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A lot of people have been unsure about Homefront. It's understandable, really - it's a new IP, so it's a far cry from the reliable (though still somehow debatable) quality of other, already established franchises.

The game, which is developed by Kaos Studios, the guys behind Frontlines: Fuel of War, is set in 2027 in a future where Kim Jong-il dies and Kim Jong-un takes his place. He unites North Korea and South Korea (and gets a Nobel Peace Prize for it), then effectively starts a war against most of the world. Japan surrenders after the Koreans destroy one of their nuclear facilities, the price of oil sky-rockets due to a war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and America withdraw their troops from Korea, Japan and other places to try to handle instability at home. Eventually, the KPA (Korean People's Army) occupies America.

This all happens a decade before the game even starts, so as you can tell, the background storyline here is incredibly well realised - as well it should be, coming from the writer/director of Red Dawn (who was also a co-writer on Apocalypse Now). All the backstory is gathered in newspaper form throughout the game - in total, there are 61 to collect littered around the levels (and we found less than 10 on our first playthrough).

Still, the game starts with what is one of the strongest opening scenes I've seen - you wake in a run down flat to a knock at the door. When you go to answer it, a few KPA soldiers burst through the door, pin you against a wall, deliver a short speech asking why you are not serving your country, then hit you.

The next scene involves you being in a bus, through the window of which you see some pretty horrible acts, such as a couple being pulled apart and people being shot and beaten for fun by the KPA. Chief amongst these and most chilling; a small child's parents being killed in front of him by the KPA, and whilst the child screams and runs over to the bodies, the two KPA soldiers just wander off, uncaring. These scenes are genuinely shocking and, thanks in no small part to some utterly excellent animation, they perfectly illustrate the world in which the game is set.

From this your bus is taken out by the Resistance and you discover that you and the other prisoners in the bus were pilots, being rounded up because they're in short supply. After this and a lot of being chased, you end up in a Resistance camp, where there are two sleeping children that are so wonderfully animated I feel they escaped the so-called uncanny valley, with the only thing that pulled me out of our amazement being that the animations did loop after a little while. The rest of the game's animation is also pretty good, but not quite approaching the opening sequence or the sleeping children.

The game is generally nicely textured, with everything from walls to character models looking nice enough, though things can look a little blurry when you're right up against them. It's not quite Mass Effect 2, but it does the job well enough. Unfortunately, though, this is let down by some of the worst aliasing we've ever seen, everything more than a few feet away has noticeably jagged edges and anything further still looks like they were made in Minecraft. A fence from 10 metres is a horrible, jagged sight. At least it's all shown at a completely solid framerate, though, as we didn't see anything slowing down whatsoever throughout the whole of the campaign or the multiplayer we've played.

The campaign took us between 5 and 6 hours to complete on our first play through, making it the regular length for an FPS in these crazy modern times, though we did expect a little more when the credits began to roll. The campaign is full of thrilling moments (an example being the Resistance saving you from the bus mentioned earlier - the bus flips and the bodies bounce around inside quite realistically), many of which left us with that adrenal surge we got from the original Modern Warfare all those years ago.

As noted in our MP hands-on earlier in the week, the game handles and plays excellently, quick, but short of Call of Duty's twitch-shooting; heavy, but lighter than Killzone. Various ideas are taken from a few places and rendered unrecognisable by both combinations with other ideas and unique ideas from Kaos themselves. The same holds true for single player, with the player often being thrown around due to explosions, plans that go wrong and ambushes that make things go a little awry. All this really reinforces that idea that you're part of a resistance that is massively outnumbered and out-gunned, and are only being held together by a few people.

This did, however, give us the opportunity to find out how fun the online is without the Battle Commander adding more variety. It's still a great game, Battle Points still seperate it substantially from the rest of the market and the large maps still manage to be packed with tense, enjoyable action. Still, we missed the Battle Commander system and, now we've unlocked them, won't be going back.

The game ships with 7 maps that are all large (easily dwarfing any Black Ops map, though probably not quite as big as the bigger Bad Company 2 maps), and what seems to be a large amount of perks - uh, I mean, abilities, and they seem quite varied - we heard someone talking about an ability that ejects you from a vehicle when it explodes, for example. You are given 6 default classes when you start multiplayer, each of which you can change everything about once you unlock the relevant unlocks (which is done by levelling up, as you might expect).

To be honest, we think full Homefront multiplayer (meaning with Battle Commander) could at least contribute to the next evolution in multiplayer FPS, if not embody it itself. The killstreak system is too brilliant to not catch on anywhere, and we'll be severely disappointed if it doesn't. We have a feeling I'll be playing Homefront online for a long time.

1. Solid, smooth and fluid gameplay.
2. Excellent, detailed back-story coupled with disturbing imagery making an engaging game world.
3. Not always to plan missions and set-pieces highlighting the struggle behind the war.
4. Excellently acted throughout.
5. Revolutionary multiplayer ideas.

1. Lots of aliasing.
2. The actual plot is a tiny bit weak after such a rich back-story.
3. A couple of multiplayer launch hitches.

All together, Homefront was a huge surprise. Whilst we went into it hopefully, we didn't quite expect such excellent gameplay in such a detailed world, and we certainly didn't expect to find revolutionary multiplayer concepts. We know a lot of people have been unsure about jumping into the game for various reasons, such as the mixed reviews and reports of a short campaign, but the latter is untrue and the former puzzles me. The only real problem we found was the aliasing, and we can see past that to see a richly realised game world, tight, smooth gameplay and a multiplayer mode with its own unique innovations that will hopefully catch on elsewhere.