Disappointed in the initial release as it was rushed, it should've cooked in the over for another year, half year as bare minimum. My main quest hasn't been fixed since I got to it in the early December, it's already end of May of 2025, still the quest is broken and the NPC that shouldn't be dead, is dead, and outside of the shack he was supposed to be in, and behind locked doors, yet when I got the Colonel, the optional quest of the main quest auto fails. I got tired of playing after 165h of just exploring the map because I have no progression besides getting money, gear, and weapons, to an extent. Limited in upgrading gear because I require to reach certain main quest progression. Basically I have explored 70-80% of the map, played 165h, and stuck at the main quest at the Garbage depot, which is like 3rd big quets and its underquests. Console commands do not help because for some reason there is no file or info that shows all NPC ID's to reset them. I wasted lots of time playing with console commands, reseting quests, manipulating, etc. I wish that I knew that my quest bug wouldn't be fixed for this long (still isn't), I would've refunded, but thanks to hope and trust I kept on waiting. I stopped submitting the same bug in February's update. Also, talking about updates, once a month having update is unacceptable for a broken release game. I will raise my star when my quest is fixed. It wont get 4-5 stars because it should serve developers to be more cautions and conservative.
Currently as the game is, it's hardly playable. Quite often crashes unpredictably, some heavy lag and frame drop occurs before it crashes and throws you out. Framedrops happen, and then it remains on low fps number before you are forced to reload the save game to clear the problem. Not even Cyberpunk had this sort of launch, or it was fixed with Day 1 patch very fast. This one still doesn't have any patches. Textures are good here and there, but then there are objects that look to be reused from first three games, such as hanging drabs that are torn, they have a fixed animation and the cloth is not interactable, it's like they copied and pasted object models from previous games and called it done. Shameful execution on that part. This game looks to be like old-school Stalker, but without loading screens (very good), unified maps that are made into one big open world, remastered textures and effects, etc., and screen space reflection added, or low resolution cubemap. But they have a beautiful foliage, vegetation, instead of raytracing. Difficulty levels are weird, it's too hard on Stalker difficulty, which is medium, but feels like any other game would be on hard difficulty. Maybe it gets easier later on with better gear and armor, but at the start engaging some group of enemies is quite risky and challenging, especially when you don't see them but they spot you easily. It's weird, but I don't want to play on easy, I always have played on medium as it always have been meant, but this one feels bit hard for medium. Conclusion: Game will remind you that you are playing the classic stalker, even if the game is new, yet it doesn't feel new when you see details. Game requires difficulty tweaking, and performance tweaking. Developers are trying to tell you it's "their first time, so be gentle", but this is not our first time playing a bad release game that looks like early stalkers but with graphical mods, and plays badly with reused world objects.
Couple of times it crashed. First two-three times when I got to the mobile bunker lab, then it crashed when I killed first bloodsucker, in the shed. And it crashed one more time later. Since it is a new game, it is to expect. Another thing is, the difficulty Stalker feels like it should be Veteran, easy to die, bloodsuckers kill you either with first jump, or 2nd hit. Dogs can kill you fast, and rat swarm is just something you can't deal with but to hope you wont get stuck and you can run away. Enemy soldiers or bandits are deadly, somehow they see you better through foliage than you can even see them, the only way to tell if somewhere sees you, is the indicator of detection. Have to wait for a patch or something. Performance wise it has some lags, it didn't showed framedrops when it stuttered or lagged in some spaces. Texture quality in game feels like it has been reused from decade older game and just improved with mods. But lightning, foliage, world, it's awesome, no loading screens. It has nice animations, quite organic when holding weapons and walking with them or running. Shadow still looks funny when you run. Poltergeist is unpredictable, for example is older Stalker games you could tell from where those telepathic throws are coming from, but here objects do not move, only when you get hit they kind of move around, it's like you were hit by an invisible force rather than telepathic object throw.
I give 5 starts for the game as such, for what it is if it didn't had any issues, which I think will be fixed in the future, so that I don't have to change review later. But what I will going to write will remain as memento. PCMR here, and I have no issues with encountered bugs or glitches that tend to happen over the course of gameplay, it's not game breaking whatsoever for me on the PC, but it is disappointing by the fact that the game has been in development for ~7 years, and it got delayed/postponed ~3-4 times, and still managed to be unpolished and unrefined. Makes me wonder what was the state of the game before when it got delayed 1-2nd & 3rd time. Would've been nice if it was delayed not until December 10th, but December 18-20th if not until the next year January, to have a much more refined game. So the devs said that the game was in a ready state to play when it was supposed to come out the 2nd time, when it was delayed first time, but it took a half a year with one or two more delays to receive Gold, meaning it is in a playable state for sure, excluding bugs and glitches, and performance loss. Fast forward to Dec 10, and with the bugs and glitches my issues are actually with performance loss, a.k.a. heavy frame drops over the time in game. When 1.04 patch came out, it did reduced some frame drops, but it is still present within the game in various locations where when you go the first time, it's ok, but you come back to that place you go from 50-60fps first time down to ~22 fps mark in the same location. It eats RAM quite a lot, seeing up to 15GB of RAM usage, it doesn't use all CPU cores, and I got a CPU with 8 cores 16 threads, and going by task manager it shows rougly ~75% being used, some cores are on low activity, including threads. With how heavy this game is, I would expect to have all my hardware used just to get the best performance while maintaining this visual quality, meaning that reducing frame drops as much as possible.
