Reviews - SebastianAg.

Out of the three Oblivion Lost projects (This one, The OBLIVION LOST REMAKE and LOST ALPHA) I can definitely say this is the weakest and least "Oblivion lost-y" one of the bunch. Not by a long shot, but god damn it, it ground my gears.

So first, positives:

1. Visually it does look interesting, and to be entirely honest what appeared to be but a reskin of the original unfolded into an interesting bouquet of many new and unique stuff!
For example: 1. Feature of being able to recruit stalkers, which will come incredibly handy in later game battles or just general mob cleanup. Hell if you are loaded, outright selling it to the lot is absolutely possible.
2. Vendors fix your gear and weapons!
3. Tons of cool and downright broken artifacts that really help out in certain places. You can even create them!
4. Many unique/new guns to play around with.
5. Weapons degrade really slowly.
6. MP9/MP5/BIZON are downright the Best side arms to have, as they fit in the pistol slot!

The negatives (are muuch more prominent though.)

1.Bugs: Mother of christ, I had a:
Sprint bar bug
Crosshair bug
Objective marker bug
A small map bug at the entryway of the wild territory
Character Marker bug in the CNPP
Bug regarding NPCs who LITERALLY respawned in front of my eyes, upon reloading a save or just to spite me.
Every time I re entered locations enemies would repopulate them.
I don't think I have played such a buggy total conversion mod of stalker and I've played upwards of dozens of them!
Some quest artifacts LITERALLY never spawned.
I had a quest for a pseudodog tail, I looted upwards of 25+ of them and none gave me what I wanted.
Some item retrieval quests were literally 6 maps away from their designated marker, and I got them by sheer dumb luck.

2.New weapons are ONLY held by the player/are almost always one of a kind (I found a Tec9, an MP9, a bizon, p90, saiga once and never after) all of which are never seen in the hands of enemies.

3.The frequent respawning of enemies means you will be mobbed and unfairly surrounded multiple times.

4.The prices are incredibly unfair. 20% repairs, or new gear might cost upwards of 20000 thousand rubbles.

5.The story is barely any different from the Vanilla. And the new locations barely give you any incentive to visit them. There is almost nothing here from the old design documents.

6.Framerate chugs for some reason in some places.

7.For some reason when I shoot, my mouse jitters from time to time.

8.The scopes SWAY all over the place making precision shooting akin to balancing a plate on your genitals.

9.There is literally an army of mutants AND an infinite controller effect inside the sarcofagus, meaning the screen will jitter and shake like a squirrel with seizures all the time you blast your way to the wish granter.

10. All in all, I'd only recommend this to the veterans of Jank with high tolerance for said Jank.

11.Many later enemies are specifically spawned around corners and will leave you staring at a game over screen in frustration many, many times.

Verdict?

I'd say it could use MUUCH more time in the oven and polish. All in all this is a 6. I find it really sad that both this mod and OLR (Oblivion lost remake) have some REALLY good features, begging to be free and used more but are completely bogged down by some nonsensical design decisions and bad coding. You can definitely find enjoyment here, but it will come at a price of a lot of frustration.

Out of them all, I think Lost Alpha is the best experience, not perfect but it definitely seems like the most cohesive, unique and fleshed out experience.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk :D Now move along.
Seb.

5/10 A perfect example of Modder's Megalomania.

I acknowledge and bow to the creators for their attempt at transforming Stalker into something new. A zombie apocalypse with models from l4D and NMRIH mixed with present day Russian provinces.

However, it falls victim of a needlessly large scale which leaves it as a half baked, skin deep experience in every sense of the word.

There are barely any survivors, and even smaller amounts of human enemies (Which get completely phased out in the latter half of the story). This almost completely drains the value of most firearms as Stalker's shoot a zombie once to down, pull out a knife to finish off can be done with the weakest Makarov (The ammo of which is well in excess). The deficit of traders or regular people means that the 6 tons of worthless fecal mater you call loot and haul throughout your way will barely see any use at the "money" the characters have is miniscule.

The world is basically a one large path with a single entrance and a single exit, constraining the environment and the story.

The story while somewhat interesting, basically devolves into a chain of fetch quests, with only a few outliers.

There is a reason why most screenshots are in the open field as you have more chance of making out wrinkles inside a bear's rectum than whatever is going on in the interiors. It is as if light is an alien concept for them.

The game wastes maybe an hour trying to teach the player survival yet utilizes almost none of it in the overworld porper, with most of it being rendered completely obsolete especially when the linear world kills the need to leave stashes behind, and these things are quite heavy.

You can get a car in the game that can barely haul 50!!! killograms which (Very minor spoilers, has to be left behind in the last 2/3s of the game).

In the end, I genuinely see the trappings of a fun game, but it is stretched too thin to be really enjoyable

I only recommend you playing this if you have a taste for Total conversions, Stalker AND HARD SlavJank. If these three are for you then go for it, if not, then there are dozens of times better, more polished experiences this franchise can give you.

I find it quite curious that the positive reviews only shower the mod with praise, yet most do not provide any sort of facts to back themselves up. Rarely have I ever disagreed with the ratings of a mod this strongly.

A cute choice of words?
This game is a representation of one's hangover. At first the drink that causes it is curious, new, intriguing. Later sadly, it devolves into a headache of a slog, which you just want to get over with. All in all this is worth only 5 of John's whines out of 16.

