Lost Alpha is a new episode of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series made by dezowave group for free!
3/10 - Agree (71) Disagree (19)
UPDATE: Changing my rating from 5 to 2 due to the rudeness of the mod team. A 5 was just being generous due to the large amount of effort it took to create these maps - but I'm giving it a more honest rating now since the creators choose to be dicks and respond to legitimate criticism with denialism and sarcastic comments (ex. "If you don't like LA be sure to return it for a full refund"). Yeah, like that's going to win you guys brownie points with your fans, lmao
Not to mention that nearly every one of these of the high ratings were made before the mod was even released based on the trailers alone (check the dates - after the mod actually came out the ratings dropped sharply from 9.5 to 8.9 - so that's pretty telling).
The "Alpha" in the title is fitting because this isn't a real game, it's just an unfinished alpha with little to no actual gameplay unless "walking simulators" are your thing.
---Original review---
While the first few moments of the game are enticing (ex. exploring the new Cordon and Garbage for the first time), the game quickly loses its charm and starts to feel more like a chore
Even ignoring the numerous bugs and poor AI in this release, the game suffers from some serious design flaws and misses what made the original SoC fun in the first place.
First off is the new maps - while the maps are beautiful to look at and much larger and more complex, you'll soon find that there's just not that much to do in them after the initial sightseeing, and the end up just resulting in lots and lots of tedious backtracking.
In SoC the maps were smaller and simpler but were more exciting and unpredicatble - whenever you entered an area you might run into a bandit ambush, or a pack of wild mutants. In LA however you might end spending 30 minutes just navigating the maps to complete a quest without encountering a single firefight; a perfect example are the missions which require you trudge back and forth from the caves in the Darkscape - you'll know what I mean if you play this mod, and it's about as fun as watching paint dry.
While the game does offer driveable cars to help shorten the backtracking - they're (and the fuel they use) are too hard to come by, not to mention the cars handle very poorly and easily get flipped over, or get stuck on objects in their path - which renders them useless.
My other major turn-off are the new cinematics and voice acting (such as the visions of the scientists in lab-X18). Sure it's impressive that the team went through the trouble of creating all of this in their spare time, but the mediocre dialogue and cinema scenes using NCPs kill the immersion and just aren't scary or eerie.
In the original SoC this was kept to a bare minimum and the rest was left up to your imagination, and the end result was much more terrifying.
It's also worth noting that you can "break" many of the main quests by killing or turning key characters hostile, and the game gives no indication of who you can kill or can't, for example killing or shooting certain Duty members now means you can't complete the game (this was also a non-issue in SoC).
Overall this mod's too big of a disappointment. Right now I'd rather just be playing good ol' SoC.