'Homefront' Brings Resistance Fighting to Small-Town America

In an occupied country, ill-equipped rebels face off against a powerful empire and impossible odds. It's a familiar story that could take place anywhere -- 1940s France, 1950s Algeria, 1960s Vietnam or even Afghanistan today.

But in "Homefront," a new video game to be released Tuesday by THQ, it's happening in America in the not too distant future.

The game takes place in 2027 as imagined by John Milius, a co-writer on "Apocalypse Now" and "Red Dawn." In the story, an economically depressed United States is reeling from the effects of skyrocketing oil prices. An insurgent North Korea unifies the Korean peninsula and cripples the American electronic infrastructure with a space-based weapon. After that, the Koreans are able to easily land troops in Hawaii and the West Coast, turning America into an occupied nation.

While the scenario is far-fetched, THQ's KAOS Studios has tried to imagine a situation that seems ridiculous when taken as a whole but is actually composed of what the developers hope are logical steps.

At IGN.com, the game's fiction is compared to the interwar period at the beginning of the 20th century. "No one could have expected that Nazi Germany would take over much of Europe only 10 years after suffering from crippling inflation the likes of which the world had never even remotely seen before," wrote editor Colin Moriarty.

For lead level designer Rex Dickson, that sort of plausible implausibility is exactly what KAOS hopes will prove unsettling for players. "What we're attacking is this ideology that a lot of Western nations and the United States in particular have -- that we're elite, that we're untouchable," Dickson told AOL News.

Similar to what Infinity Ward did in "Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2" in 2009, KAOS is hoping to develop a deep, uncomfortable disconnect by taking familiar American settings and turning them into war zones.

"We give the player this place that looks so familiar to them -- their hometown, the place where they grew up," said Dickson. "But we've made it horrible. Everything that you ever knew about home has been twisted and occupied."

The designers at KAOS studied movies like 1966's "The Battle of Algiers" to build an accurate depiction of asymmetric warfare. As the saying goes, "one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist," and "Homefront" hopes to start asking gamers to explore some of the moral gray areas that come with resistance fighting.

Dickson said this first offering of "Homefront" is definitely a "freedom fighter's game." He said he's proud of one moment in which a white phosphorous grenade sets a Korean transport on fire and the soldiers start to burn.

One character implores the player to put them out of their misery. But if the player starts to shoot, a more extremist character interrupts. "Who's shooting?" he demands. "Let them cook."

In a market saturated with games about being a professional soldier, the designers at KAOS hope that a shooter starring a civilian resistance fighter will be able to carve out a different niche. On Tuesday, gamers will get a chance to see if they want to explore "Homefront's" dark and dystopian picture of the collapse of American power.