Reviews - UltimateHobo

Basically a re-skin of vanilla. Not awful but doesn't do anything special. Balance is pretty poor though.

One of the best games ever made.

Thus game is dripping it atmosphere, it oozes it. Furthermore, its one of very few games which can make me genuinely scared, it feels like you're constantly on an knife edge.

The game is open world and in a literal sense, it gives you the freedom to wander into the later zones if you want and, provided you're good enough, you wont just die. It doesn't suffer from terrible level scaling, though, it is harder when you reach later zones, much harder, but it also rewards skill.

Since I'm on moddb I probably ought to mention mods, there are a lot, and the community is still active. Mods can change this game into an even more atmospheric and tense game, they can make it into a full survival game where you find yourself scavenging for food, or, they can make it into a more action packed and story driven game. Lost Alpha is probably the best example of this; Lost Alpha changes stalker a lot, it changes it from an open world and atmospheric shooter into a story driven, and really quite linear, shooter in which you can backtrack.

Play vanilla first, before any mods, otherwise you will miss out because, however good they are, mods change a game and vanilla stalker has, for me, a special something which just cannot be beaten.

I was torn as to what rating to give this.

Firstly, it looks great and it plays great, there isn't much more to say in that regard. The new zones are good, Darkscape is oddly one of the safest yet most atmospheric areas, and, for me, they were perfectly stable.

The difficulty, I felt, is too easy. You get a scope by garbage and it becomes trivial to snipe all the bandits who have worse gear than you, furthermore, by the time you reach harder foes you will have a G36 and at that point nothing is much of a threat. However, mutants still scary and can get the drop on you sometimes; I was cleaning up, taking all my loot from an army base, when a pack of pseudodogs ambushed me, I killed them though and that leads me on to my next point.

I swear the game is easier - I don't think I've died outside of helicopters, even the pseudogiant wasn't a threat. Maybe I'm not dying because I'm a STALKER veteran or maybe its because I like to take all the loot but I played on master and it posed little challenge.

Although, it may have been because of another one of my problems, my biggest problem: the linearity. Lost Alpha is linear, lets not beat about the bush, it is. You cannot go to most areas until they are unlocked because of reasons like "blowout damage" or "too much radiation" but in reality its because the story doesn't want you to because it has a nice scripted sequence which it wants to show you, which would be fine, if it were not everywhere. It takes away the sense of freedom and adventure because of this and i seriously feel its to the determent of the game.

If that's so then why does this game get an 8? Well, its a great complimentary experience to STALKER SoC. Do not play this first or only this, play this after vanilla (same rule for every game and every mod but especially here). This game expands the story and shows us what STALKERs world is, it reveals the old, lost, areas and its great in that regard but it takes away a lot in doing so.