The Portal Home

It’s hard getting back into a game that you last played eighteen months ago. It’s a bit like stumbling home drunk from the pub. You emerge from the comforting, known safety of the pub into the strange and unfamiliar darkness of the streets. It takes a while to acclimatise, to remember how you function, what makes you do what, and how to utilise any abilities you might have, special or otherwise. You rely a little on auto pilot, and hope that eventually you’ll remember the correct path to get you to your goal without falling over or dying too many times. I’ve encountered this feeling of disorientation more than a few times over the course of this journey of mine. But never has it been as hard as trying to get back into Portal 2.

It’s especially hard to jump back into a puzzle game once it’s been abandoned. You have to put yourself in the mindset of the puzzle designers, to try to remember the tricks, quirks, nuances, and logic that define the puzzles and their solutions. It really was quite difficult to begin with. I felt like a drunkard swaying at the front door, trying to figure out how to make the keys work in combination with the lock.

Portal’s brain-teasing nature means there’s no ‘Follow’ arrow or obvious pointers, no hand-holding along the way. Jumping in cold made me feel quite stupid at first. I’d clearly forgotten the functions of half of the objects and obstacles in the game. I will admit that I had to shamefacedly turn to an Internet walkthrough to work out what I was doing wrong. Like that drunk, I had to ring the doorbell, wake the missus and admit that not only did I not know how to use my keys, but that my attempts to get in had woken up the neighbours as well.

And as it turned out I’d completely forgotten something very important, and had totally misread the situation I was in. If I hadn't gotten that information from the walkthrough I would most likely still be there now, tearing my hair out in frustration, jabbing the wrong key at the lock of the wrong house. But the walkthrough had refreshed my memory like a sobering slap to the face. Eventually I got myself back into the groove, and completed Game Number 30 in a couple of sittings.

There’s only one thing worse than reacquainting yourself with a complex game after a long absence; starting a game that you've heard nothing but bad things about. Homefront was generally panned upon release, and I can see why. The warning signs are there before you've even started playing. 

The game is set fifteen years in the future after North Korea has somehow invaded and occupied America. As you start a new game a montage of news reels and newspaper cuttings explain the circumstances that led to this unlikely scenario. Delivered in grave, dramatic style, and utilising an ominous soundtrack, the developer’s attempts to draw you in to this potentially shocking world are totally undermined when, 30 seconds into the opening cinematic, there is the sudden appearance of a big “Press 'A' to Skip” in the middle of the screen. Wow, is the setup to your game that boring and redundant that you’re actually encouraging me to skip past it? Think I'm exaggerating? Take a look for yourself:

But whatever you may think of the intro you’ll soon be wishing that “Press 'A' to Skip” popped up a whole lot more often, as there are a fair few problems to be found once the game actually begins. The first thing you’ll notice is that this is not a particularly good looking game. There’s lots of distortion, heatwaves, and blurriness from concussive rounds that attempt to mask the bad graphics, but you can see that a lot more polish was required. The levels are uninspired and start to feel too similar after a while. You move through trashed streets, into trashed houses, and on to trashed supermarkets, and it’s all rather boring. There’s not enough variety, and barely any destructibility to the environments. Bullets won’t even go through a flimsy wooden fence.

There are continued attempts to instil anger and hatred towards the AI enemies, as you encounter mass graves, civilians being tortured and murdered in the street, and parents shot in front of their wailing toddlers. But the only people I really wanted to put a bullet in were the AI freedom fighters I was lumped in with as they were constantly getting in the way, chatting shit, and generally being annoying. If you happen to stand in your teammate’s scripted position they won’t go to a secondary spot, they’ll just move into their assigned spot that you’re in, sliding you out of the way against your will, and often putting you in the line of fire.

What makes it worse is that you’re treated like an idiot who needs babysitting at all times, despite the fact that you’re almost constantly moving ahead of the guy with “Follow’ above his head because he’s just too damn slow. Homefront makes you wait for everyone to do everything for you. You can’t open doors by yourself; you have to wait for someone else to do it, and then they must go through first. In fact they have to do everything before you are allowed to; climb ladders, enter trapdoors, use turnstiles, crawl under stuff, move barricades (old fridges, always old fridges). You’re not allowed to use your initiative, even though the “Follow” guy is always slowing you down. You may be standing by a ladder you know you have to climb, but the button prompt won’t appear until the other slowcoaches have caught up and finally climbed the damn thing first. “Press A to Skip”, indeed.

Your fellow resistance fighters are a bunch of raggedy people living off the grid in rundown shacks, and surviving on nothing but cabbages secretly grown in their back yards. Yet they somehow possess a fully operational remote-controlled tank armed with infinite rockets, although it does suffer from a sometimes useless target lock. Instead of selecting the massive enemy Hum-Vee you’re aiming at, it will select the lone enemy soldier standing next to it. What’s even more hilarious is that the resulting rocket explosion is so huge that it utterly obliterates the soldier, but leaves the Hum-Vee totally unscathed.

What would a first person shooter these days be without the obligatory stealth/sniper level? In this one you run stupidly around in broad daylight, standing tall in plain view of what I can only assume were blind enemies, without any use of shadows or any interesting methods of subterfuge. It’s horrible.

And then something really weird happened. It started to get fun. You jump in a helicopter gunship, hijack a bunch of fuel tankers, and then defend and deliver the tankers to a US army base in San Francisco. After successfully supplying the fuel you then join forces with the army and launch a full-blown assault on the Golden Gate Bridge. I was starting to enjoy myself!

And then, as quickly as it had turned interesting, it ended, like a kid hurriedly finishing a piece of homework so he can go outside and play football. “And then they killed all the baddies and crossed the bridge the end.”

31 down, 19 to go.