Reviews - The Journey mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

This mod was definitely an interesting experience. I thought I should write a little breakdown of all the positive and negative stuff. Also, this review contains spoilers, so don't read if that bothers you.

+ The level design is great! I loved exploring both the old and new locations. It was especially interesting seeing the old locations so abandoned, it almost felt like the end of the world.
+ I really liked the atmosphere that this mod creates (mostly through dialogue and level design)
+ It was cool to see Strelok again, I definitely didn't expect to see him there
+ I like how the mod doesn't hold your hand in regards to quests. You don't have any quest markers on the map, so you only have to rely on information obtained through dialogue. Reminds me of TES III: Morrowind.
+The hand-drawn map was a great idea, it suits this mod perfectly

- Monolith spamming grenades. At some points it was practically impossible to fight them because of the amount of grenades flying at me
- The story isn't very intriguing and the plot twist at the end was honestly very predictable
- Literally just one single combat track, which gets really annoying after a while, even though the track itself is pretty good (unless it's a bug, in which case I hope it gets fixed soon)
- english translation isn't exactly bad, but sometimes the grammar errors can be a little distracting

This mod is just not for me, way to much, imo boring walking around. Gameplay pushed by a very flimsy quest goal that lacks the pull to keep you going.

Even thou the NPC's info is well presented and some parts are highlighted, they are just a basic pointer, you will still walk around not knowing where to go many times, specially because the mod wont tell you, when you have done a task, is a total guessing game, I'm all for no stupid handholding features but this is just bad design.
Because the game never hinted that I needed to go talk again, to the first stalker you find, instead I went to the "farm", I saw in the distance, thinking "perhaps the game is pointing me on that direction?", but no, instead I got there only to find a totally boring and empty place, no hints nothing and after minutes of walking around aimlessly, got killed by a pack of "wolf's" roaming around, this because I add no gun, you start with no gun, just a knife...
To get the gun, you need to talk to a particular NPC and get him a very hard to find axe, again because of bad design, the "axe" looked to me like a normal peace of wood not a axe! I think because the tall grass was hiding half of it!
Then after you give the axe to the NPC, will you get a weapon or at lest be told where to pick it up.

And this is the problem with this mod, is mostly fetch missions with way to much, boring walking in between, because most places are just empty of NPC's and the houses have almost zero stuff for you to pick up, after some time you just stop caring to explore, because "I'm sure it will be just another empty house.".

Some problems and stuff I found during my play, first got stuck on some stairs, those going down into a hole in the cordon houses, where the pack of dogs live, add to restart from a save.
Two saw the "elk" spawn in the distance from the air and fall down, when traveling from the first area to the second, when the old man told me to find the stalker.
Third is very obvious the wolf and elk are just reskinned stalker monsters. The elk for example behaves very unlike a elk, it should mostly run from you, not attack you on sight.

Sad that the mod ended no being my cup of tea because the images do look very good, but like everything on life, looks are deceiving.

Btw English is not my main language so sorry for the grammar mistakes.

Preface: I played a lot of Stalker mods (weight mods not included).

TL;DR - A good mod marred by horrible spawn, cyborg AI, and a very dissatisfactory ending.

Let's just point out everything good or bad, instead of writing a fanfic.

The good:
- The map designs are really top notch, especially for a single person venture.
- The atmosphere of a desolate Zone is really omnipresent, thanks to the abundance of overgrown grass, the colors, and the permanent wind noise in the background.
- The story design is quite unique, making you think for a second.
- New mutants and mutant textures really make it a nice viewing experience.

The bad:
- The weapons are the trash vanilla models.
- For a Zone about 20 years post-CoP, it really has a lot of supplies that you can get from fallen enemies.
- You can skip some fedex content by just picking up stuff before it's called for.
- No way to repair your weapons/armor.

The (very) ugly:
- The 'improved' AI just means that you'll get sniped from 200 meters by a bandit in a leather coat wielding a rickety sawn-off, and that's a problem because...
- Weapons can't be upgraded. This means that the **** poor accuracy of vanilla weapons is pertinent throughout the entire mod, so you'll be slinging bullets at enemies with little effect, while they headshot you with pinpoint accuracy from 2 hills over.
- Ridiculous enemy counts. Like seriously, for a dying Zone, the mutants are running around like nothing happened. There are probably more zombified stalkers in Agroprom than in all the entire vanilla trilogy combined, same for the Monolith on the last map, which is also another problem because...
- Monolith has grenades. This is a true Limansk experience, when you'll get nade spammed into last Thursday once you peak out of cover.
- The last map. While gorgeous (in a apocalyptical way), it's a horrible maze of anomalies, heat anomaly fields, full of Monolith soldiers which will gun you down the second they see you. To top that off, the ending sequence is a nightmare straight out of OP 2.1 or some other Scar's Return.

