I want to give this game a good review; sadly I cannot. Technical: The biggest issue is the optimization. I am running this game on a RTX 3090 with a R7 5800X3D and 64G RAM. At 1080P Medium settings, I am lucky if I can hit 60 FPS. Frame rates constantly dip to 30FPS with 1% lows of 8FPS....at 1080P Medium! I would love to run this game at 4K, but then it only gets 30ishFPS highs. While you may think the card and/or the processor are under max load....you would be wrong. At these settings, my GPU doesn't cross 70% utilization and the CPU doesn't hit 50%. Gameplay: This is a lot like the other S.T.A.L.K.E.R installments, though a little easier in my opinion. For fans of the franchise, it will scratch the itch. Storyline is good and different paths are available dependent on the choices you make. The voice acting does leave a little to be desired. The world is "empty" in that there are not events, NPCs, enemies, and hidden secrets around every corner. This is the exclusion zone and only the crazies and desperate come here. There are a lot of POIs, but they are empty locations with the same loot of food, drinks, and ammo; once you've cleared one, you know what to mostly expect from the others. The other POIs are stalker stashes, with mostly the same loot, sometimes a broken weapon, and there are a huge amount of these. The best locations aren't typically seen on the map, the anomaly clusters with an artifact, or 2, hidden in them. Gunplay is good, though some of the attachments and upgrades need to be addressed; EX the laser light upgrade for the Buk is not centered on the crosshairs, therefore is useless for visual targeting. Conclusion: This is a good game for the average player, a better game for fans. The optimization is holding it back, as well as many bugs. Hopefully this will be fixed in time and I can edit this review to reflect that.
