I rented Homefront last night just cause. I was expecting a sort of like Red Dawn tribute game, and I thought that would be fun to waste an evening on (kind of like watching Red Dawn).
Well, more than anything I was shocked by how primitive the game was. I mean, it's pretty, but that's about it. You'd think a game based on street-to-street urban warfare would have like, destructible terrain and a physics engine worth a shit, right? Nope. Not only are explosives totally useless against stuff like above-ground swimming pools and chicken wire fences, but you can't even open doors on your own. Fucking doors!
Weapons are shit; there's like a whole mess guns but really, there's four: single-shot rifle, burst-fire rifle, SMG and SAW. The grenade throwing animation, though? It's so ridiculously funny that it was worth the two bucks just to see. You pull the pin and then sort of lob it overhand, but not so much with a throwing motion as a "pushing it forward at your enemy with an open hand through the air" motion.
The characters are of course awful, and not in a sort of tongue-in-cheek GTA way where they're parodies of someone or anything. There's just "angry dude who might be part Mexican but maybe not" and "black chick who gets weepy when someone dies." There was also an older black dude who said he was getting too old for this shit. He died first.
But yeah, what I was really shocked with was the disparity on the technical end of things. Stuff like lighting effects and shit? Those are amazingly well-done, top of the line shit. But the game world is less interactive than it was in Half-Life 2.
