Reviews - felixbr

After quitting version 1.3 for good due to broken gameplay, I was really reluctant about tried the Director's Cut. Well, I finally played it to the end, with LB's Compilation and a few other adjustments, and I'm glad I did. The game is much, much better now, and some of the worst problems of the previous version are solved.

First of all, there is more content and life now. The maps aren't as empty, and there are more side quest to make use of the great environments they created. Second, and even more essential, there are guides now to carry you around the map. The main plot still has a lot of "cross three maps to say hi to somebody", but now you can spend a bit of coin and do it in a pinch. It's way easier to go back to hubs, traders and technicians. It might feel a bit "cheap" to always go to Shakarov to sell artifacts or to Fox to upgrades, but it's better than having a near-unplayable game, for sure.

Finally, cars are much better to drive. You won't be afraid of turn around the corner, at least. This comes at the cost of truck space: a car for four people cannot carry you and more than 80 kg, it seems. I got the mod that increases truck storage and reduces fuel consumption to avoid getting angry. Still had to do a lot of save scumming because cars still are made of paper and may explode when you hit dogs. I wish there was an addon changing all three variables at once.

About the plot, a lot of hate on the original was because of the fan-fic stuff and Illuminati and whatever. The new version fixes it and - thank God! - removes most of the cutscenes. It's still a confusing plot and a lot of things that you have to do doesn't make sense, but it's not like SoC was perfect either.

So, it's much better than before, but it's actually good? Well, I still had a lot of issues. Crashes were quite frequent (using DX11). Some plotlines break if you merely sneeze outside of the script. The gunplay was unsactisfatory: they apparently resurrected the dreaded hit probabilities disguised as "armor piercing", and more than one of my perfect headshots went to ghost town. The knife was also terrible, almost useless besides breaking boxes. And, although I like the skills system, I still experienced significant dispersion with Sharpshooter maximized and a assault rifles fully upgraded for accuracy. Grenade launchers were also useless. In short, a far cry from the gunplay of the more polished, CoP-based mods.

I also think that every time they tried to be "smart" and pull some setpieces, they failed. The escape from Monolith base in Dark Valley, the blowouts that kill you of hunger, the enemies that spawn at your side and kill you immediately, and so many other scripted moments... It seems that the developers wanted really hard that you play THEIR game, not yours. The removal of Developer Mode symbolizes it: you cannot spawn an item of a broken quest, or God Mode your way out of a hard spot. Stalker IS a broken game and the Mod Community is all about choice.

After bashing a bit, my conclusion is that I strongly recommend to play the game once, following closely the main plot. Don't try too hard: play with the Wiki by your side and save scumming all the time. It is now a very enjoyable experience in the best Zone we can have. For roaming around and freeplaying, however, stick with the more enjoyable gameplay of Anomaly or the like.

It's a nice mod with a very well-written story. It's excellent for a one-man job. It better succeeds with its new missions or when it makes old ones really distinct, such as Lab X8. Many are simply "go to place X talk to Y" (it would be unplayable without fast travel - looking at you, Lost Alpha!), other are the same old ones, those that play exactly the same every time. Unfortunately, the ending was completely bugged for me, and I had to cheat several times to advance past the coded door at the Sarcophagus. A pity, because that last section was one of the most interesting of the game. Gameplay is basically Call of Misery, but way less miserable (no issues with money here). It has some long-time issues of Call of Chernobyl, for instance I searched dozens of stashes and found only three basic toolkits, nothing more advanced. I would recommend to play once following the story, and leave freeplay for other mods such as Anomaly.

There is a reason why this is the single most popular mod in Moddb: it's the best thing that happened to Stalker so far. It gets the best of two worlds: the "complete" zone that Call of Chernobyl brought to us, and the complexity of Misery. Anomaly owns a lot to them, but surpasses both: vanilla CoC is too shallow for experienced players, and Misery just tries too hard to be miserable.

The biggest asset of Anomaly, compared to all other mods I've played (and I played thousands of Stalker hours) is simple: choice. Out-of-the-box, the mod allows you to play the way you wish. Want to just freeplay for a while on a weekday night? Choose forgiving settings of progression and gameplay and have fun. But now, want to spend a weekend trying to survive and perhaps have a good jacket and a 70's rifle by Sunday night? Crank up the difficulty and have fun (or not). Moreover, tweak the settings as you wish. For instance, I like to play as Survivalist, but with Scavenger values for quest rewards, artifact spawning and finding stashes, to reward exploration and make quest worth the trouble.

Another pleasant surprise for me was that Story Mode was actually worthwhile (besides the random "go to the other side of the map to talk with the trader" stuff - just forget it, there isn't payoff at the end). But the three main story lines were well written and not far from the vanilla games in quality (well, they were never thaaat good). The best thing of the story is that it gives you things to do on several locations that otherwise are relatively uninteresting for freeplay. Not that I would play it that often: I'm really sick of turning off the Miracle Machine and Brain Scorcher for the 1000 time. But try to finish them at least once, as a bonus you unlock some new factions for freeplay.

Now, there are some issues, naturally. The item bloating is scaring at first, but there is an inventory tab system that helps you to organize your stuff (I discovered it just recently and it changed my life). Cooking is really unbalanced and hardly worth the trouble. And then there is the nemesis of most players, the extremely over-complicated repair and crafting system. It took me ages to get into it, and even now I still don't bother with some parts of it. However, choice here is great: you can just adjust the economy and completely ignore crafting and weapon/armor parts. Sell everything and stay just with repair kits. I suggest you to do this in the first playthroughs, otherwise you could be overwhelmed. But give it a try after a time: the first time you build a neat rifle from scrap is quite rewarding.

I also enjoy the level of customization, because I've spent hours tweaking files of other mods to remove item use animations, annoying dying and breathing sounds and so on. Here you can turn them off directly in the menu. Even the Debug menu is organized and easy to use (yeah, just spawn a box at Clear Sky base). Naturally, there is still plenty of customization possible through addons. Stability and performance is great, I had 0 crashes after hundreds of hours, and can make the game looks pretty even in a gaming laptop.

Thus, I cannot recommend enough this mod. A while ago I thought CoC was the definitive Stalker experience, but Anomaly is much more. Better than this, just if one day somebody merges the polished and enticing gameplay of Anomaly with the detailed and sprawling maps of Lost Alpha (putting more life on them, naturally). This may not happen before the Apocalypse, but until there I hope Anomaly keeps being developed and improved.

STALKER: The Pig Hunting and Cooking Simulator

This massive effort will make S.T.A.L.K.E.R. be playable forever. The core idea, of just having a huge open world with all maps available from the three games and cut content, is already enough to provide countless hours of gaming. Sure, this open world should be filled, and the community is providing plenty of content, in the shape of addons to change game mechanics to whatever you like, and others that provide "things to do" during your aimless roaming through the zone. The addition of the story mode in the last version already provides a good reason to explore the maps without need for addons, even if this small story itself is kind of crude and not exactly fits the canon of the previous games.

Due to the large scope of the mod, the constant release of patches and high amount of addons, it is natural that you will find a lot of bugs and strange things. Don't the bothered by this and just remove problematic addons or look for some that tweak the game to suit better your play style. The mod is still in full development and hopefully soon we will have a stable core mod and more complex addons could arise (e.g. telling new stories or having more complex missions added to the open play).

As it is now, the mod is already a great achievement, and it will just improve with time.