I played the other stalker games when they came out years ago, and continued playing them ever since. S2 does remove some things I loved about SOC, like seeing the identity of the person and their faction that you are looting. Killing monsters and not being able to loot body parts off them for money later is also a weird choice. Holding down F used to put text on screen showing you where items were and their names, but now its just a dot when you get close enough. Also I do not enjoy the artifact scanner at all. Whatever happened to just exploring and finding them on the ground like in SOC? The scanner likes to say you are near the invisible artifact but instead its across the room. Might be a bug for me, but its really annoying to see it just pop into existance. Speaking of artifacts, it seems they made them much much harder to find and rarer than the older games. Any time Ive found one it has instantly gone to an NPC for the story line. I have yet to find one for me to use. I also hope the 'meat' artifact is still in the game, but the amount of health items the game throws at you now makes me think they got rid of them. Visually, the game has the same zone feeling as the older games do, but the graphical fidelity is amazing. It is not hard at all to lose yourself in just walking around and looking at everything. I havent gotten too far into the game, but I was hoping more for an expanded loot and items for janking together awesome weapons instead of having a seller do it for money. I always enjoyed finding / buying the attachments for weapons and wanted to see an expanded options in that realm. Mods will most likely fufill that need. I havent really seen any bugs yet, the only strange thing I came across was when a group of stalkers attacked me. Returned fire killing one of them, ducked behind a wall to reload, popped back out and the other attackers disappeared. Ran everywhere to see about getting their loot. All in all, Ive been enjoying the game.
Addicting and fun.
