Chernobylite

First things first: there's no timer that causes you to fail missions. What happens is after spending some time on a mission a storm will appear in the form of lightning strikes setting small patches of ground on fire, and some time after that an enemy will appear and hunt you down. You can't kill him but put enough shots into him and he'll flee, leaving you to continue exploring in relative peace. I feel sorry for the devs because this feature seems widely misunderstood and forms the basis of many of the lower review scores. So here's what you do in the game. Each day you start in your base where you can build upgrade stations either to increase things like air quality and general comfort (important for the health and well-being of both yourself and your companions) as well as upgrading your weapons, crafting consumables and armour, levelling up etc. You then proceed to the mission selection screen. There's no wide open map, it's divided into smaller mission areas. You pick one for yourself and can choose to send out your companions (if you have any) on other, less important missions like scavenging. Once you embark on a mission you're teleported to the relevant mission area where you'll explore, sneak, kill, all that good stuff whilst avoiding highly irradiated areas. You'll occasionally encounter friendly npc's you can have a chat or trade with. Sometimes you need a specific item to get to optional rooms/areas, the most obvious being lockpicks which can be crafted at your base. These mission areas aren't huge but they're big enough to explore without feeling cramped. When you've completed your mission and have scavenged all you can you open a portal to return to base where you'll get an overview of your and your companions' mission results, decide on food rations and prepare for the next day. Sound and visuals are great and highly atmospheric. The game is mechanically quite different from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. but if you enjoy those games you'll enjoy this one.

Dont listen to people who say there is a time limit for missions - it is not true. Every 30 minutes a storm happens, but it is not limiting your mission-time by any way - except if you have some weird phobia of bad wather... Good things: - graphics - you can customize your base, build furniture/workbenches to buld/tune weapons an other stuff - the world looks nice - in some moments It gets a Stalker atmosphere, felt it, loved it, unfortunately those are only a few and short moments Bad things: - the world is made of a fiew, way too small maps with too fiew interesting places because of that it is very linear but worse than that: not enough to explore and very repetetive - The decisons that are given to you and the consequences are iritating, the characters met to bland and iritating aswell - side missions are completely simple, bland and repetetive, little to no depth - not enough weapons: revolver (only usefull at the beginning, too weak) pumpgun kalashnikow It definetely needs better writing, storytelling, more complex characters and interactions, it has potential but because of it lacks and size, it will not come close to stalker or metro last mission is not available yet, besides that there is still lots more to do for the devs

If this was a final version of a game I'd give it 3 or 4 stars, but since this is EA I gave it 5 since this game has a lot of potential and I hope that it will evolve and the bugs will be fixed. So.. for the pros: - interesting storyline - great music and sounds - nice looking graphics - all of the above put together make it very climatic - cool idea with crafting/building - rpg elements - quite nice optimisation - it run smoothly on my Ryzen 5 1600X / 1050Ti / 16GB RAM setup on medium settings cons: - I know it's the first day of EA, but I experienced some bugs (for example I had to aproach some objects from certain side to interact with them. Also I think some of my mechanical parts just dissapeared) - Only russian language voice over with en subtitles for now. I'd very much ike to hear english voices with heavy russion accent. Would sound great I think! - Sometimes I got lost with what I had to do (for example when building the workshop, there was no info what button should I press to enter the building screen) - The item icons are somewhat ugly, same as the this red kind of placeholder when crafting - Some UI items are not clickable (was expecting them to be), only keyboard buttons activate them, this makes the UI cloggy sometimes in my opinion Oh, and the view on the city from the base is veeeery nice. Reminds me of the Dying Light!

The game is quite nice : the atmosphere is really stressful and immersive, the plot also seems well made... unfortunately my own playthrough came to an end abruptly since one of the main story missions bugged out and thus I couldn't finish it no matter how many times I tried. And since it's a "main story" mission, I can't go further if I don't finish it first, hence why the game constantly makes me re-do it everytime I fail it. For a game with such a chilling atmosphere and well fleshed out scenario, this is the kind of incident that completely breaks both. I'd probably give a better score for the game itself, but when THIS kind of technical issue is left inside to plague it I can't possibly rate it higher than this