Reviews - AlsGaming

The start was amazing, well written, interesting but as soon as you leave that point into the wasteland. It becomes buggy, incoherent and a non-stop grind of fighting and walking. The mod is geared mostly to combat and I felt my int/charisma character was useless. The combat was unbalanced, I ran out of ammo and medicine so easily without means to recuperate them. A big let down after the long wait, the map is large but empty of content and is simply for you to walk between places. It's extremely easy to sequence break NPCs, alternate options and paths are obscurely hidden.

I don't know what they did in the several years building up to this release, I understand it's two people who obviously have other matters in their life to attend to. But after you leave the vault, it feels like everything was thrown together in a few months. That includes the map which is poorly navmeshed, the combat encounters which are just hordes of enemies which makes for artificial difficulty and poor performance and the storyline which is disjointed and unconvincing. Your character has little agency or motivation, especially for the scientist path. The ending was beyond disappointing, I felt the rest of the story mattered little to what it built up to and feels like a cop-out and is unimaginative. I very much wanted to love this mod, but one playthrough took 7 hours and it was a struggle the whole time.

There was a lot of fun parts, but it gets dragged down by aforementioned flaws.

Currently the best STALKER experience.

Engine optimisations, great list of available mod addons, great gameplay, great variety of maps and there's a committed group of people constantly improving it.

It gets the hardcore feeling so right without ruining the vanilla gameplay.