The reviews are in and by all accounts, Homefront – THQ’s much-hyped first person military shooter, released today -  is a decidedly mediocre effort.

But while dated graphics and derivative gameplay may soon consign it to the bargain bins, what makes Homefront remarkable are its right-wing undertones and its links with what might be termed the military-entertainment complex.

Homefront is the brain-child of John Milius, a larger-than-life screenwriter, producer and director who became a notorious figure in 1970’s Hollywood. It was Milius who inspired the Coen Brothers to create the character of Walter Sobchak, the gun-toting, bowling-obsessed ‘Nam vet in The Big Lebowski. This is the man who penned Dirty Harry’s catchphrase “Make my day’; who co-wrote Apocalypse Now with Coppola; and who catapulted Arnold Schwarzenegger to fame with Conan the Barbarian.

“Say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos…”

Known for his Hawkish views, Milius has cultivated a fascination with guns and the military ever since chronic asthma prevented him from joining the Marine Corps in the late ‘60s.  He is said to have personally introduced Charlton Heston to the National Rifle Association. A cartoonish figure much given to provocative liberal-bating, Milius is a mass of paradoxes: a self-professed ‘libertarian zen anarchist’ and surfing nut (remember ‘Charlie don’t surf’ from Apocalypse Now?); a Nietzsche-quoting Jew who longs for the return of a warrior culture.

Having recently produced the HBO series Rome, Milius was drafted in as a story consultant on Homefront to provide the game with a compelling narrative setting. The result is a neo-con nightmare: set in 2027, Homefront sees the US in decline, weakened by a spiralling oil crisis and an Asian bird flu epidemic, and abandoned by its allies. Out of this power vacuum, an aggressive new superpower arises in the form of the newly united Greater Korean Republic. The Koreans manage to land troops in Hawaii and soon, great swathes of the US are living under foreign occupation.

Milius is fond of turn-the-tables scenarios like these, in which Americans get to play underdog in a to-the-death showdown against a foreign aggressor. The Homefront concept is essentially an update of Red Dawn (1984), Milius’ movie about a bunch of Colorado high school students who form a guerrilla resistance movement when their home town is invaded by Soviet airborne troops. Red Dawn, which stars Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen, carries the dubious distinction of being labelled the most violent film ever made by the Guinness Book of Records, boasting a rate of 2.23 acts of violence per minute. A remake, due out in 2011, has been subjected to last minute delays so that the enemy can be changed from China to North Korea, a la Homefront.

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Milius is also an advisor for a military think tank, the Institute for Creative Technologies, which is based at the University of Southern California, the college Milius attended in the ‘60s when he was part of a filmmaking brat pack that included George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis and Francis Ford Coppola.

Founded by the US Army in 1999, the ICT aims to bring together the creative talents of Hollywood and Silicon Valley to develop interactive training aids for soldiers serving in the field.  This means US tax dollars can be used to pump-prime the development of commercial off-the-shelf war games which, upon release, contain a hidden military training mode unlockable by rookie troops. One early example was Full Spectrum Warrior, released by Homefront developer THQ in 2004. In September 2008, the game was released as a free download sponsored by the US Army.

The logic is that most army recruits are young men who grew up with videogames, which makes them the perfect platform from which to train, and even recruit, new troops. It’s a trend which has culminated in the success of the ‘propogame’ America’s Army, which today is used as a major recruitment tool by the Pentagon, having been downloaded 40 million times since its launch.

“Press x to jump in mass grave”

The pre-release hype surrounding Homefront has relied to a very large extent on Milius’ potent, if implausible, vision of the near-future. The game’s opening sequence tells the story in a highly emotive montage: we see labour camps and summary executions on the streets; within the first minute, a man in aviators and a camouflage hat has delivered the inevitable line: “The only good communist is a dead communist!” 

Its not hard to detect a strain of jingoism and anti-Asian sentiment here. Homefront carries a powerful ideological subtext, prophesying the doom of an America ‘gone soft’, a country whose supposed excessive liberalism has sown the seeds of its own destruction.  And as ever, the threat comes from the East – whether in the form of contagious diseases or sabre-rattling dictatorships.

Videogames and politics have traditionally given each other a wide berth. But as games become increasingly cinematic and story becomes an ever important component of the gaming experience, there’s a risk that insidious ideological messages could leech into videogame content. If Homefront is a sign of things to come, gamers might be advised to question not just the quality of the game they’re buying, but whose view of the world they’re buying into.

Has Activision produced the ultimate expression of gaming’s will-to-power?

The narratives of videogame culture are rooted in the world of comic books – the stomping grounds of the superhero whose toughest quest is often a struggle to come to terms with the implications of their own astounding powers.

From The Hulk’s anger management issues to the literalised body consciousness of Invisible Girl, comic books both mirror adolescent anxieties and – by turning them into superpowers – provide the ultimate in wish-fulfillment. Their characters get to taste the thrill of superabundant adult power without the constraints or responsibilities that come with it.

