Four hour campaigns apparently don’t make for happy reviewers.
When near-future, “what if?” shooter Homefront came out in March, the reviewer reaction to it was rather subdued, with all three versions of the game chalking up an aggregate score of 70 on Metacritic. Now, a few weeks on, Brian Farrell, the CEO of publisher THQ, thinks that the game’s single player campaign might have been to blame for the rather cool reception.
During a conference call following the release of THQ’s third quarter and end of year financial report, Farrell said that the length of the campaign – or lack thereof, as many have placed its length at around four to five hours – contributed to the game receiving rather mixed reviews. Considering how much emphasis the game’s marketing efforts placed on Homefront’s story, it’s not hard to see why reviewers might react negatively when they learned that the game’s campaign was so short. In his review of the Xbox 360 version, The Escapist’s Editor-in-Chief, Russ Pitts, said, “there isn’t enough game in Homefront The Game to contain Homefront The Multimedia Concept,” which seems a neat summation of the feelings of many critics.
But despite these lackluster reviews, Homefront has proven to be a strong earner for THQ since its release. Farrell said that THQ had shipped 2.6 million copies of the game, although didn’t say how many of those copies had been sold. He added that not only was it a great start for the franchise, it was also a great start for “the strongest pipeline of AAA core games in [THQ’s] history.”
Source: Industry Gamers
