person shooting war game (what originality!) where the battle takes place on American soil, because North Korea has invaded and enslaved everyone in America. THQ is marketing it as "the next American revolution."
Beyond this fucking awful set up that basically is this commercial that I see all the time on CNN, the game seems pretty… racist? At the very least, willfully unaware of the role of American hegemony. The developers can say, "oh, this is what it's like when other countries get invaded, and you get to see what that would be like from an American perspective," but I always contend that we don't live in that world, we live in this world, and in this world, there's no question of America's military supremacy. As well, the very structure of the game seems to suggest that America will "win" in the end, which is obviously inherently different from most colonial places in a modern context.
So the game's problematic right out of the gate, but there's also THQ's ridiculous marketing stunts which call to mind similar stunts pulled by EA and Visceral for Dante's Inferno. I'm guessing that no one at THQ cares that those marketing stunts are morally bankrupt, because Dante's Inferno still sold a shit ton of copies despite being almost universally lambasted. It seems like this is the tactic taken by companies when they have an "edgy" product that is probably inferior in many aspects. Any game that has a marketing campaign bigger than your average Pokemon game and relies so heavily on viral marketing is going to get me to automatically shut down.
I'm thinking I'll rent Homefront just to see how jingoistic it is. Because the last thing that America needs is another video game saying "hoo ra American army!"