52 Games Challenge 2025!!!

[bizzgeburt]

15 - Homefront [AT][CH][DE] (PlayStation 3)
https://vgcollect.com/item/288665

Hardware: PlayStation 3 fat
Playtime: about 30 hours

I initially played Homefront shortly after it's release in 2011, but quickly abandonned it in favour of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which got me sucked in for quite a few years … now in 2025 - a good 14 years have passed - and after finally re-achieveing a functioning PS3, I attempt to "dig at the roots" of my PSN trophy-tree, starting with this title.
NOTE: since the online-server has long been shut down, I'll focus this review solely on the single player campaign.

Homefront is a first-person-shooter that was developed by KAOS Studios. This division of THQ was founded in february 2006 by former Trauma Studios Inc. employees. The only other game I found information of, that KAOS Studios was responsible for developing was Frontlines: Fuel of War (xbox & PC, 2008). This division appears to have been closed by THQ in june 2011, which actually was about 3 months after Homefront was released in march 15th 2011 by THQ Entertainment in Switzerland, Austria and Germany, where I purchased and played it.
This game praises itself with an intruiging background-story written by US author John Frederick Milius, who was also involved in the scripts of cinema blockbusters such as "Red Dawn" or "Apocalypse Now". The story is mostly settled in Montrose, Colorado in the year 2027: after North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il's death in 2011, his son Kim Jong-un went on reunifying the two Korean countries into one - The Greater Korean Republic, which soon began to strenghten it's influence in asia and the whole globe, resulting in an attack on the USA. In 2027 almost half of the north american continent is occupied by the Korean People's Army (KPA), with the highly radiated Mississipi acting as a radioactive border between the communist occupier's forces and the remains of an almost defeated and scattered US Military, supported by local resistance groups. You as the player assume the role of helicopter pilot Robert Jacobs who ends up joining such a resistance group, urging to fight of the Korean oppressors. In all those years between me playing Homefront the first time, and now that I've finally played through the whole campaign, I kept this unique plot in good memory, and even 14 years after it's release, this weird distopy captivates me and kept me hooked to this game the past few days. The US being occupied by a villain state type of enemy like (North-)Korea, with everything cruel that comes with it, is illustrated in a highly cineastic and therefor spine-chilling manner, truely bearing the handwriting of John Milius, who already shocked audiences with terrifying anti-war scenes. The story in Homefront really is something very special and imo kind of a gem in it's genre.

Besides that, Homefront is technicaly a very basic first-person-shooter of it's era, but with a very sophisticated ballistic engine for it's time. Or at least it felt like that back in the day. Maybe that's the reason why it play's itself a bit like Battlefield Bad Company 2 or Battlefield 3 - nevertheless it's still enjoyable today. Missions themselves are all linear but already with a ton of cinematic sequences spread througout them, enough but not too many vehicle-missions to not get you annoyed and an acceptable armory of different guns and gun-configurations to satisfy your local NRA-guy (like Author John Milius, by the way). 

It's really difficult to assess 2011's graphics with 2025's eyes, but honestly? Graphics look amazing to me when I try to put myself back in that time, especially the lighting appears very modern, setting a very realistic atmosphere. I guess I'll have to play more FPS from that year to really be able to compare it to anything…
NOTE: I noticed specifically this game crashing/freezing my console (first Edition 80GB fat lady PS3) repeatedly, which didn't occur playing other games … maybe it's just my copy being faulty, but it tended to freeze entirely, especially after longer sessions or repeated loading/reloading during a session, and mostly in situations, when the game attempted to load another section of the mission or when getting in/out a vehicle. Maybe someone reading this remembers having any similar problems with this game?   

