Homefront: The Revolution will be free to play this weekend as part of the Steam Free Weekend promotion. The game’s campaign and cooperative Resistance mode will all be unlocked to sample between 10 AM PST on September 8 until 1 PM PST on September 11.
According to publisher Deep Silver, this will give players an opportunity to see the “significant improvements made in the recent Performance Patch.”
“The entire game will be unlocked and available to sample, including the vast 30-hour single player campaign and full access to Resistance Mode, Homefront’s online co-operative experience, together with the new Missions released since launch,” it said.
“The ‘Performance Patch’ launched earlier this month on console and PC, providing a significant boost to frame rates and overall performance thanks to a focus on GPU, lighting and particle optimisations, and checkpoint save and enemy spawning optimisations, and two new free Resistance Mode missions.”
Homefront: The Revolution will also be on sale during this period.
GameSpot’s review of Homefront: The Revolution scored it a 5/10.
“Its substantial story campaign is impressively rich and its shooting can be tense and fun, but half-baked stealth, an unfulfilling story, and a vast menagerie of technical inadequacies drag the overall experience into disappointing mediocrity,” critic Scott Butterworth said.
The Revolution’s four-year development was less than smooth. Crytek bought rights to the franchise in early 2013, after the collapse of THQ. A year later, following reports of financial issues at Crytek, it sold the IP to Deep Silver, which set up a new studio–Dambuster–for the Homefront team to continue its work.
Dambuster addressed the rocky development path by including a note at the end of the game that acknowledges the situation.