Cheap and watered down version? If you are talking about visuals here I think you should try to get nostalgia glasses off. Artstyle is a matter of taste, personally I don't think Coh2 is more comic-like than vCoh. Let's take the jeep driver for an example as mentioned before.
If you are talking about the gameplay then I'm as confused as Nullist. One post you are talking about physics, explosions and body parts, the next is about unreliable outcome of explosives.
This. Precisely. Physics like that has zero effect on gameplay, it's cosmetic.