Reviews - Melbux

Almost everything you wished in Far Cry 2 is here.

I'm shocked, that such quality of gameplay can be archived with game, which already had high quality of gameplay. Every solder is valuable, every decision is important... and whole this mod is standalone.

Pretty balanced "marrage" between Misery and CoC: not as artificially punishing as former and not as casual cakewalk as latter.

Generally here you have all what you could expect from that kindof mod: You got survival aspect with all meds, stimulants, cooking and other stuff to keep you fit & alive, without fancy visual effects of slowly decaying from hunger, radiation, poisoning etc. You have dynamic fights with human and non-human opponents in good looking, high-quality environment. You have various weapons with many kinds of ammo in diffrent condition, suit and armors, tools, junk and all of this can be disassebled and used to make upgrade for your gear or just sell away... and yes, it was already seen somewhere else, like the same set of bricks, which was used to make another construction, plus some annoying features like lack of guides (seriously, I also have another life to live) or making quests main source of cash, as trading is profitable only in few instances.

In total, very solid game, which in terms of difficulty is something between aforementioned Misery and CoC. If you never tried or like Misery-ich vibe you will like it, however if you already tried other mods of that kind like Dead Air or Last Day, then you would be quite bored and feel, like that meal just start to lose it taste.

I apreciate the work of Team Epic with making the best freeplay Stalker game so far, with can be customized by players to make their own adventure with custom difficulty, grafics, quests, mechanics and many others features and all of this can be played with any character from any major faction, including Monolith. But ironically, without moding that mod, you get plain, "clean" CoP, where after a while was nothing much to do with addition of generic quests, recreated story from SoC and achievements, what keeps you interested for a bit more. Hopefully, new version will bring more feature which fills the current routine ... and possibilities for new mods.

When classic became even better (and younger!).

Very good mod, what makes Bf2 much "younger" and simply better. Now diffrences between weapons and their effectiveness are more visible than in vanilla and whole gameplay receive huge overhaul. Only downside is self-regen health, which somehow spoils the immerse (I think if creators want that feature in game it could be solve in other way). I wish there could be maps for Co-op. Fully deserved "top 100" mod, I hope it'll get high place.

After few years from initial release I decided to write rewiev for second time, because dev team made a noticable progress in many aspects.

First of all, its less buggy. Yes, unfortunatelly some weird crashes happen from time to time but game work much better and its more stable than infamous versions 1.3x, which receive many negative notes due to it. It also receive more content, like CoP-like ability to upgrade weapon and equiping items, 2 slots for any weapons AND additional one for sidearm (which is kinda unique amongst the mods I know), possiblity to upgrade detectors and binoculars (thats worth extra mentioning), serious visual overhaul and many minor improvements of gameplay.

After playing it few times and also other popular mods I must say something about the Dezo's "blasphemy" of rewriting Stalker: all renowed mods are basing on CoC and/or Misery, so you may have different mechanics, content, difficulty and similar, but basicly you still have the same CoP/SoC. Playing the same stuff for x-time, when you know all routes, every corner, each anomaly field, story events which you already saw many times make you feel somehow disinterest and in result heavily bored after a while. Folks try to counter it by playing with more punishing settings to give the mod/game another spark of freshness. Lost Alpha is actually some kind of "new quality", since you have something completly different from mainstream Miser-ish clones: completly altered or reworked maps (some of them are class in themself, with no competitors), working wehicles, interesting story events, classical artifacts hunting (detectors help to find stuff, not "spawn" it), kind of RPG elements and few minors features.

People complain that the maps are empty (they aren't, but even if: do anyone expect a lot of loot in every hut, in Zone where bunch of stalkers rob every single piece of useble item?), game is buggy (unfortunatelly, but with every patch game is closer to expected state) non canonical story (it is, but it recreate the atmosphere from SoC), gfx isn't top-tier (it isn't open xray but still good one, especially after graphical overhaul), bad voiceovers, animations and chaotical narration (well, its somehow true, but word is Dezo's are fixing the stuff), ending is either too mawkish (it is a bit, but thats a level of Strelok with dragonfly scene) or involving conspiracy theory (seriously, whole Stalker series was standing on conspiracy theories).

Lost Aplha is worth a recommendation despite of many justified or not criticism. Dezowave made a great work and they didn't abbandon their work, but still are working on improving this, what they achieved so far. They had enough courage to get out of box and made some new, something truly refreshing.