This mod is excellent, really brings A-Life to life. With Stalkers within and outside your instance moving, questing, artifact hunting, trading, killing and getting killed while commenting on it. Procedural quests and emerging gameplay makes the experience memorable. Very unforgiving, it takes a while to get used to the mechanics and difficulty. After that time it's will probably be one of your top 3 mods of all times. It's not for nothing it's been up there on the ModDB most downloaded list for as long as I can remember. Unfortunately even getting through that initial hurdle can be a real challenge. It took me years on and off of trying, not understanding and quitting after an hour or so then trying again 6 to 12 months later. But believe me it's worth it. Even though the mod is solid, with very few bugs considering the engine it is built on and the amount of new content and combined content from the franchise added, I'd say the Anomaly still feels unfinished. With assets from different artists, a very outdated inventory UI and gunplay it can still be improved in a later release or with sub-mods or mod-packs. Still, I recommend you give it a try, and come back to it until you're finally ready to get in the Zone. The playthroughs can be as long as you make them, once you know the systems, making money can be easy and rushing the main quest possible. Still, the fun part is the free roam. Getting your reputation up through questing, finally going North, meeting legendary Stalkers, teaming up with them or killing them depending on your faction, hunting others, watching the sun set over the Zone, getting immersed into the night, be a bystander to a gunfight, maintaining your equipment, having your sortie ruined by an emission or a psy-storm. So many things to do, and never going through the same. Many thanks to the GOG team for bringing the mod here, and to GSC for allowing Stalkers to revisit the Zone through those mods.
The CD version of this game is still in my library, no more having to download a NoCD patch from a shaddy website to avoid plugging your external CD-player each time. It's a very fun game that had me dozens of hours in over the almost 20 years I owned it, coming back to it every now and then to do a few missions. It's very janky and buggy but if you like open worlds and FPS with RPG elements I'm sure you can have fun. Today it's finally on GOG and not abandonware. Thank you. Game works fine on a laptop with AMD APU 2500U without dGPU.
