Homecoming is... not very good. There's one segment where the team appeared to understand the series and applied their own spin on it, but it's otherwise very forgettable. The drama, characters, locales and combat are all stiff, with none of the series' trademark attention to detail, lore, or masterfully executed horror elements to make up for it.
To expand upon this, the entire game is definitely "not very good."
A few pros:
-Akira Yamaoka's soundtrack is fine, probably the best part about Homecoming, really. Isn't as good as some of the other SH OSTs, but it's still fine.
-A few boss designs aren't terrible. I don't want to spoil it for anyone that wants to play the game, so I won't be too specific about the bosses. A few enemy designs are okay, too.
-PC version looks better than what I remember of the 360 version.
-Some of the transitions between the normal world and the other world look cool.
-Could have been much worse according to interviews with Tomm Hulett.
Negatives:
-The game's writing is pretty terrible at times. My personal favorite quote of the game is "I don't want your help!
These wounds cannot heal," said in one of the whiniest ways imaginable. The voice acting doesn't even have the bizarre charm of SH2's voice acting.
-The sound mixing is really weird at times, to the point where sound effects and dialogue often make the soundtrack nearly inaudible.
-While a few boss designs are fine/serviceable, most of the enemy designs are either bland, re-purposed from older entries, or outright bad. Hey remember those "awesome," totally memorable bug enemies from SH 1 and 2? They're back, but look slightly different and have a different name. Dogs are back, again, but now they're skinned. Nurses are back because they're the most recognizable enemy of the franchise other than Pyramid Head, who also returns for Homecoming. There's an enemy that is basically the Lying Figure from 2 but shoots smoke out of its body (hence its profoundly deep name, Smog).
-Speaking of Pyramid Head, the character is completely misused. It only shows up in cutscenes and has no direct interaction with the player. Pyramid Head is just kind of there and is really only in the game due to marketing and brand recognition. That's not to say that I'm entirely opposed to PH being in the game; Origins and The Arcade retcon PH to be an entity associated with SH and not just James Sunderland. But PH is completely misused in Homecoming.
-Combat is awful. It's basically Zelda combat but worse, and relies heavily on whether or not you can stunlock enemies before they can stunlock you.Boss battles are frustrating messes based around stunlocking and conserving ammo to hopefully avoid melee combat as much as possible. The knife you start out with is by far the best melee weapon in the game for the majority of the encounters due to its speed and stunlocking capability. The game's combat is probably one of my biggest complaints, as it was one of the big things this game was supposed to do right.
-Puzzles weren't that good. To quote Dusk:
The game has a few puzzles, and by puzzles I mean over half of them are sliding tile puzzles or this puzzle about crossing wires. Whoever the ♥♥♥♥ at Double Helix thought that making most of the puzzles in the game ♥♥♥♥ing sliding puzzles really deserves a solid kick in the ♥♥♥.
-Frustrating glitches. First one I encountered was about ten minutes into the game, where trying to open a door that I had to go through crashed the game. I had to futz around with various settings just to get past the door, but at least I was able to reset the settings afterwords and didn't encounter that glitch again, even though it wasted about 20-30 minutes of my life. The other major glitch I encountered was during an escort section in the sewers. The person I was escorting was pushed into a corner by a monster, and would not leave the corner, forcing me to reload an earlier save. This happened twice before I was finally able to make it through that segment.
That's all I can really think of right now. The story wasn't really good, but it could have been far worse, as I've already mentioned. I just don't think that Homecoming is worth anyone's time.
I'm thinking of buying Oceanhorn I heard it's a good Zelda-like, can someone who's played it recommend it?
It's a decent Zelda-like. Don't go in expecting an actual Zelda game and you'll probably enjoy it. Just avoid the fishing segments, they start to get very frustrating towards the end.