Here Are Some Crazy Bugs We Ran Into While Playing Homefront: The Revolution

Homefront: The Revolution came out two weeks ago, and unfortunately, it's not great. While I appreciated some of the novel ideas the sequel introduces, a wealth of bugs and performance problems made taking back Philadelphia an unenjoyable slog. If you're looking for a better idea of what players are up against, or just want to laugh at some pretty severe glitch videos, I've put together a collection of gameplay clips from my time with the game.

All videos were taken from the PS4 version of the game.

Clip #1: The Gameplay Delay
One of the first problems you'll notice while playing Homefront: The Revolution (on console at least), is a seconds long delay any time you reach a check point, complete an objective, or exit a shop or storage locker. It appears to be caused by the game autosave system, and it's kind of astonishing that players are just expected to live with it.

Clip #2: Wait For It...
Seeing as how a lot of checkpoints happen immediately big moments in the game, these save delays can really sap any sense of achievement you may have gotten from surviving a tough battle.

Clip #3: Climbing Up The Walls
In addition to sluggish gunplay mechanics, Homefront's navigation mechanics leave a lot to be desired. The large, open zones you travel through are full of interesting places, but issues like spotty climbing detection can make exploring harder than it should be. Notice the magical floating act my character does after one of the botched landings – it's kinda hard to avoid suspicion when you're helplessly hovering on the side of a building.

Clip #4: Keep On Hopping
After a while I just got used to jumping several times at ledges that I thought were climbable. There didn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to when or why my character would eventually grab on. Other things to notice in this clip: The bugged-out camera angle when climbing onto the first roof, and how your hands hover above the environment – other times they melt right through the environment like they're made of butter.

Clip #5: The Framerate Ain't Great
The biggest hurdle Homefront faces on console is the framerate. The framerate is so bad in places that playing the game for prolonged sessions gave me a headache, something I have never experience from an FPS before. It also kills the gunplay. While it can be hard to judge video quality from online videos sometimes (it has been converted down to 720p in this clip, for instance), the framerate is really as bad as it looks.

Clip #6: Time To Get Your Eyes Checked
Texture pop-in is also a big problem; you'll frequently run into blurry objects that magically come into focus after a few seconds. In the multiplayer clip above, you can see three distinct resolution levels, with the left newsstand popping into focus several seconds before the right newsstand. This problem is by no means limited to multiplayer.

Clip #7: Like Riding A Bike
This video has three moments worthy of a good facepalm. The first is the inability to get on the motorcycle due to the missing prompt (fixed by a couple of bullets). The second is the chugging framerate, which makes the bike virtually impossible to steer. And finally, you have the enemy that pops in out of nowhere – but hey, at least he had the decency to spawn directly in my path. Not shown: The death animation for running an enemy over, because there isn't one.

Clip #8: The No-Gun Double-Take
Sometimes the loading problems are so bad that things just don't load at all, like this freedom fighter's rifle. To his credit, however, at least he keeps his finger off of the invisible trigger – that's just good gun safety. I like this clip because it you can practically hear my brain go, "Wait, what?!" when I get to the top of the stairs.

Clip #9: Now You See Them...
Sometimes an entire roomful of characters will disappear before your very eyes. Again, my genuine confusion is palpable.

Clip #10: Mind Police
Here's one of the most bizarre glitches I ran into: I was randomly tasked with saving a civilian from a K.P.A. soldier, only the soldier appeared to be invisible. After getting manhandled and forced to the ground, the poor innocent bystander just gets up and walks off like nothing happened. Was it all just some kind of performance art?

Clip #11: Run For Your Life
Homefront also suffers from some woeful A.I. problems. Not only did these two freed prisoners get stuck on the same sign post, they were also in some kind of time-warp that made them run super slow. Notice how the second fleeing NPC decides it would be a good idea to run and hide right next to the K.P.A. soldier. Yeesh.

Clip #12: Cover Me!
Sometimes the broken A.I. works in your favor. Take this helpful NPC, for instance: He spent the entire battle facing the wrong way and refusing to move out of enemy fire, but he was also invincible, so he served as a good distraction.

Clip #13: Well, Looks Like I'm A Shoe Now...
This video might look like an experimental arthouse film, but I promise you it's still Homefront. Several times while playing multiplayer with some of my co-workers (sorry, guys), I spawned into a new multiplayer session in some kind of black-and-white parallel dimension where all I could see was a close-up of my shoe. All I could do was hop around and rotate my shoe while I listened to my co-workers play the mission. Once they completed an objective, I would spawn in normally.

Clip #14: Glitch Climax Achieved
This final video showcases pretty much everything that is wrong with Homefront at the moment. It starts with our favorite buddy taking a few dozen more shots to the dome before the mission progresses (notice how sometimes after landing a headshot, the hit indicator continues to stick around on your reticle). After that, it's a whirlwind of problems. First, our ally magically warps directly behind us, only to respawn in a default Jesus pose when the viewpoint momentarily hops to a broken camera angle. In front of all that is a guy in a truck who is only a head and a pair of hands for the beginning of our short journey. After the explosion, another floating appendage man briefly runs into frame, before the game lurches into two lengthy consecutive freezes. Simply unacceptable.

It's worth noting that Dambuster Studios has vowed to continue patching the game to address gameplay issues, and that the framerate and control issues may not be as bad on PC (once again, our review only pertained to the PS4 version). However, these bugs – and the countless others I experienced but didn't record – make it impossible to recommend the game; what little entertainment I got from playing the game was for all the wrong reasons.