Hi Friends,
I’ve been replaying Homefront lately. Its a great game, but has a very short storyline.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/55100/Homefront/
What I like most:
- intense firefights, giant explosions
- good storyline
- genuinely horrifying atmosphere with mass graves, rubble everywhere, a horrifying police state with North Koreans occupying the US. It’s not hard to feel like a resistance fighter protecting your homeland
- linear gameplay with a balance of brute force and tactics, skewed towards making things go boom
- not set too far in the future, no giant humanoid mech robots
- abundant ammo
- runs on Linux with no stupid sign-ins or subscriptions beyond Steam
I’ve done some poking around online and it sounds like Ghost Recon: Wildlands hits a few of those points and might suit me.
I can search for alternatives myself, but I’m really looking for some recommendations from real people
Hardware requirements shouldn’t be an issue, and I don’t object to slightly older games either, especially if they’re just old enough that I can scoop up the game and DLC in one bundle.
Other games I liked:
- Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl
- Blood and Bacon
- Crysis
I appreciate any recommendations you give me.
If you liked STALKER, maybe revisit it with Stalker GAMMA.
More or less, its a huge compilation of mods, tweaks… … i think they may have actually rewritten/repaired significant chunks of the engine itself… its kinda sorta like Deus Ex Revision, its basically a whole bunch of modules and different mods, with an easier way than fumbling with an external mod manager and load orders to try and make shit work.
On that tangent, while its… not exactly as thoroughly combat / survival focused, and is certainly clunky by modern standards… the original Deus Ex is maybe a good recommend, as it comes fairly close to hitting all the other things you mention liking, although… from a different angle, basically.
Also, now… this might sound like a bit of an oddball but… State of Decay 2.
Yeah, its humans vs zombies, yeah, its got Microsoft bs in the way of just being able to play the game (unless you acquire a cough custom version cough)…
But it actually has pretty darn good combat mechanics, for a console native game, can actually meaningfully difficulty scale from ‘baby easy’ to ‘this is actually impossible’, and whats more, a whole sort of set of subsystems for actually managing your survivors and your resources and maintaining and improving your kind of home base…
I find it to be a similsr kind of… high tensions, pretty immsersive, pretty brutal, pretty dark, kind of game that can basically grab hold of you and not let go.
But, it doesn’t really have much of a proper ‘story’… in the way of most single player games… but but, it kinda sorta makes up for that in that characters in your party, they’ll get stressed out or be in good moods, they can have fights, have rivalries kinda…
And this can kind of generate a kind of emergent plot, if you care to keep track of it, maybe in something like how you could the show ‘Survivor’ has a plot.
Play with your band of survivors enough, and you will have emotions when something really bad happens to one of em.
I dunno. Maybe its a bit of a reach, for what you were asking for, but it lit up enough of the same parts of my brain.
Oh, here’s another oddball suggestion that might either totally be your thing, or not your thing at all:
G-STRING
Yep, weird name, no, not a porn game.
This game spent like… 15 fucking years being an in development Half Life 2 mod, by apparently a solo dev?.. and it… its weird, but its certainly a story driven, action shooter, in an extremely oppressive dystopian setting.
Far Cry 5 - blaspheme your way across beautiful Montana killing and pillaging to a kickass soundtrack
You got me interested now. 5-10 years ago I drove out to Seattle and set up camp outside of Bozeman, MT for the night to save on hotel costs. Slept on top of my car under the open star filled sky. I still think Montana is one of my top 5 most beautiful states. I’m curious to see it represented in a video game.
5 years ago or so I also stayed in Montrose, CO where much of Homefront takes place. They captured the vibe fairly well.
Spec Ops: The Line
Yup, gotta x2 this one.
Maybe not perfect in a gameplay sense… but holy shit, its arguably actually a horror game just wearing the skin of an action shooter.
Damn, people are coming out of the woodwork to +1 this one. Guess it’s gonna be a “must play”!
This! It might be a different gameplay, but man… this game hits hard in story department. Really, really hard.
The new Wolfenstein trilogy is probably my favourite shooty explody experience i had in the last decade. Hits similar story beats by having also an alternative history setup. Old Blood -> New Order -> New Collosus would be the best order to play them. Old Blood is IMHO the weakest title but its still good. Also that way the story gets told chronologically.
That’s what AI told me, but I trust it more coming from a real player. Thanks for the tip on the order as storyline is important to me. I speak fluent German, so I might find some of the obscure jokes and references others miss. Looking forward to playing it through.
Some of the german Nazi NPC chatter you can overhear is way better than it needs to be. Its really fun if you can understand german.
Just overheard the bad guy who killed me say “Ich pisse auf deine Leiche.” (I piss on your corpse) 🤣
You might enjoy Singularity
This looks really cool. Can’t believe I haven’t heard of it before. I’m a bit of a casual and I play mostly sandbox games like Minecraft and Cities Skylines. Thanks for helping me scratch my once or twice a year FPS itch.
Absolutely second Singularity - it’s a game very much in the vein of Half-Life 2 and BioShock. Almost as good, if not quite, but rather quite forgotten. Loved it when it came out.
Terminator Resistance strikes me as very similar to Homefront, played it a while after finishing the Homefront series and there were lots of similarities.
There is the sequel to Homefront. It’s a bit different gameplay wise but it’s the same world. It does have some jank though and I haven’t tried it on Linux. Frankly I forgot about the series and I might actually scoop them both up to replay on the spring sale. Only a few dollars each.
I may pick up the newer Homefront. It sounded different, but it’s old enough I can probably grab it on sale for peanuts.
No issues running with max graphics on a laptop with a 20xx series card, though it started as such a tiny window I could barely read the menu to make it full screen. Same deal on the desktop and over steamplay.
It definitely had that early 2000s vibe, but I actually prefer the controls over many modern games. Nowadays games are like “press E to sneak”, “press E to kill the guard”, “press E to climb to safety”, “press E really quick to overpower the attacker”.
My favorite part is “Do you want to exit to Windows?” Windows. Yes, that’s definitely what I’m playing this on. :-P /s
I thought Farcry 3 was a great entry into the series kind of fills that play ground vibe.
I forgot about Farcry! I loved the original and replayed it many times, but Farcry 2 wasn’t my jam. Maybe 3 could make me love the franchise again.
You could go straight for, too, 5 if you like the setting at all compared to the others. There’s a sidequel called New Dawn for 5, too. It’s nice.
