If you want the definitive stalker experience then play this, but you may need to edit some of the settings to tailor it to your level.
In the first age, in the first battle when the shadows first lengthened One stood. Burned by the embers of Armageddon, his soul blistered by the fires of hell and tainted beyond ascension, he chose the path of perpetual torment. In his ravenous hatred he found no peace and with boiling blood he scoured the Umbral Plains seeking vengeance against the Dark Lords who had wronged him.
Well, as suspected the game is horribly unoptimized and very buggy. Even top of the line pc's struggle to run the game. Then there are a myriad of bugs in just about every part of the game. If you're lucky you will encounter few of them. The biggest disappointment though comes from the gameplay system they call a-life. For years they hyped it up yet the final product doesn't resemble anything like what we've seen in previous games. Enemies spawn literally on top of you or behind you. There are no roaming bands of monsters or people. The devs claim that the system is broken, but if that is the case they why release the game? You know there is a problem when on the day of release they release a public letter apologizing for the state of a game. Gunplay is also slow - from healing yourself to reloading your weapon they are all slow compared to previous games. The extra animations look nice, but they are so slow that you will find yourself canceling a reload or heal because you tried to do something else and the animation wasn't finished yet. The quick menu system is weird requiring you to hold down a button which is again slow and not quick. The English voice acting is bad and very out of place with everything from American accents to Scottish and Irish accents. The monsters are bullet sponges and drop nothing of value making them something to avoid rather than fight. That said, if everything worked properly the game would be great, but all we have right now are promises that they will fix the game and make it what it should have been. Unfortunately this is the trend in modern gaming where we get half baked games and promises of fixes later. If they do manage to fix everything then this will be another amazing entry in the Stalker series, but only time will tell. As of right now though the game is only average at best.
While some of the voice acting is weird and they seemed to mess with the story a bit they really captured the feel of the movie. Shooting people is incredibly fun and they fleshed out the gameplay with an open city where you actually do police work and investigate crimes. The skill system adds depth and you can even get different endings depending on your choices.
This game is a truly open world game where you can go where you want and do what you want. You can align with whatever faction you want or just drive around and do nothing. You play the game how you want and have fun doing what you like. However the game is very janky and buggy. The audio will randomly cut off during dialog, You will get stuck on tiny obstacles you should be able to simply step over. When you walk in certain directions or on certain surfaces the screen jerks around. Also there is no run button and the areas are unnecessarily large and empty. These things aren't game breaking but they add up and become annoying. The worst is the insane difficulty curve the game throws at you. You have to level up your skills in this game and after the first few missions they immediately ask you to take down a drug house with like fifteen guys with assault rifles while you're still level 2 or 3 and your weapon keeps misfiring because your skill is too low. Expect to do lots of grinding and/or cheesing.
After the disastrous launch of this game they managed to bring it back to a somewhat okay state if, and only if, you buy the game on sale. The game is very shallow and repetitive and after a short while you will find yourself doing the same things over and over for little to no reward. Hello Games has released several updates since I purchased this game, but none of them add any depth to the gameplay which is what this game sorely needs.
I've put over twenty hours into this game and even though I could get it run fairly well on my pc, it's still was riddled with bugs. There are too many to name here, but go to youtube to see how incredibly buggy this game is. This game is an unfinished mess. Outside of quests there is nothing to do. Most of the vendors are there for appearance and none of them sell you anything unique so there is no point in visiting one over another. In a city that is supposed to be full of sex, drugs and vice there are only two prostitutes you can interact with outside of quests. The strip clubs and bars are all illusions that add nothing to the game since you can't do anything in them. There are no casinos to gamble in, no minigames to occupy your time. There is nothing to do, absolutely nothing to do, outside of quests. Night city is completely lifeless and boring. There are no random enemies either, just enemies that respawn at certain locations so you always know where they are. The ai controlling peds and cars is not even on par with ten year old games. Police spawn right next to you no matter where you are. Ped driven cars run on rails and control horribly and either don't turn enough or turn so much that it feels like you are on ice. The prices for buying cars is so high and unbalanced that it is laughable. The lifepaths are meaningless outside of the ten minute intro and a few dialog options in the game. The perks are mostly stat boosts instead of unique abilities that add variety. The user interface and menus feels like it was made by ten different people who never talked to each other as there seems to be no coherent reason for why a certain button does something. One minute C closes the dialog the next it's ESC or X. Nothing makes sense. The crafting menu is horrible and doesn't even tell you how many of a certain item you have so you are making items blindly. Everything feels rushed and slapped together with little thought. CDPR can't be trusted anymore.