Interestingly, the musical score to Homefront was composed by the same guy that composed the soundtrack to KAOS Studios' other development Frontlines: Fuel of War - Matthew Harwood from Sumthing Else Music Works. Most of the time, the music kinda whobbles in the background of your fighting action with only a few elements of significance, like in any semi-good action-movie. Only the piece in the last mission felt a bit more present and pompous. I don't expect much of a FPS's music, so that's all just fine with me on that part. Normally, music is the part of a game I love to adress most, especially when reviewing 8- to 64-bit era games … somehow in a war-like scenario, most music seems out-of-place and unrealistic, and there are only a few great examples of how the soundtrack can elevate the experience in such games, like for example in Halo: Combat Evolved. Homefront's soundtrack succeeds in setting the atmosphere fitting to the scenery and action, but it certainly isn't any type of gaming soundtrack you'll find yourself searching for on YouTube.

Although I'm sad that it's impossible to get the platinum trophy with the servers down, I really enjoyed revisiting this game after 14 years and it aged well, I must say. It's great for a quick playthrough with an interesting story and challenging difficulty. So give this game a chance and try it out. 

Another game finished … on to the next one 

[bikingjahuty]

124. Resident Evil 3 Nemesis (PS1)

It's interesting to see where our opinions overlap and differ from another. Despite mentioning how I think I may have enjoyed Resident Evil 3: Nemesis more than the previous two series titles, I'm not one to rank or score games. To me, they're all three about on par to each other considering their time of release and existence as debut, sequel, and third entry titles.

Also, at this point, I can see why Resident Evil is the most popular horror franchise (objectively at this time and arguably not anymore), but I'm still far more captivated and unnerved by Silent Hill. Yet even if Silent Hill debuted first, I think Resident Evil would have gained the broad audience appeal.

The original three games each definitely bring something new to the table that makes them memorable. I guess all things considered, the originality and creepy mansion setting of the first game, and the crazy scope and story of the second game elevate them over Nemesis chasing you around Raccoon City in the third game. You're definitely not alone in liking the third game more, and if anything it seems like more people than ever consider the third game the best. For me though, I love the first two noticeable more despite really liking 3 still.


I really need to branch out more with the Silent Hill franchise. I adore SH2, but I don't care for the first game as much, mostly due to how dated the gameplay feels. I know they both use tank controls (as do the early RE games), but I jsut got frustrated with how much less precise they felt and how I kept on getting hurt or killed when I knew what I was supposed to do. The game just wouldn't let me do it, or at least not do it as well as I would like to actually succeed. But yeah, I still really want to play 3, 4 and some of the later games. SHF is towards the top of my To Play list for next year. I really looking forward to trying that one out.

[kashell]

81. Nancy Drew: Shadow at the Water's Edge

Water's Edge gave me a watershed moment: I finished my first PC game. Ever. One of my friends that likes to watch me game and vice versa suggested that we play this. She used to play a ton of these back in the day, and she said that since I like mysteries, visual novels, puzzles, and Japan, then I might like this. I'll start with the bad: the control scheme. Point and click adventures of this era are pretty awful and I don't know how people had the patience for them. This isn't just limited to navigation. Simply interacting with things requires certain steps that make zero sense. You're forced to listen to others state everything from start to finish - you can't skip dialogue. I may write a review that lists all of my issues because they really stacked up. Also, this game is supposed to be for a younger crowd but I don't see how in the hell folks finished some of these puzzles without guidance. There's one near the end of the game where you're supposed to cut ropes before a timer runs out or poor Nancy drowns. Seriously! Home-girl gets killed in this "for kids game." On the other hand, I loved the Kyoto setting, and getting to use the JR system was fun and nostalgic since I've been to Kyoto. The non-guide puzzles were super clever, and the story was entertaining thanks to the phoned-in (but racially problematic) voice-acting. Some of the puzzles allowed me to flex my knowledge over the Japanese language. I think the best part of the game was that it was another fun, comical, bonding moment with a friend. I doubt I'll play more in the series but hey, I gave something completely new a shot and that counts for something!

[bikingjahuty]

9. Gaiares (Genesis) - ABANDONED

In general, I love shumps. however, I am not afraid to say that the most shmups of the 80s and even up to the early 90s has some incredibly annoying gameplay issues that prevent me from enjoying many of them, including what are generally considered to be some of the better shooters from that era. Power up marooning, arbitrary stage checkpoints you have to restart from when you die, and poor enemy/projectile balancing plague so many of these games. While there are definitely some older shmups that possess these vices that are way more tolerable than others, in general it's something I am so happy most shooters moved past by the late 90s. Unfortunately, 1990's Gaiares suffers from all three of these old STG gameplay pitfalls to an extent that made the game unplayable for me fairly early on.


