Reviews - Darkh4

Simply amazing! This is the Zone as it was meant to be. Once finished, this will be the definitive Stalker experience.

I made an account here just to review and follow this mod. I love it, it brings back the survival horror atmosphere that's been missing from the Stalker series since Shadow of Chernobyl.

Pros:
- The new re-touched textures for structures and NPCs are great. They look much more worn in and exposed to the elements.
- The gun play is so much better than vanilla. The guns have heft and weight. Firing a shotgun actually feels like firing a shotgun, and being sent reeling by a bullet to the shoulder is surprisingly immersive.
- The music really adds to the mood. It's not quite as good as Mooze's stuff from SoC, but it's much better than vanilla.
- The difficulty makes every little success feel like a major triumph. You have to work to survive, just as it should be. Those who are complaining about it being too difficult just don't know how to survive in the Zone.

Cons:
-The scorched earth look. It's kind of neat at first, but it gets a bit bland and boring after a while, and it's not particularly realistic. I get that it is meant to set a mood, but Stalker is not Fallout, and the Zone was not hit by a nuclear bomb. If the plants were all dead, then the ecosystem would be destroyed, and we shouldn't be hearing frogs, birds, and insects. And why do all the plants look like they were killed just a few months ago? Besides, part of what makes the the Zone eerie is that nature hasn't been hurt by the disaster, only man.
After a few hours I overwrote the nature textures with AN3 Lite.

-Very few NPCs use the new 7.62 weapons, which makes finding ammo for them very rare, and purchasing ammo is not cost effective. Despite all the new weapons, I've found that I've still fallen back on my old vanilla standby, the AN-94, just because it's the best weapon that I can still scavenge ammo for. What's the point of new weapons if using them doesn't make any sense from a survival standpoint?