I want to give the game five stars, but nostalgia has clouded my judgment a little. It is a very good game but it has the usual euro-jank flaws. I'll try to go through them without spoilers. The good: -The exclusion zone is now seamless open-world. You can explore a positively enormous Chernobyl exclusion zone withrelatively minimal pop-in. There are a few problems with this, but I'll discuss that later., On the whole I like it. -Good variety of anomalies, suits, ammunition, and consumables. -Dynamic weather system really enhances the gloomy mood. -Aggressive autosave system insulates against some of the more annoying bugs. -Gunplay feels weighty and effective. Slower, more cumbersome reloads and jams force you to play more strategically, and you will die quickly if you act like a one-man army. This is not a Calladooty game. -Old locations stitched together with new ones for some familiarity and nostalgia. All rebuilt and looking great. The bad: -Optimization. I7-13700, GTX1080 SC, 64gb DDR5 RAM, running on a FireCuda SSD, I had to run at 1080P to get playable FPS. -Bloodsucker spam. Too many around midgame makes them less scary and more annoying. -Stashes are kinda lame now. -ALife has been replaced with spawn-ins which are inconsistent and feel unfair. No more spotting and picking enemies off at long range. This is a major step backwards in an open world. I imagine the over-dense foliage was added to help hide this. -LOTS of bugs. Although some are actually just poorly communicated and poorly thought-out game mechanics. The weird: -English VO is mostly from the UK. Voices range from brummy northern English, to Londoner-doing-Boris-Badenoff, to the occasional Pacific Northwest American liberal, to the striking Irish accent. I was not prepared for a leprechaun in a Sunrise suit greeting me with "Hooh, me fellow Stalker! Top o' the marnin' to ye, laddie! 'Tere be an emission a-comin!
If you're looking to try S.T.A.L.K.E.R., but are only willing to commit to one game, Call of Pripyat is easily your best bet. It does come chronologically after the previous games, but you can play it and really not ruin the experience. The reason I say to play this one, is that it has the most polished, modern experience, with the fewest bugs (and the ones that do pop up tend not to be game-breaking), the most reasonable learning curve, the fewest out-of-left-field moments where the missions or the enemies are either so strange or so unpolished that they feel like the game is broken. The atmosphere is incredibly spooky, multiple factions, playstyles and a pretty impressive active world make replayability pretty good. The game has enough conventional FPS elements that players of the genre will pick it up fairly quickly, but otherwise the game has a very large semi-open world, a story that requires *just* enough digging to find that it feels like an accomplishment rather than an afterthought, and a good, if harsh, combat and enemy AI system. Gun and gear customization adds lots of depth to an already pretty big game, but having to find tool kits adds just enough grind to this process to make it feel, again, like you've achieved something. Even after you have top-shelf guns and armor and loads of supplies, the game really never allows you to feel like it's become easy though. It is bleak, melodramatic and unforgiving, typical of Russian narrative. The post-apocalyptic aesthetic and the iconic bandit faction add a lot of silly, fun, cult-favorite appeal to the game. Even if you don't "get" the whole cult following and the silly in-jokes, fans of Fallout looking for something that gives you a little more direct control over the narrative, or fans of Metro looking for a less linear experience will still probably enjoy this a lot. Now geet out of here, STALKER.
