The game was tailored for the first few hours to give it the illusion it's good. After the initial positive impression, it goes downhill fast. Main quest and side quests are a fetch fest, everything is far, and the character can only run 125m at a time with objectives 2-3 km away. Combine the short stamina with the low weight tolerance, you'll see yourself pressing W for several minutes until you get back to a base to sell your loot. Speaking of loot, most stashes and loot from killed enemies are absolutely trash, and are not worth your time. Regardless of the faction or enemies, most of them drop: broken guns, small amount of ammo, some drink, some food, maybe a bandage or first-aid kit. After the first areas, Lesser Zone and Garbage, the number of interesting side quests becomes almost zero. If there's any, it's just to pad the played time to make money to repair your stuff. Speaking of repair, the costs are outrageously high even for the starter equipment and you need to grind for money because that doesn't come easy. The last mission was an absolutely slog with no game design thought with enemies one shotting you (or close to that). Now, regarding the technical issues, Unreal Engine 5 is known to require high hardware specs. Unfortunately, this doesn't translate to good graphics. The game is heavy, requires DLSS/FSR on a 3090 to run at 1440p at medium-low settings. Compared to Stellar Blade, same engine, the performance and graphics are atrocious. If you are a fan of the STALKER series, do yourself a favor and go play the classics or STALKER Anomaly. This game definitely is not worth your money or time, not even on a sale.
Got it for free, decided to finally try it, crashes to desktop while loading.
The shooting is good with the twist of adding "reliability" to the guns. As the guns are used, they become worse and unreliable thus leading to jams. It kind of fits the environment as far as I understand. Now, the bad part is the enemies constantly respawning. Did you clear an outpost and moved away? Not 5 minutes passed and there are enemies again. I guess you are expected to be shot at every single moment...? To make matters worse, the enemies are spongy in the vanilla game and the use of mods that tweak the gameplay are required.
