Reviews - Bizona

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS !!!!!!!!

Ok, so I finished the game today, 27.11.2015. I played the Overhaul 3.2.5. version. Naturally I was very excited for this mod, it had such great reviews and STALKER is my favorite series ever. I was left disappointed. I am not the type of guy to obsess over graphical changes, animations and models etc. I wanted to play Priboi Story because it promised a new and exciting storyline (or so it said) In my opinion the story is terrible ! My arguments - If you don't download the walkthrough and play by it you will almost certainly end-up sequence breaking the story, finding documents that you're supposed to find later and clearing ares that you should also do later and since the respawn rate is low the remain empty. The so-called story basically gets backtracking until your fingers bleed from pushing the arrow keys, because you cleared the area and there's nothing to do anymore. The story is one big fetch quest to find different documents in different areas back and forth. I never got attached to Lt. Priboi, I don't give a **** about him, he's as empty and bland as a character that you can imagine (not that the characters in the other games are super likeable, but they gave you enough so you could imagine the rest on your own, they had PERSONALITY). And the story in the documents is just lazy, some zombie mumbo-jumbo, not interesting. Then there's the things from the lore. You kill Strelok in a raid on the Freedom base. That's it. The game doesn't even indicate that you did it in some way, it doesn't show up on the PDA, it's NOT EVEN QUEST-RELATED. He dies in the raid like common bandit, maybe not even by you. He is mentioned in the Encyclopedia and t and the vague info there suggest that he might actually be important to the story, but no, he's just there so you can take a ****** flash drive from his corpse, that's the fate of the most iconic character in the STALKER universe. As you can see I am deeply affected by this I think it is THE WORST solution possible for Strelok. Also the Monolith is in Garbage, but it's just an empty model, there's no interaction with it whatsoever. At the Sarcophagus there's like a ghost monolith or something and there'e no interaction with it either. One major things that I think the original failed to address properly was the monolith phenomena (lack of detailed explanation) and I thought the development had a great opportunity, but no they just moved the model and that's it. TOTAL ****. Also the final level (after sarcophagus) is the most anti-climactic ending that you can imagine, and if you're not careful or don't read the walkthrough you might even think that you are stuck or something, but you're not, the story is just ****. Last but not least the AI is bad, as others have said they shoot through bushes with pinpoint accuracy, often pile up on doorways and are unrealistic as a whole. The ending is just plain terrible, so lazy and cliche I won't even get into it. Other than that the game is stable, there aren't CTDs, a few new weapons which are ok, but everything else is about the same as the original game, It's not a total conversion, just there's a sleep mechanic and some cars, which are no integrated very well, because of bad spawning and mechanincs.

Rating out of 10

Story - 2 (Siderovich's story is also very poorly done)
Gameplay - 6 - because the mod promises something new but it's not there
Graphics - 8 I think it's better than the original but Priboi isn't meant to be a graphics mod
Effort - 9 - you can see that there's loads of effort put into this mod, but it doesn't deliver. Priboi Story's selling point is supposed to be its story, but that's probably it's weakest aspect. Extremely disappointed