Reviews - Ranokin

The best mod for CoP I've seen so far, it does so much right, and only a couple things wrong. Unfortunately for me, those couple things are very, very irritating. Lets go over the pro's first.

-Fantastic visuals, bleak and depressing.
-Turns STALKER into a survival game, which is how it should be. Forces you to think and plan, and not doing so will result in death.
-Food and sleep requirements are relatively balanced.
-Firefights feel realistic, both the player and the other stalkers will go down from only a few shots with the basic armor.

Now we get into the negatives. There is a significant amount of artificial difficulty in this game and it can really ruin the experience. Having classes and specializations in this mod was a poor decision, mostly due to my next gripe, which is my most glaring problem with the mod. Ammunition is FAR too scarce. NPC's drop little to no ammunition when they die despite spraying bullets everywhere in the fight, and traders charge crazy prices for basic ammo. It's cool to have a small amount of ammo in a survival game, it forces you to make every shot count and think about how to use your resources in every situation; but this is going too far. Let me paint you a picture. In more than half of the firefights I have, I run completely out of ammunition. This forces me to run to nearby corpses and just pick up whatever weapon they might have had, use it for the 7 shots they had left, drop it, and run to the next corpse. This is incredibly frustrating, especially since characters are specialized in only a couple types of weapons. The next problem I have with the mod just makes the first problem worse. Mutants are way too resilient. I dont care how mutated it is, a psudodog should NOT take 5 shots from an assault rifle to kill. A snorker should NOT be able to take 3 rounds of buckshot at point blank range. Every fight with mutants will significantly reduce your ammo and health, and will leave you with nothing to show for it.