This isn't a case of the game was too hard; I love shmups and there are very few that I would classify as easy. However, outdated gameplay mechanics and design are just that, outdated. There's a reason the genre moved past removing all your power ups when you die, only to die over and over again at the same spot you died before even with all the power ups you had originally. Also stage checkpoints are just arbitrary and annoying as hell too. Gaiares also puts you in many situations that are either just downright cheap or just poorly designed. The game's saving graces is that it looks excellent for a very early 90s shmup and the soundtrack is very catchy. Sadly though, I kinda hated playing this game to the point where I just couldn't do it anymore just three stages in.


Gaiares was on my backlog earlier this year and due to time constraints and feeling like playing other games instead, I just never got around to playing it. With a week left in the year, I got a wild hair and decided I was going to play it. I kinda wish I hadn't now. I'm happy for people that really like this game, but I'm certainly not one of them. (12/24/25) ABANDONED

[bikingjahuty]

126. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs (Arcade)

Over the years I've been heavily into retro gaming, I feel like I've heard Cadillacs and Dinosaurs mentioned in passing numerous times. Still, over all these years of hearing this game get name dropped, I knew very little about it up until maybe a couple of years ago. When I did finally get more info on this somewhat obscure early 90s beat em' up beyond just its name, it began to emerge as an obscure gem that has been unfairly overshadowed by other more well known beat em' ups for the past 30 years. Since beat em' ups generally don't take more than half an hour to play all the way through, I figured I had nothing to lose in seeing whether this game was actually a forgotten classic, or just another game "hardcore" gamers use to gate keep and flex with.


I can fortunately say that Cadillacs and Dinosaurs is a REALLY good beat em' up! This game is apparently based on an existing IP, a comic series I believe, that I know nothing about, but still, with the limited story delivered through still cutscenes and dialogue, I have to give props to Capcom for making things feel original and interesting. Cadlllacs and Dinosaurs takes place in a distant, dystopian future where dinosaurs have been brought back from extinction and the four playable characters you can choose from are on a mission to save them and also defeat an evil scientist who is fusing humans and dinosaurs together as weapons. All this is show off with incredibly detailed character and enemy sprites, as well as very intriguing stages and backgrounds. I'm a bit disappointed there isn't more dinosaurs or Cadillacs in this game, but even with fighting a lot of the same human type enemies throughout the game, it does a good enough job at keeping things pretty interesting and fresh from a visuals standpoint. The dinosaur hybrid enemies are also very creative and well designed too.


Perhaps Cadillacs and Dinosaurs' best quality though is its soundtrack and overall sound design. This game has such an awesome soundtrack with nearly every stage song being memorable and catchy as hell. There are also unique sound effects and brief voice clips for all four characters as well as some side characters. Some of the weapon sound effects are also great, and have a great sense of impact which is in no small part because of how good the sound quality in Cadillacs and Dinosaurs.


Discussing the gameplay of a beat em' up, especially an older one is often where I have to start being a bit more critical and negative, but luckily I can that Cadillacs and Dinosaurs' gameplay is actually pretty good given the genre it belongs to. There are a tone of weapon and item pickups in this game which definitely mix up the two button combat of attacking, jumping and pushing a combo of the two for special attacks. You can also run in this game by double tapping left or right, which allows for its own uniqe attacks and strategies. Still, despite this, umm, added depth, the Cadillacs and Dinosaurs is still expectedly cheap at times and also easy to cheese certain moves to make the game easier than it should be. Still, the gameplay is definitely well made enough to where this game is fun to play almost the whole time from start to finish and doesn't have anything about it that's egregiously broken or flawed.


