NOTE: See review update at bottom, after the indicated line The game has the atmosphere of the original Stalker games, including the bugs by the looks of it. I would love to be able to play decently it for once. The most annoying bug is not being able to compile/unpack shaders, which means that for every 5 minutes of play you spend 25+ minutes restarting the game and hoping you get further than the startup screens. Once into the game, if you manage to actually start, then it is a waiting to see if the game will crash after walking 5 meters, 50 meters, or if you're very lucky, you just might get halfway to your destination before the game crashes due to not being able to unpack shaders (?!?!?). And that is with patch 1.4.2 If you do manage to get in to a fire fight, expect to have to play through that fight atleast 15+ times. Because you can't save without enemies nearby, and the game crashing every 2-3 kills due to shader issues, a 2-5 minute fire fight may take 3 days to actually get to a state where you can save. If the developers actually manage to fix that issue, then the game may just start to become worth the €€€ I spent. ---- UPDATE ---- Updating/changing my review. Once I got frustrated with all the updates seemingly making my game experience worse, I started looking at other possible causes. One possible cause that I found was a bug in intel CPU's which could damage the CPU itself (caught that in time with a FW fix), unfortunately this fix didn't help. The other possible issue was with the Intel Turbo Boost Technology being activated in the BIOS. Turning this off, has resulted in just 2 crashes in the past 3 months! Which is an enormous step forward from crashing every 5-10 minutes (sometimes on startup). Not all bugs have been fixed, a really big issue is dead NPCs disappearing under the ground. Especially when it is a key NPC whom you need to open a door/stash. For example in the Concrete Forest, where you need to jump down the tower and retrieve the key from a dead NPC at the bottom. This NPC is underground, as the icon (v1.15+) shows, but no way to interact with as it's too far away. Hoping to see these fixed in upcoming patches, as well as looking forward to the upcoming DLCs, considering I bought the Ultimate Version.
Only played the first 15 minutes or so, but approx 3 hours according to GOG due to the many crashes. (Win11 24H2, 4060Ti, 32Gb) Although the bugs so and crashes so far remind me of the OG S.T.A.L.K.E.R. it doesn't help that I paid for the Ultimate version... But I'm holding out that things will get better, either with an Win update or from GSC.
