S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

Ignore all the people whining about SOC being unplayable without mods. I bought it on Steam, sure, but I've played a good few quests/missions and explored the world with nary an issue. The steep difficulty is due to the design of the game, but if you swear by your quicksave key then nothing can stop you. Even with my shitty PC only being able to run the game at almost the lowest settings, the atmosphere of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series is unmatched.

I really tried to enjoy and play through this game, but the struggle just became too much. The atmosphere and story were enjoyable, but game kept randomly crashing on me from the beginning. Like almost every gaming session. Next thing I noticed was that the gunplay was VERY poor. I mean it felt broken. Feels like the guns (even sniper rifles with scopes) don't shoot where your crosshair is aimed at or the bullets just disappear in the thin air. I've played lots of FPS and survival games, but something just felt very off with guns in this game. I read somewhere that lower difficulties screw up aiming and/or damage so you should play on higher difficulties. Tried to install suggested mods, but it didn't help much either. I know this is an older game and one of the first of it's kind, but I just can't stand combat systems where every enemy has Superman's X-Ray vision and the accuracy of a world renowned sniper. This makes some of the larger combat scenes very frustrating. Add some cheap AF choppers on top of that and yeah well... get ready to savescum. I kinda wonder if I even got the same version of the game that some of these 5/5 reviewers did or is it just the nostalgia talking? I can see the potential, but at this state this is max 2/5 from me.

This port of SOC uses the 1.0006 patch which horrifically borks much of the balance of the original game. Enemies are far tankier than they should be on Master difficulty, and weapons are horrendously inaccurate peashooters. AI was never a strong point in the series, albeit their tendency to rush the player after a set amount of time in tandem with their aforementioned tankiness makes enemies utterly joyless to fight. Imagine dumping half a mag into a bandit wearing nothing but a leather jacket at point blank range only for him to drop you with a blast from his double barrel shotgun due to a lack of pain states and proper feedback. This was doable in version 1.0005 due to the global damage calculation being so high that a lack of pain states barely mattered, however, it is most assuredly noticeable here. And here's another gem: This garbage port comes with no gamedata file for the player to tweak and fix all of this. You have to download an unpacking toolkit from disreputable websites (enjoy your potential trojans) just to get access to the config files in order to make this trash port even playable and/or to install any sort of mod that could fix this ungodly mess. It's busted. You can't mod it and/or tweak it right out of the box. What in God's name was GOG thinking here? Get it on CD. Get it on Steam. Get it anywhere else but here.

PAIN!

Good Game!