Cadillacs and Dinosaurs is indeed a great early 90s beat em' ups that certainly deserves to be mentioned with other genre greats like Final Fight, Streets of Rage, Xmen, The Simpsons, and Aliens vs Predator. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this game and unlike a lot of beat em ups, I can actually see myself wanting to return to this game eventually. It's truly a classic arcade beat em' up if there ever was one, and one I'd easily recommend to someone looking for a more obscure, but still very enjoyable game. (12/24/25) [36/50]

[bikingjahuty]

127. Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves (PS5)

Like most long time Fatal Fury fans, I was very excited to hear a new game in the series was finally being made after over two decades since the last installment. Not only that, but the game that proceeded City of the Wolves, Mark of the Wolves has remained the gold standard for the Fatal Fury series since its release in the late 90s. To say City of the Wolves had some big shoes to fill was an understatement, however if SNK has proven anything since the late 2000s, it's that they still know how to make some incredible games, albeit with a few stinkers thrown in here and there too. Of course, I preorder City of the Wolves as soon as I could and was counting down the days until its release...and then there were some last minute character announcements that really threw a cold bucket of water on my enthusiasm for this game.


Ronaldo and Ganacci as characters in a fighting game might go down as one of the most odd and most stupid decisions a publisher has ever made. But what made their inclusions even more of a bitter pill to swallow was the omission of two Fatal Fury staples, Joe and Andy, and making them paid DLC characters. This massive fumble on SNK's part was enough for me to cancel my preorder and deciding I wasn't going to buy this game until I could do so for under $30. Less than a year after City of the Wolves was released, I finally was able to pick it up for that price and see if maybe I was too harsh on this game initially. While I do think maybe my anger about a real life pro soccer player and some rando Bosnian DJ being made into Fatal Fury characters was a bit excessive, I have no regrets about waiting to pick this game up until it was much cheaper.


My main issue with City of the Wolves is how restrictive its gameplay is. Sure, you can play the game however you want to in terms of your style. However, the game is clearly designed for a specific type of play style, specifically a much more defensive one that heavily relies on counters, rather than just aggressively pushing your opponent. Especially with the KOF series and Fatal Fury, I absolutely prefer to play these games more aggressively, so needing to play more defensively to have a shot felt very weird for me. I played this game a ton and beat it with many of the characters, but the entire time, I still wished the game allowed me to play much more offensively and still be mostly competitive. And I mean, this kind of works against mid and lower level CPU controlled characters, but against experienced players and harder CPU opponents, you're pretty much screwed.


Despite City of the Wolves punishing more aggressive play styles and favoring more defensive ones, I thought the rev meter and SPG system were good mechanics, although I felt like neither tilted or balanced matches as much as maybe they should. This made them feel a little superfluous, but they still offered some fun variation to the gameplay compared to most other modern fighting games, SNK titles included. I also felt like character balancing was definitely considered heavily when making this game, but again, pigeon holing people into a few play styles sorta sucked a lot of the fun out of what could have otherwise been a much more enjoyable game to play.


While the gameplay of City of the Wolves does leave a lot on the table, the visual presentation mostly does not. City of the Wolves is a mostly detailed, vivid looking game with mostly great character designs, stages, and animations. This game heavily reminds me of Street Fighter IV's art style which is a huge compliment towards this game. Also, stages are pretty memorable for the most part, with a few being a little on the stale side. One issue I did have with the visuals has to do with the cutscenes that play out between matches. These are mostly done using semi-still images of the in game character models in certain poses as dialogue plays. Doing these cut scenes like this just felt a little lazy and also dampened my desire to unlock them all like I did in games like KOF 14 which had lots of hand drawn, fully animated cutscenes for many characters. There are some animated cutscenes, mostly character endings, but these still play out in a somewhat uninteresting way as montages of stills, rather than fully animated scenes.


While the visuals are mostly praiseworthy, the audio is not. In fact, City of the Wolves' audio is probably the game's weakest quality. The english voice acting us umm,,,not great, but luckily you can just switch over to Japanese audio which fixes this issue. No, my main issue with the audio is action the soundtrack which mostly just sounds stale and uninteresting. I don't think there was a single track in this game that caught my attention or made me go, "whoa! This song sounds awesome!" That's a real shame since most Fatal Fury games have great soundtracks, or at least a song or two that really catches my ear when I'm playing them. Unless I'm forgetting a specific older game, City of the Wolves might have the worst soundtrack in the series, which is really too bad.


