Reviews - skullkan6

Changes way too many gameplay options and does NOT give you the options to toggle features or aspects you like. Some of these are almost knowingly unaware of the original purpose of the mechanics or values they replace.

This could have been the ultimate go-to mod to use for every time you install Call of Pripyat but instead because of the Dev thinking he knows better, it plays worse than it did stock.

Just because it feels like castlevania doesn't mean the gameseries works in a first person perspective. The entire first section must be beaten in one go with no health pickups, including bats. I made it further but without a lives system you just KEEP whip upgrades which is honestly kinda weird. It's not unplayable and you might have fun with it but god my index finger was getting sore after only an hour of playing. Also Castlevania's movement restrictive whip mechanics just do not feel good in first person.

A bit patchy, but a good "best of" of some of the the community mods.
Do NOT make this your first playthrough, go for the latest unofficial patch and extended content for that.

It's Lost Alpha.
Honestly, it does not 100% deserve its negative attention from the STALKER community, but it's not like it doesn't deserve SOME of it.

The biggest issue with Lost Alpha (and to some degree its greatest strength), is that it is a mod which seems to be trying to feel more like a game. It is incredibly cool see a redone cordon, (which in some sections I think may just be better than the original), and incredibly cool to get to finally use that belt system, find entirely new areas of The Zone, a good way to describe Lost Alpha you will find is two steps forward, two steps back.

The main story writing sucks, that's pretty clear. But a lot of the side-quest writing (especially dealing with Nimble) is surprisingly excellent.

A lot of the maps now have new areas, are completely new (sometimes in ways which make more sense than SHoC), and have cool new areas which reveal shortcuts to make your movement through the map easier on back trips.
On the other hand, many of the maps are now arguably way too big and many, many quests require you to go 2/3 of the way across the maps or across multiple areas to get a mediocre reward for the amount of travel.

New graphical options, and upgradable detectors!
Yeah but detection is inconsistent and half broken, and the game is optimized like a heroin turd being forced out of a junkie's ***. There are several visual issues relevant to Radeon cards the devs still cannot fix because they do not OWN a radeon card. Water is still unfixably bugged and glitchy for me.

New underground areas! New mutants seamlessly built into the game!
Yeah, but now you have needless psy attacks and scripted psy bolts after MANY MANY story missions. Some of these work, like the one in Garbage, many of them just plain do not work.

A good comparison I would make would be to the stalker mod OGSE or Old Good Stalker Evolution, in that while Lost Alpha tries to be a game while often feeling more like a mod, OGSE is a clear janky as hell mod which at times feels more like a full game.

In its current state with the Director's cut it is much easier to recommend Lost Alpha, especially with the Extended Pack mod which adds a new arsenal of weapon changes and rebalanced the honestly rather rough gunplay of stock Lost Alpha.
Some of the design choices for Extended Pack are questionable and seem to lean more toward a Misery style balancing (it was ******* weird to fight my way to Bar from Cordon only to find despite having two very valuable artifacts and four other artifacts, two sellable guns, I basically had no money to buy new guns or equipment).

tl;dr it's okay if you want to try to see a bunch of fans try to make a new stalker game based on the original alpha try it, just know you're in for an equal amount of ****.

One of the best fixes or fan contributions to any game ever. Basically revives and allows you to play one of the greatest roleplaying games ever released by fixing all of the issues which made it genuinely unplayable in the original release.