I dabbled with it a little and somewhat enjoyed it. I haven't played much COD but it reminded me of it. Anyone think it is worth getting?

I played the first one they released. I've been told they fixed a lot of the issues and re-released it with new maps in rotation, I haven't tried it since though. Looks promising, though.



Lately I've been playing a lot of Homefront though. Basically CoD mixed with Battlefield with dedicated servers. Whenever you spawn, you "fall" down from the sky giving you a bird's eye of the battle and a general idea of where your teammates and the enemies are, so if someone's hiding under a truck by your spawn you see them immediately.

You also accumulate Battle Points for any kills, assists, objective work, etc. that you use to call in the equivalent of kill streaks, such as a humvee, tank, scout/attack choppers, rpg's, hellfire missiles, cluster bombs, drones, etc. My personal favorite is calling in a cheap little scout drone that is small, fast, and fragile and can't attack, but you can fly it up and down alleys and pop up, "mark" someone for your teammates to kill, and dive back down before they can shoot you. Takes some practice, but you get Battle Points for marking and even more for someone killing who you marked before the tag expires in 15'ish seconds. There are also ground attack and air attack drones. All of these purchases have been balanced out with the most powerful ones costing the most battle points, so you need to perform pretty well to get the best ones before the game ends.

You get "perks" in the sense that you have 4 points to put power-ups on your class (fast reload, cheaper killstreaks, scavenge ammo, faster drones, etc.), each of which costs from 1-3 points.

Weapons don't have the distinct personalities like they do in CoD. They're different, but not as noticeably so. Snipers are pretty strong, including the first one which is pretty much semi-auto with no delay needed between shots, 2 hits to kill with body-shots, reminiscent of the Halo 2 sniper without as good of a scope. Very little recoil on weapons makes assault rifles too powerful at range since you just aim and go full auto, but snipers still beat them out at decent distance.

They had some server issues on launch which made it hard to get into games and occasionally the lobby would be too laggy to play in, but they've improved and apparently they did some server maintenance over the weekend that I haven't gotten the chance to test out yet. Teams are 8-16 players each depending on the playlist, and the party system works well. If you join with a party, it may split you up the first game to even teams, but from then on in that lobby you'll always be on the same team. Someone who joins you when you're already in lobby gets the same benefit, so you don't have to back out of a good lobby for a friend to join, which is sweet.

That's all I can really think of to say. This is actually fairly concise given the number of options in the game. If they get the server issues resolved it'll be even better, but for now it's my go-to FPS (not that it really takes much to beat out Reach and Black Ops).



Now I'm waiting for the randoms to come troll me with tl;dr's. Make it happen.

you ask, and i'm here for you

tl;dr

Asshole

Problems with the game:
* The campaign is terrible. It's broken in almost every way imaginable. It's actually worth playing just to laugh at how bad it is.
* Poor texturing. You can't shoot through anything. Not fabric covering an open window, leaves on a tree, even the space between bars on a railing. Only really affects sniping.
* Going in alone sucks. This isn't really a game where you join and immediately turn the game around on your own. It's much more fun if you're playing with at least one friend. I usually play with half a dozen friends, but (at least before the server update, I haven't tried since) it's harder to get everyone in the game with bigger parties.
* I usually show as either yellow or red bar connection, again, before the server update. But on this game that's entirely acceptable most of the time. I went 12-5 last time in red bar. It doesn't feel the same as red bar on other games. I haven't played enough to say much more about connections.
* Don't rent it. Without a code that comes with new copies of the game you can't rank past level 5. That's too low to play with the best stuff.
* Replay value? As far as I know, you rank to 75 and that's it. If that's a problem for you, it's something to think about.

Excuse any typos, I wrote this on my phone while bored in Engineering Ethics lecture.

Do you like it more than Halo in its prime?

Basically, I'm itching to start playing a new FPS and rape people at it. COD pisses me off and it's too easy so I'm hoping there is something better on the horizon that will have a competitive community.

No, mainly because of the fact that it's not really something I can go into alone and have a lot of fun playing. Also, since ranking up isn't based on winning, it's less competitive. With bigger teams, it's based less on individual skill and more on controlling the map in general, so it's CoD'esque in that sense. Now, it's entirely possible it could reach a competitive level in custom games, but I don't know of any specific plans to do so.

What makes it better than CoD in my opinion is the fact that the game mechanics are geared more toward anti-camping, whereas CoD encourages camping. It's the only current FPS I can play for any length of time without questioning the sexuality of the developers. It's on dedicated servers, has a lot of fun new features that I haven't played with before, and I've got enough friends playing it that I can usually play with someone if I want to hop on. It has its annoying issues and could've used another 4-6 months of polishing before release (the graphics, the texturing, and the server issues chief among them), but it's much better than the alternatives and I don't regret buying it.

At this point, I'm not really interested in playing any games that aren't on dedicated servers any more. There's no excuse NOT to have them, and there are too many issues with the alternative to make them enjoyable any more.

Agree with this. Homefront is a pretty awesome game and its new. However it doesnt have the competitive edge that halo has.

Few FPSs do