All in all you should give this a try, even just to see what a single man can do to a Stalker game. Just don't expect a multi-layered plot with dozens of hours of gameplay.

This is a mod that tried something different and not many people noticed it. It's not perfect by any means but still worth playing regardless.

The first thing you'll notice is how the quests are handled. Basically, the PDA is useless in this mod. While everything you need to know is in the dialogs and most of the time the hints are highlighted in a different color text as to draw attention, your active quests never show up in the PDA. I enjoy figuring things out by myself, I even love the "needle-in-haystack" situations soup mods mainly use but this seems overkill to me. I'm not asking for a big shiny quest marker showing me exactly the item I need to take or who to talk to, but a reminder of the quest instead, it's what the PDA is for after all. It could have been logged as "The hunter told me to search the village" and then it's your job to find the item you need or "I should find and talk to the stalker's friend", things like that.

There are both new and edited maps from the original game. Generally, I found the maps a bit too big and empty. The creator clearly has talent and apart from some minor mapping errors like floating objects there aren't any big problems, if only they were more compact and polished. They are also not utilized well, you may have a giant, interesting map but there are only two quests attached to it.

Speaking of polish, there is a general lack of it in this mod. You can do quests before quest givers give them to you, after that they'll act like we've spoken before. The dialogs are weirdly spaced and full of typos, the ending screen is warped, normal fauna is added to the Zone, there are elk, foxes and wolves but you only see them at the beginning and never again, elk still use boar noises and so on.

Since the mod takes place fifteen years after the Zone is abandoned there is no economy, no traders, no ammo, health and other things to buy. To find them you have to look for stashes which are scattered around nicely, exploration is always welcome in STALKER mods.

All of these may make it seem like the mod is horrible but it has a certain charm. It's fun to roam around in familiar maps that have changed so much, the initial clue hunt for your brother is interesting, I really enjoyed some of the combat scenarios and so on. If you can overlook the lack of polish and like exploration, this is a mod worth playing.

This must be one of the worst mods I have ever played for STALKER. I did enjoy the foliage and how the tasks are given out, but the story seems extremely lacking as well as the ending was almost vomit-inducing from boredom. 3/10, not giving it any higher, I hope the devs create something better based on their experience while making this one.

(Mild spoilers ahead)

Really liked the new zone design and handmade map. Pretty proud of not using guides in this one.

Biggest issues with this mod are the lack of an actual ending (maybe I failed to trigger it) and weapons being far more inaccurate than normal, making the last strech especially difficult (sniper rifle is essential).

Some bugs or quirks that could be fixed are the quest NPCs in agroprom leaving their posts to loot bodies far away (made worse by lack of minimap), dropped weapons disappearing due to lack of safe boxes (and no way to repair them), the map not fitting properly with the player marker (playing in 16:9) and map teleporters not really making sense (which also aren't marked on the map).

It's a complete disservice to STALKER to make the VSS innacurate, that needs fixing ASAP.
I was also expecting the last NPC to give you a better suit with containers, not just some healing items.
Also should add a PSA noting that only DX10 and DX11 modes are playable.

Current score: 6.8 (could go up with fixing)

It's all right for a small project, it's worth to play through, but there are some small things to adress.

SPOILER AHEAD
One of the things that caused me a headache was finding what to do after I found the suit at Yantar. Since previously the dialogues always pointed me to a direction, I just running around trying to trigger a dialogue. It should be at least mentioned that you have to find the passage to Hell alone and don't bother trying to get help.

The other of course is the ending. It was a bit anticlimatic, but also the moment you have to kill your brother, there should be a cutscene or at least just a credits screen or someting. It felt weird that after all that fighting, I get to meet him, I have to kill him and then.... nothing.

But other than these, it was interesting. I liked the maps for the most part.

It worked flawlesley on Linux, no corrupted saves, no crashes, no tasks that didn't trigger and a quite lovely ending map.
If you like the old stalker Style and like to fool around in a apocalyptic surrounding - this could be for you!

- Idea: 8
- Gameplay: 5
- UI: 1
- Graphics: 7
- Maps: 8

The general idea for The Journey was interesting. It reminded me of old games where you had to deduce yourself what to do based on dialogue and such.

One caviat though... when the dialogue or plot here may be simple, the increasing amount of easily forgetable npc's makes the game hard to navigate. Forcing the player to write down everything because the game lacks tools to do so.

The only thing that helps is the ugly, default chat log.

Simple system of auto notes about characters or locations would fix that. Or perhaps a journal, like the one from Planescape: Torment (old RPG game) with entries about recent doings of the character.
Not only the game would be more comfortable to play but reading it would help with immersion and lore.