Homefront Guerrilla war on home soil

The premise does the heavy lifting: after years of economic collapse, a nuclear-armed Greater Korean Republic has taken the country in days, helped by an EMP strike that left the military blind. What follows is not a distant battlefield but your own street turned hostile. High school stadiums serve as detention centers, armored vehicles park in shopping malls, and civilians are either prisoners, collaborators or resistance. You play Robert Jacobs, a former Marine helicopter pilot pulled out of his Colorado home and into a resistance cell. The campaign leans on first-person cutscenes to tell its story, written by John Milius of Apocalypse Now and Red Dawn, and it does not shy away from what occupation costs ordinary people.

You are not a superpower here. You move through damaged neighbourhoods with a small cell of fighters, using whatever you can find, and the fight mixes infantry work with stolen hardware. You commandeer military vehicles, fly drones, and can deploy the Goliath, a remote-controlled assault vehicle you direct by marking enemy soldiers and armor for it to destroy. One moment you are sniping from a tower, the next you are dropping white phosphorus on a column and dealing with the aftermath. The gunplay is the part that holds up best: weapons sound and feel punchy, and the set pieces, including a helicopter mission many remember as the campaign's high point, keep the pressure on. Collectible newspaper clippings fill in how the world got here.