Even though currently we are in the Beta stage, Home still doesn't show us anything new, should be a whole lot better...
Home is very much like The Sims, only it's narrowed down a whole lot. At first you have to create your character, or pick a preset and change the clothes. This can take you about 10-20 minutes, but the customization is nowhere near as deep as Sims, there aren't even no beards at all. There are limited amount of clothes you can pick, which you can't change the colour of sadly, so you have to stick with the preset colour even if it doesn't suit you. Once your done your then transported to your default property, which you can re-arrange the furniture anyway you see fit. You can change the wallpaper....but there are only 8 options and 2 of them actually looking unique to Home.
When you've done and want to move to another area you have to download the area and wait, so you have to stay online for about 20-30 minutes for the download. This is very boring, so you might want to read a book you've nearly finished or get a MP3 player or portable console to pass the time.
There are 5 areas which all connect with each other, but are nothing special. You have your Theatre, which you can view the latest movie trailers and game trailers, again there are the annoying download times, so you'd be better off viewing them on Youtube. You have a Bowling Alley, which allows players to communicate with each other in a game environment, either playing Bowling or Snooker, or one of the three arcade games, which you can barely play unless you wake up at 5AM as everyone is trying to get on it. There is a Shopping Centre where you can view the latest downloads, which you have to purchase which is ridiculous. 59p for a cowboy hat? 79p for a chair? £3.99 for a Summer House? This makes no difference to your status in Home at all, well apart from the "I-waste-my-real-money-on-virtual-sim-creators". There are a couple of free items which, suprisingly look very nice and casual. The Midtown Square connects with all of these, you can play Chess or Draughts, or view the 2 big HDTV's but again, loading times and the fact that most people are on the games are annoying.
The online community however is great, I've only had 1 problem with a girl which I sorted out (by reporting abuse) and I made 3 friends in 3 weeks, you can use pre-automated messages to quickly say "Hello" and "Goodbye" which is a neat feature. You can use headsets too, however half the time you'll sound really muffled because of the background noise in the game.
The graphics are very good for the environment, whilst not the slickest of the PS3 there are rooms for improvement...like in the characters, especially in the nose and face, my character looks 20 when I wanted him to look my age (nearly 16), whilst in The Sims I would have no difficulty doing so.
The handling is probably the only excellent thing in this game so far, it's easy and simplistic to use, so casual and hard-core gamers (if you can find any) won't have a problem with the handling.
So to summarise Home, don't even think about downloading it, even if you get the little icon appear on your XMB, it's not worth spending 3GB just to use a poorly adapted Sim, if you want a good Sims game wait for The Sims 3, and let EA do their job.