Home Behind 2 Review

Something in my brain snapped when my first ‘run’ had failed and I was booted back to the main menu. Despite my many missions ending in near failure, a failed random vehicular combat encounter that played out almost entirely without any meaningful input cost me my save file. As a self-proclaimed ‘anti-war’ rogue-like, my very tentative feelings about Home Behind 2 started to sour after realising I had lost six hours in a fairly middling game to a series of random dice rolls that should have been in my favour based on the high, arbitrary skills and stats of my rebel convoy. I then realised I would have to dance this wicked dice-roll dance again, and again, and again…

Home Behind 2 favours theme over plot, although there is a linear narrative that laboriously repeats itself every time your convoy of revolutionaries dies and your save file is deleted. Basically you play as Banan, who flees her home in Scaria once violent conflict erupts under the hostile occupation from the neighbouring authoritarian nation of Akadullah. Shoving aside any further nuanced plot setup, a wandering militant merc named Chris finds our destined revolutionary leader battered and bruised on the outskirts of her war-torn home. This then kicks off the game’s deluge of non-spoken text comprised entirely of cringe and exhaustively soulless dialogue. The golden introduction is Chris repeatedly calling our initially traumatised refugee “Miss Pee Pee Pants” to the blushful ire of Banan. It’s all forgotten fairly quickly though, as you’ll then be swiftly off committing war crimes and executing (or occasionally recruiting) nearly any passers-by unfortunate to cross the path of our smiling comrades’ party of pain.

The emphasis on theme, by choosing pithy vignettes and generic text dumps with redundant choices, undercuts any memorable story here. There are endless variations on typical ‘rebels versus invaders’ plot beats but they are entirely separated from any ongoing plot. The characters that join your wandering band are voiceless, soulless death machines that cosplay as the Village People to overthrow anybody dressed like characters from a Warner Brothers theme park.

This is the opening character dialogue, and it is all downhill from here

Frequently when exploring Scaria, choice-driven events appear. Players get a text outline and some illusion of choice wrapped up in shallow, cookie-cutter revolutionary tropes. One of the most frequent of these was encountering refugees (shown offscreen) or people in distress and having the choice of feeding them, putting them out of their misery, or ignoring them. Taking the grim option provides valuable rewards with no repercussions from the typically overzealous, unexplained penalty messages that appear.

Players may see similarities to Darkest Dungeon. This is not unreasonable, due to the art and combat visuals having the same presentation and shuffling, paper-thin appearance. However, upon reaching the first combat encounter five minutes in, there is a rug pull so vicious it’ll give you carpet burn. This is not turn-based, or even tactical, combat. This is an auto-battler. Early combat plays out entirely automatically upon your cardboard cut-out characters walking into another, assumedly hostile character. There may be a choice about whether combat is initiated, but even if you are successful in choosing non-violence, combat still immediately triggers with no reason as to why.

Got us some wise guys fresh from a civil war reenactment

There is no real way to quantify what tactical impact a +10 intelligence -3 damage firearm will have when the game is throwing damage numbers above characters heads in rapid succession as combat plays out automatically. Eventually you may unlock abilities that boost a percentile of the characters’ stats, such as extra dodging or armour. These allow you the weak autonomy of refreshing the consequence-free ability cooldowns at will, but there is no resource or fatigue economy to stop players from setting combat to full-auto and letting the abilities activate themselves. All of this with no satisfying visual feedback to emphasise success or achievement.

Tedium and repetition set in early across all stages of the gameplay, from base management to expeditions, and finally vehicular combat. The game ultimately plays itself, with players moving their typical stat numbers and percentiles in supposedly meaningful ways. Strength, agility, intelligence are all here, but don’t go towards building any purposeful character. The game tells you at the outset to build characters maximised in one stat, as your expedition party of four will only rely on the highest stats in any category and will not double up. There’s no benefit in having two characters with 20+ strength on your team, when the character with the higher strength stat will render the slighter weaker character completely redundant on the team.

Grind your base upgrades so the computer can play better for you!

To draw parallels to Darkest Dungeon is the intent. The entire game functions as a poor knockoff. Traversal through the world is still strictly moving from the left of the screen to the right, clicking on the environment to salvage resources and detect traps. Resources are used to upgrade the various disconnected elements of the roaming headquarters, such as your medic bay and truck. Most of these will require the better part of 10 hours before seeing any kind of benefit due to most upgrades requiring hours of grind before the numbers shift into any kind of vague, stat-based reward that will be plugged into the backend and largely invisible amongst the discernible player information.

Final Thoughts

A Darkest Dungeon clone in all but execution, Home Behind 2 plays like a game that scrapes too many different mechanics and numbers-based systems together with little thought. What ends up being a rogue-like that plays itself might be appealing to those seeking the placid comfort of an auto-clicker. Wading through dull inventory, stat screens, and on-rails exploration with an insulting illusion of choice make this one series I hope will be left behind.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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