Reviews - MrPhantom31

Excellent concept, but unpolished.

To get it out of the way - ZoA looks incredible. Seriously. With this mod, graphics at max and forced AA, SoC looks as good as it probably ever will. It looks realistic without being overly gritty, and manages to be both colorful and grim at the same time, unlike a certain other "realistic" Stalker mod.

Weapons are generally well textured, with some occasional wonky modeling and quite a few poorly modeled iron sights. Also, certain guns have an annoying innate zoom on their irons, like the SVD. One of the better features is the inclusion of night vision optics, which feel like a natural extension to the attachment system and work very well. Rarely, when attaching scopes, the gun and scope can spontaneously disappear.

The magazine system is also a nice touch, though it certainly has flaws. Reloading feels much clunkier than it needs to be - there has to be some way to implement a menu or something - but the fact that magazine reloading is actually animated is really cool, and gives you something to do while waiting for dawn around a campfire. I experienced some issues with magazines getting "eaten" by the reloading process, and loading from boxed ammunition, rather than loose ammo, sometimes outright refuses to work. There also doesn't seem to be a way to unload partially loaded magazines without first filling them, which is a huge annoyance when trying to scavenge rare ammunition.

The almost total lack of HUD is an interesting choice, and usually works well - with one exception. There's no way to check the fire mode on a weapon without test firing it. There needs to be some way to do this - perhaps a brief text popup when you switch between fire modes?

Overall, ZoA is one of the best mods out there. It's certainly a bit unstable, and in need of some polish, but the uniquely brutal combat and atmosphere make it incredibly immersive. It feels like the game that STALKER always should have been, rather than just a mod.