THQ Hammered by Sub-Par Homefront Scores

[tzimize]

I find it amusing that 73 is considered mediocre...

Well...think of it like this.

Games with a score in the 20-30s are so iredeemably bad that they are not even worth looking at, except as a horror story to how stuff should not be done. So...to actually PLAY a game, it should have a score in the 60s at least (personally my time is too valuable to touch games that lurk in such low scores, in almost all cases). Considering there are a lot of releases, and the best ones are 90+. In that light, 73 can suddenly be thought about as "mediocre".

Of course, if you take the whole spectrum into account, its not in the middle of the tree, but you get my point I guess.

 

[omega247]

If I had an average of 73% in uni, I'd be happy.

lol, I got 62% for my degree, so going by the fact 73% is mediocre I guess I did pretty badly ¬_¬

 

[FinalHeart95]

73 is sub-par? I consider that a game that I could definitely rent, or maybe buy in a bargain bin. Maybe even before it hits the bargain bin if it's in a genre I really like. Besides, last I checked a game in the 70s was PAR, which was when scores were already too skewed.
That annoys me more than anything else in this article to be honest.

 

[Dzil]

72 isn't that bad. My take on metacritic scores is:

95+ : Everyone should seriously think about buying this game.
90-95: If you like the genre, you will probably love this.
75-89: Not for everyone, but if it interests you you will probably enjoy it.
65-74: Either this game is a flawed diamond (eg STALKER) or a truly average game.
40-65: Only if the game fits into a particular niche you like.
<40 : Garbage
<10 : So bad its funny

I'm guessing home-front is an unadventurous splice between BC2 and CoD, so I think 74 is fair. Doubt there's anything really wrong with it, just doesn't do anything new.

My thoughts exactly. You can't churn out a CoD clone that makes no significant improvement, and expect existing CoD fans to shell out 50-60 bucks on it. You only get to get away with cloning the game and reselling it anyways if you can put a higher number on the end. See Madden 1992 - 2011.

TBH I much prefer the work I see indies doing these days: minecraft, spacechem, dwarf fortress... the FPS just seems... done. There's really only so much you can improve on the recipe as the game is almost entirely about the multiplayer. Oh, how I wish a AAA publisher would take the first person and primitive graphics of minecraft, the mind boggling complex systems of dwarf fortress, and churn out a multiplayer game that did both. I'd shell out 50-60 bucks for a polished version of that in a heartbeat.

 

[Nedoras]

I really really hate how games are scored nowadays. It makes no sense.

10/10 - It's pretty good.
9/10 - It's okay I guess.
8/10 - It's decent, I wouldn't really recommend it unless you love the genre.
7/10 - It's bland, I'd pass on this one.
6/10 - Um....what's a 6? There are numbers below 7?

That's how it seems to be to me. Whenever a game scores a 7 or even an 8, people say that it's average or okay at best. Some people that are fans even complain that it didn't score high enough. It blows my mind. I'm gonna give this game a rental to see if it's worth buying. It may be short, but it could still be fun. Plus the multiplayer could be fun as well.

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

Not saying Im surprised. Now they can get back to Metro 2034 and STALKER

Yeah um, THQ didn't make either of those games, they just published them.

I actually think THQ is going about it like a dick. "Oh, Kaos Studios didn't make the game good enough. It was their own fault, and now they're going to have to be exiled. Tough break."

Your marketing, dear THQ, was appalling, and this is nobody's fault but your own.

no it wasn't. That game had a HUGE marketing push. See shogun 2 total war for poor marketing. (mind you total war will always sell well.

Oh no, I know their marketing was huge. It was appalling all the same. It was like EA-level atrocious, and it pushed all the wrong elements of the game at all the wrong people. Atrocious marketing, not nonexistant marketing.

And Shogun 2 got that TF2 pack-in over Steam, so it doesn't matter how well it's marketed now - it will sell one bajillion digital copies. And you can quote me on that.

 

[Moeez]

I guess Cliff Blezinski was right about that the "middle class" of games is DEAD. You can now only have AAA titles, or indie titles that'll do well.

 

[Nick Angelici]

I have the reason why this failed THQ, you made a MODERN DAY SHOOTER, good work, way to be bland and try to beat a market that CoD, though terrible, pretty much owns every fan of the genre.

This is great news to me, every time a shooter like this fails, it tells the industry to try something else, take a risk, or go home, nobody did well in the industry of games being like the leaders, because then nobody buys their games. see this cycle of stupidity, dont follow it

 

[DTWolfwood]

And ppl wonder y the enemies are always russian, cause when its anything else the game bombs XD

joking aside, the game did look a bit on the generic side other than the preposterous setting, which would have been the same game if the Russian invaded, brought nothing new to the genre.

I can almost see the same thing happening to Crysis 2 XD

 

[Denamic]

Probably doesn't help that it's shooter #6974.

 

[jmarquiso]

How could "poor" scores of one game drive down stock prices that much?

 

[KO4U]

Are stock holders aware that Homefront is THQ's most pre-ordered game ever? It kinda is selling!

 

[Flatliner74]

OK.. I finished the campaign in two nights. Just like Call of Duty BlOps, and just like Halo Reach. The campaign didn't feel short as much as it kind of felt incomplete in a way. The production values could have used some polish, and graphically, the game can't stand up to the likes of Crisis and the upcoming Battlefield 3, but it's passable.

I personally enjoyed the narrative. The story was really intense. I loved the future history take on things. The multiplayer in this game is awesome though. I felt it is handled much better than CoD.

I think the game deserves a real chance. There aren't many 32 player FPS's out there.

 

[JayDig]

Too much concentration on multiplayer these days. At least they didn't make a deathmatch killbox type online game like every COD game seems to recycle. Since many of us have been tired of that since Unreal Tournament, I'm glad they went for the Battlefield style. But Homefront seems to lose a lot of points on it's single player.

Even if their campaign was 15 hours in play-time, it's not long enough to ensure that players won't trade in, so multiplayer must be in there for 'unlimited' play-time.

I guess I'm the target audience for this game, (I play a lot of FPS) but I play very little competitive multiplayer, so these type of games have less and less value for me as single player shrinks and online balloons.

I still buy Call of Duty games for the short campaign... but their high point for MP was COD:United Offensive more than six years ago.

 

[electric discordian]

Why did Homefront fail? The single player is stilted and emotionless despite being lauded as being written by the bloke that did Red Dawn and Apocalypse Now! The servers on the Multiplayer are non existent, you can't play with your friends as they have disabled that feature whilst it's repaired, if you do by some fluke get a game you find that you are at the bottom of the heap as they fixed the US servers first therefore some places already have level fifties whilst us poor sods in the UK are still level 4 usually because of the bug which resets your xp level!

Oh and the multiplayer code for the XBox works infrequently often asking me to pay a second time to play online.

The lag is horrendous, the glitching is unbelievable and the community are fiercely protective of the game as are the publishers who have taken down most of the negative posts on their forums, usually asking for Bug fixes!

I would trade this pile of junk in but its only worth Twenty five pounds so it has depreciated half its cost in four days!

This could be why it got bad reviews!