I have to say, even with choosing to wait for City of the Wolves, I'm still a bit disappointed in it. By no means do I think this is a bad game, or even think it's unfun; rather, I feel like after a 25 year wait, this game just isn't as good as we all wished it would have been. It didn't even necessarily have to be better than Mark of the Wolves, just better than the majority of other Fatal Fury games. Instead, it's a game I'd place somewhere in the middle of the series in terms of how good it is. I also think if you are a more defensive minded fighting game player, who really enjoys punishing opponents with counters and reversals, you will probably enjoy City of the Wolves more than I did. I liked this game, but it's just too bad I didn't like it maybe just a bit more. (12/25/25) [33/50]

[bikingjahuty]

After opening presents with my wife, having breakfast, and calling some family, I had a pretty low key, relaxing day. I took advantage of it by playing a lot of the new games I got for Christmas, but mainly I spent a ton of time today playing the following.


128. Demon's Tilt (Switch)

I've been wanting to try out Demon's Tilt for quite some time seeing how I'm a pretty big pinball guy. I love playing real pins on location when I can as well as virtual pins on the PC and console. Speaking of virtual pinball, I've learned to adapt to the inherent lack of any analogue, tactile sensations of hitting a physical metal ball around a physical playfield. There is always some level of delay and while virtual pinball doesn't necessarily provide a 1:1 substitute for the real thing, it at least scratches the itch most of the time when certain tables aren't available. I mention all this to preface some of my thoughts and feelings on Demon's Tilt, which was a fun game for the most part, but certainly lacking when it comes to an original virtual pinball game.


Demon's Tilt is definitely more about spectacle than gameplay. Being a highly stylized, retro inspired game, I feel like Demon's Tilt wants to wow you with its neon bullets that fill the playfield when you hit a specific target or complete certain shots. Or, certain targets in the form of beasts or a priestess in the middle of the 2nd level of the playfield changing throughout the game is also there to provide a level of entertainment. And for the most part, this all works pretty well. Being essentially three playfields stacks on each other to make a single game, Demon's Title has a lot of see and experience as you play longer and longer. Unfortunately, you will see 95% of what Demon's Tilt has to offer visually by the time you reach the 100 million to 200 million point range. Once seeing certain events happen on the playfield for the dozens time begins to wear off, you're left with gameplay that isn't terrible or even bad, but certainly not amazing either.


When I mentioned the delay and sometimes questionable physics of virtually all virtual pins, Demon's Tilt is no different, and if anything felt a bit worse. The delay when using flippers was very difficult to get used to and even after 3 hours or playing, I still didn't feel completely used to it. Likewise, the physics in this game felt all over the place, making actions like performing consistent shots fairly difficult. Not that there are a lot of great shots in this game. Some of the best real pinball machines gained their accliamed status due to how well they shoot and how well the playfield, ramps, and other features are laid out. Unfortunately the devs behind Demon's Tilt missed the memo on this and there are very few good or even satisfying shots in this game. You pretty much are just aiming the ball at the same dozen or so targets with a few ramps and other minor shots thrown in.


Finally, the audio in Demon's Tilt is pretty good. The music in this game is definitely a retro throwback similar to its visuals. The sounds in this game harken back to various 16 bit games from the 90s, as do the pixel graphics that make up the visuals. There are some catchy songs that all fir in pretty well with what's going on. Speaking of going along with the visuals and action, there are some good call outs and other sound effects that definitely add to how enjoyable Demon's Tilt can be.


While I enjoyed Demon's Tilt and kept on running into the "One more game" trap while playing, this game's visual charm that dips its toes into bullet hell chaos at times does wear off the more you play the game. When that begins to happen, you are left with a game that will mostly make you wish you were playing most other real pins that have been made over the past 30 years. Even if that means playing those other pins digitally. Still, as a fun way to spend a few hours, Demon's Tilt is certainly worth it. (12/25/25) [33/50]