Stalker 2 is a Stalker game but the game has a lot of issues that hinder the game of being as great as the first three titles. First of all you have the huge zone without any loading times. Sounds great but in the original games you spent some time in each parts of the zone,and once you have been there for a while, you moved on to the next part. In Stalker 2 you have to walk for hours upon hours. You get an objective and have to go somewhere about 5 Kilometers away. so you stroll over there for what feels like an hour, finish the objective in 10 Minutes and then you have to walk back again. I made myself a Macro for my keyboard so the player character moves by himself, because I don't wanna sit here for 30 minutes just holding down W. If you could at least run all the time but thanks to the spongy full auto sharpshooters that are your enemies, you have to carry a ton of ammo and health items. just so you then collect tons of health items and ammo from the dead enemies. the devs know you can't get through the game without constant supplies. So a huge balancing issue right there and instead of making the game a bit snappier, it just drags on and on for hours and I totally forgot who is who at the end. You fight several bosses and always when it feels like the game is over now, it just continues. I played it for 70 hours and I think that is more than I needed for the first three games together. So while the game was fun in the beginning, it loses all its momentum and I only had fun again once I installed mods that reduced the weight of the items, doubled the sprinting time and another mod that made the enemies less spongy and the shootouts with the cool guns way more fun. While the devs claim they listen to feedback, the community makes mods to make the game not how the devs make it. And if you need mods to make a game fun, you know its not a good game.
The first two episodes are great. they play super smooth and have satisfying gunplay and the upgrades to the weapons do make a difference, so blasting through the 24 levels is really fun. But then comes the third episode and there the game is just awful. Your character can barely take any damage while the guns don't do much damage and all the time the guns stop working and you have to do active reload for whatever reason and if you fail that you have to wait ages and all the enemy does is swarm you and kills you in seconds. totally annoying! Not going to finish this.
Played this a while ago but stopped because hitscanning enemies snipe you from across the level and you end up in trial and error situations all the time. now I wanted to finish the game and my mouse doesn't work anymore.
...how it is when you're mentally and bodily disabled, then play this game. I know the devs don't want to become the Dragonborn and rule the whole game with a single sword as it is possible in Skyrim but the combat system is one of the worst things I have ever seen in gaming and thanks to the totally stupid RPG system, it is like fighting as someone who has no muscles and it is actually funny how the enemies fight. They swing the swords in slowmotion and they surely would do damage that way but it would be so easy to sidestep them and then just thrust the knife I use (because Henry is too weak for everything else) in the enemies throat, but no the knife does only this damage and the enemy has this health despite his throat being cut and he would actually start to bleed out. I wouldn't mind avoid fights but you no other choice most of the time and even sneak attacks have to be unlocked and bow and arrow to the neck and head also do no damage. The devs probably want the player to be creative but I don't like trial and error in games, so this is not for me and neither will be the sequel.
First of all I had technical difficulties with this game. With Frame Generation on, it drops to about 5FPS when you play longer than 20 minutes and get near NPCs. Not fixed despite mulitple patches. All those patches did for me was make the game crash sometimes during the shader compiling screen, which is extra fun when the Task Manager can't be brought in front to close the game. But what really grinds my gear are the hitscanning enemies. This is such bs! The player has to fire semi, because bursts and full auto are too inaccurate and you even have to watch for the bullet drop and have to shoot the enemies 5 to 6 times with Assault Rifle bullets. I just had to shoot an enemy 3(!) times in the side of his head with a .45 USP. All while the enemy just blasts away at 200 meters or more and you just get hit. and if you take cover, well they start throwing grenades that always land next to you. In the beginning this was not that noticeable but I am close to the finale now and here it just is really annoying. nothing but enemies left and right and everyone is just blasting away your health bar despite having one of the best suits in the game and you shoot them in the face and the throat and they don't even care. This is such an artifical difficulty nonsense. Make the enemy hard to kill and the player easy and done is "Our super challenging game". They also have fun instant deaths if you enter areas where you're not supposed to be. Totally cheap and weak and my guess is the devs don't have the skills to make it a balanced game. Just like they don't have the skills to fix the technical problems.
I play on the second lowest difficulty because I have only little experience with CRPGs. KOTOR 1+2 and Fallout 1+2 are the games I played the most, but I also enjoyed Pillars of Eternity. So I was excited for this game, not only because I am a huge Warhammer 40k fan. And in the beginning the game was really fun. leveled up my characters and found some better gear while following an interesting story for 10 hours and combat was fair. It was not super easy but also not brutally difficult until I got to the boss of the Act 1 and that boss just kills my crew in seconds. I have no idea how you can overlook something like this but the whole design of the boss fight is total nonsense. You have no cover, the boss just sucks up damage like it's nothing and like I said, kills your crew in a few turns while calling in reinforcements. This absolute nonsense and total unfair and neesd to be redesigned from ground up. If that is not patched, I will never buy a game from Owlcat Games ever again.
Mission design is "Protect this and that" all the time and you always get the wrong vehicle for the missions. Most missions would be perfect with a X-Wing or A-Wing but what do you get? Y- or B-Wing! For example: You should disable enemy transports because slaves need to be rescued. Your mission is to indentify the transports with the slaves and disable them with an ion cannon before they reach the planet. Sounds like a perfect mission for a B-Wing you got in the previous mission, but you get a Y-Wing and your teammates with X-Wings are too stupid to shoot the Ties. They should give the player an A-Wing and let the AI disable the transports. This is the case for most missions. Forget this game and play the first X-Wing, Tie-Fighter and Versus.
