Released in 2011 and published by now-defunct THQ, Homefront was a first-person shooter set in an occupied United States, conquered by the North Korean army. It got a little swamped by the likes of Call of Duty and Battlefield, however, but that doesn't seem likely to happen to its belated sequel.
Developed in the UK by Crytek, which bought the rights to the franchise when THQ went under, Homefront: The Revolution picks up four years later with the player cast as a freedom fighter, still battling against the KPA forces.
The big change is that this time the game will be an openworld sandbox, rather than using linear levels, and you'll have to forage and craft to improvise the weapons you need to strike back at your technologically superior enemies. The game's map will be separated into colour coded zones. Green Zones are where the Korean forces and officials live in luxury, and Americans are forbidden to enter. Yellow Zones are where most civilians live, under KPA control. Red Zones are the most dangerous of all, where the KPA dare not tread and lawless bands of marauders will attack, regardless of nationality.
You'll be free to explore this dystopian world, but you won't have to do it alone. Up to four players can co-operate in a game, working together to take down KPA strongholds using ambushes, assassinations and sabotage.
Crytek's Nottingham studio was already working on the game when THQ collapsed, and buying the rights to the game freed the developers to evolve it in this new direction. "That gave us the flexibility to push out from that and see how far we could take it," designer Fasahat Salil has told Eurogamer. "All of a sudden it was up to us how big we wanted the game to be - we were in full control of it. That was really exciting. It was then we made the call to make this a free-roaming world where the player isn't restricted by levels."
Homefront: The Revolution will be released in 2015 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.