turns out, making challenge was simple. make each enemy a mini boss! you will know the real boss by the sheer number of unkillable chaotically moving adds that do 2x damage. also, more adds! 3x damage! and the music is boring.
Very solid shooter. Location are crafted lovingly, and have this incredible abandoned/dangerous/unknown vibe. Gameplay is somewhat simpler and has less sharp corners than original Stalkers. Lots of bugs were fixed, so now the game is playable. The story much better than typical western console shooter, with multiple unreliable narrators and some choices even meaningfully influencing the story (thankfully, this is kept to a minimum) The most weird thing is about the Zone in its current state is that you can run for kilometers and not encounter even a single blind dog. There's a distinct lack of stuff to do in the last third of the game.
it's the good old stalker. what else can I say. the zone is still the same, beauriful land full of radiation-crippled flora and fauna, pretty sunsets, anomalies and bandits. The mutants are still the same bullet sponges they were a decade ago. yay.
This is a very competent and fun SF adventure. Lowkey pretty alien environments, guns are a pleasure to shoot. Combat has some light elemental / puzzle / weakpoint mechanics mixed in, and they can be opaque at times, esp. with bosses. A bit on the short-ish side. The story is actually decent! Not Hugo or Nebula levels of good, but significantly better than the usual "hurr durr aliens bad".
pretty art, cool music and very unique chill apocalypse vibes. slightly disappointing gameplay, still better than many modern AAAs. there's actually no train management, and it's absolutely not similar to FAR in any way. the DLC is even worse, it lacks the laidback fatalism of the main game and takes away the train ride completely.
ROG Zephyrus Ryzen 9 6900HS + Radeon RX 6800S (8GB), Win11. Tried all combination of options for fullscreen/exclusive/dx12. graphics on low. To clarify: This is NOT GOG's fault. This is absolutely on Eidos.
This thing is beautiful, humongous and beyond harsh. It's not a metroidvania or a platformer, not really. This is a survival horror: difficult controls, scant resources, smart enemies. The approximation of the idea of a food chain is charming in theory, but the game doesn't really go as far as "ecosystem": wildlife is sadistically placed to hinder your progress, progressively more as you move through the game, without any regard to resource or energy balance a real ecosystem would have. Save scum is the only way. Those choosing the easy difficulty will be denied access to lore texts. Then again, just to read them you would have to do insanely long backtracks through the map, so if you chose easy you'd presumably just read those lore bits off the wiki ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
