I knew the game was going to release in an incredibly broken and buggy form, so i didnt pick it up in their November release window. Only after i saw the 1.3 Patch 5 months later did i pick it up. Even so the game is in such a odd state that i can't reccomend it to many people. Starting off with the positives. The first 10 hours of the game really nails STALKER. It brings you into the world and sets you up on a narriative adventure inside the Zone. It's obvious that this is where the Devs put 80% of their time and effort. I want to say the first 3 or 4 zones have plenty of stuff to do, side quests and interesting things to explore, but the later zones feel so empty and devoid of things to do. Its like they had the main story set out and started building out around it only to run out of time and need to ship the game shortly before Christmas in order to make rent. The Voice Acting is all over the place, i highly suggest you run the game with Ukranian VO and English subtitles, I think they have gone and hired the same VO studio that Warhorse did with Kingdom Come Deliverance. You get Scottish, Irish, American and Australian VA's with a slight Eastern European accent trying to convince me they have lived and worked in Pripryat all their lives. Now we get onto the bugs and what is causing me to put the game away for maybe another 6 months. I spend 60 hours running the game, get to quest 10 and im hard locked. The quest dialogue won't activate, im told to force progression through a console command and then force spawn an anomoly to reset character AI. This does not work, and i am now faced with 60 hours save file which i cannot progress, or start again. I want to come back to this game and love it, but in its current state i cannot justify this level of jank.
I've played HOTA for several years now, it is by far the best community expansion to any work i have ever experienced. The team have patched several tedious leftovers from a 20+ year old game, while expanding it from the original in the form of the Cove and Factory towns. The Mod feels like a true £20 expansion pack from decades ago. A warning for new, or returning players. This mod is developed and created for players who have been playing HOMM3 for many years, its campaign is incredibly difficult if you are going in fresh. I do not see this as a bad thing Per se, but it might be a big difficulty wall if you are returning after a large hiatus. I fully believe this is the HOMM 3.5 we never got and the development team behind it have created something nostalgic, and new at the same time.
Even after thousands of bug fixes, 5 months extra in the cooker the game is plagued by gamebraking bugs all through the Zone. Some of them are an easy fix, but some are so bricked they require an entirely new save file to be created. I encountered one such bug on the 10th mission of the main storyline, which broke my game so much that even after console commanding the quest completion NPC's and quest triggers failed to load or work properly. Every single NPC was listed as "Busy" and i couldn't ineteract with them. If you are going to get the game and look past the bugs, afterall Stalker 1 was famous for it. Play the game in Ukranian, the English VA's they got were such an odd choice. Almost everyone sounds like they are from a 10 mile radius of Glasgow in Scotland. I believe they got the same Voice Studio as Warhorse who made Kingdome Come Deliverance to do their English Dubbing and it's such a weird mix of Scotish/Irish/English accents which you'd never find near the Ukranian exclusion zone. Gameplay is great, the guns feel like they have a personality of their own with a decent Durability system with wear and tear on the physical model as you fire. The story so far has been a little hodge podge, lots of factions and singular interests fighting for control of the zone, there are times when you need to think to yourself "Who are we, what are we fighting and whom?" But it does start to come together shortly after a betrayal you suffer early on into the quests. I've given the game 3 Stars as of now, as my time with it has been cut short due to game breaking glitches. It could become a 5 Star game if those get ironed out and a community modding scene crops up around it, but for now until i hear back from their support team i can't give anything else.