Similarly, the lure of the videogame is the chance to remake yourself – bigger, better, faster, stronger. Activision – whose latest game comes with the strapline, ‘Become anything; change everything’ – evidently understand this. Perhaps more than any other game before it, Prototype gives you a sense of unbridled, freakish, unstoppable power – and everything in its sandbox world is designed to reflect that power back at you.

As the hoodie-wearing Alex Mercer, you wake up one day on a mortuary slab to find that you are no longer human, but a shape-shifting genetic prototype capable of consuming people and taking on their form. Handily, you can also transform your limbs into lethal weapons, morphing through an arsenal of blades, shields, hammers, whips and claws like a walking multi-utility knife. Top all this off with superhuman strength and speed, the ability to glide and to scale any surface using adaptive parkour, and it’s unlikely anyone’s going to try to make you eat your homework again.

After thus tooling you up, the game lets you loose in an open-world New York, where it’s time to contend with the now-obligatory apocalyptic virus outbreak scenario. Within minutes, Prototype plunges you into an intense battle with strike teams, giant mutant beasts and hordes of shrieking Infected, as the city’s downtown is enveloped in a viral red mist.  Before you know it you’re racing up the sides of buildings, launching yourself at helicopter gunships and sending tentacles erupting from your body, under the feet of panicking civilians, and up through rip-holes in the concrete streets.

It’s one of the most breathlessly thrilling openings in gaming history; there’s a very real sense of kinetic, frenzied chaos, and the game engine manages to keep the frame-rate well on top of the action despite a gobsmacking number of antagonists on screen.

Having given you a taste of the game at full tilt, Activision set the clock back and your abilities along with it. From here you must progressively power up – no bad thing, as there’s so much to enjoy about being Alex, even on his lowest setting. Your parkour skills allow you to effortlessly negotiate every surface of the city with a few fluid movements. Soon you’re swooping and gliding, scaling skyscrapers, plunging hundreds of feet to street level and bounding over the heads of spooked pedestrians. You can grab civilians and rag-doll them around at comically frenzied speeds, or hurl cars around like toys. The game is also exceptionally and imaginatively violent: enemies can be cut in half horizontally, torn in half vertically, have holes punched clean through them, be decapitated, skewered, and even used as projectiles.

As well as its obvious link to the Grand Theft Auto series, Prototype owes a clear debt to Crackdown – not to mention the undercover gameplay of Assassin’s Creed and some aesthetic and conceptual borrowings from The Darkness.  Graphically, Prototype isn’t pushing any envelopes. Alex himself is well animated, but the city is rendered in crude brush strokes compared to the stunning pointillism of GTA IV.  Yet overall, the environment convinces. It’s in moments of recreation and repose that you find much of the game’s atmosphere: looking down over rooftops and seeing skirmishes playing out below you, there’s a real sense that mutants are sporadically wreaking havoc on an organic living city.

Prototype‘s ‘deceive or destroy’ gameplay promises a lot of depth, and initially at least, it delivers.  It seems to encourage a genuinely strategic approach as you scope military bases and choose the right moment and entry point from which to attack or surreptitiously consume the identity of a target.

But beyond the immediate charms of its malleable open-play world, you soon come up against its limitations. The illusion ofstrategic play collapses as you become overtly conscious of the underlying game mechanics. Your choices start to feel arbitrary – merely a matter of triggering  set pieces designed to lead you into the familiar cycles of repetitive, mash-em-up gameplay. Like Assasin’s Creed, which was a painting pretending to be a game, Protoype‘s depth is skin-deep, and the game feels like a rehearsal for a full experience that may only be realised in its sequel.

One day a developer will create a sandbox world with real depth and majesty, in which your decisions genuinely feel autonomous and success is not just about learning to outsmart the pre-patterned responses of the AI.  While Activision have inched a step nearer that goal, they’ve fallen short of the giant strides the game claims to make in the sandbox genre. Thrilling as it is at its frenzied best, ultimately Prototype fails to break the mould.

Fantasy film auteur Guillermo del Toro has intimated that he may wade into the games industry in a bid to become the genre’s Orson Welles.

Speaking of his disappointment with the conservatism of the videogame industry, the Mexican director behind Pan’s Labyrinth, Blade II and Hellboy told Wired: “In the next 10 years, there will be an earthshaking Citizen Kane of games.” 

Asked whether he might be the man to deliver it, Del Toro replies: “I’ll be trying to make it. But I won’t be trying until after The Hobbit.”

Del Toro also spoke of his conviction that the fusion of multimedia entertainment platforms would soon replace conventional film narratives with a new form of interactive storytelling:

“In the next 10 years, we’re going to see all the forms of entertainment—film, television, video, games, and print—melding into a single-platform story engine. The Model T of this new platform is the PS3. The moment you connect creative output with a public story engine, a narrative can continue over a period of months or years. It’s going to rewrite the rules of fiction…

“We are used to thinking of stories in a linear way… We’re still on the Aristotelian model. What the digital approach allows you to do is take a tangential and nonlinear model and use it to expand the world. For example: If you’re following Leo Bloom from Ulysses on a certain day and he crosses a street, you can abandon him and follow someone else.

“Hollywood thinks art is like Latin in the Middle Ages—only a few should know it, only a few should speak it. I don’t think so.”