Prepare to blast th- oh my mistake, prepare to get blasted through this...mess, where recoil is nonexistent, yet your hands sway in the wind like branches of a weeping willow. Where enemies are john wicks that swarm your position with reckless abandon, snap at your location and shoot you through thick blanket of smoke. A place where your weapons are mostly reduced to confetti spewing (though quite diverse and well modeled) sticks of metal with sight pictures only a mother could love. You will be stuck in well designed environments, with bare illumination, riddled with invisible walls, pixel-small key items and inexistent directions.
The "How the **** was I supposed to figure this out?" and "How the **** am I supposed to fight on two fronts, with dozens of respawning enemies and two helicopters?" were the two questions that were engraved in my consciousness.

Admittedly, the game does delve into a less explored theme of portal storms, with us taking control of a dollar store Gordon Freeman. It packs an interesting twist at the end however. The aesthetics are quite pleasing to look at. You navigate through urban scapes, dark sewers and abandoned metros, culminating with forest warfare. The problem comes from the fact that the player will most likely overlook that one key item he needs to progress, which by itself if placed like a needle in a haystack. The enemies are inhumanly tanky, come in huge amounts and shoot from incredible ranges. The helicopters that accompany certain hostiles take upwards of 6 rockets on NORMAL to bite the dust, while the eternally respawning units pummel at you.

The Voice acting is decent and gets the job mostly done. However, the companion that sticks with you is very poorly written, coming off as a whiny weakling and more of a weight for the blank slate of a protagonist to drag on their back.

The story is meh. Has some interesting points but is nothing impressive.

A cute choice of words now in 2020? This is a third person fantasy shooter (?) about some unnamed woman flinging only 2 forms of magic at ice-fire bear monsters in strange aztek-esque temples. Blasting through this little time waster is worth every 8 fireballs out of 16.
Curiously, the game more seems like a proof of concept, a tech demo of sorts. It lacks both depth and story, despite quite a substantial size of the team that designed it. However, the aesthetics are pretty nice and retain their charm throughout the small <1 hour campaign.

The magic, the enemy variety and the controls, the linear map layout, despite their interesting looks is more bare bones than skeletons in someone's backyard. The game holds off on every bit of information it can, only letting us grasp 4 or so bits of text on the screen. I forgot, the very text is based around controllers in spite of the game not acknowledging XBOX one input (my hint, press space when close to an object).

The game is almost laughably easy, with turret enemies being barely an inconvenience, while the melee based enemies deal massive damage, but are slower than a paraplegic grandma.

This puzzles me! Everything from the looks down to the ideas and the size of the team just reeks of a potential that failed to bloom. Were they over ambitious? Or is this just some random mishmash of canceled projects?
If anyone knows the story behind its development, please do not hold off on the details.

All in all, I recommend this piece. Just look at it as a Demo that never furthered into something bigger.

Thanks coming this far
yours
Sebastian Stag Agner

I can't add anything that hasn't been said already.
I would give it a 7, but rather spare another point as a sort of "Good job" bonus

5 words? Space Bioshock: Source on crack.
Here, pacing goes faster than Usain Bolt, enemies attack in groups of half a dozen, like crazed wolves and ravens hit you with psyche beams.
This is Bioshock in space, hyper condensed, wild and difficult, with shoddy voice acting, acoloholic level booze consumption and interesting aesthetics.But the shotgun...now that piece makes it worth Every. Damn. Second.
Give it a whirl, its kinda worth it
and then give a try to the sequel, the "Lunar descent."

Worth every 12 bottles of brandy, out of 19

Tell me, what's the actual chance of you reading this, or giving a **** about it? Yeah, right?

I wanted to love this mod, to give it a higher rating, but unfortunately, its just a plain case of "Style over substance."

The aesthetic is the only impressive aspect of it. The horror quickly wears out due to its repetitiveness, the map design, though somewhat diverse, is almost always constricted to tight corridors and vents. The lack of ammunition means that you'll have to do the god awful source melee combat (or i guess comBAD amirite?)

The problem i have with this mod centers around its inferiority when compared with the Cry of fear. Or to be better put, when the latter learned from mistakes made in "afraid of monsters" the makes of Grey did not. CoF offered a cohesive story, a clear goal, verity of gameplay and map design. It also had a bunch of new features that, despite their shortcomings, truly made it into a standalone game.

Grey feels well designed, but cheap, detail-greedy, with boring combat that doesn't try to diversify itself. Hell even inclusion of some of its optional challenges into the base game could have given the player some welcome variety.

Another thing that baffles me is the amount of 10 ratings, that completely ignore any explanations.

All in all, if you want a short, atmospheric horror, you can try this. However, please, do not expect much of it. Oh yeah, another headsup. The level design in normal mode and hard, as well as their endings and enemies are different. This change is most prominent in the first couple of levels, where the hard mode seemingly presents completely different maps. But it seems that the devs were lazy to overhaul them all, with the later levels mimicking the normal mode almost to the T.

A cute choice of words? You're seeing the premise of Taken mixed with the theme of half life. This all coming with a twist of Liam Neeson's substitute having what can one assume a debilitating lung disease, which denies him ability to sprint. The combat's more challenging and weighty, with added mix of realism centering around the firearms. The level design is its strongest side, offering a short, yet diverse roster. Sadly, the over reliance on platforming that requires nigh pixel-perfect accuracy and one being unaware 50% of the time of what to do, drags the whole thing down. The featured voice acting gets the job done, the music is as generic as it can get, but also gets the job done. All in all, this is worth every 5 walther PPk shots to the combine out of 7. So uh, 7.5 out of 10.

In the less cute choice of words.

The story. Your playing as another forgettable protagonist, who gets his wife (I think her name was Anna?) taken by the Metro Police, forcing you to track them down to an abandoned facility. Its as bog standard as it gets, yet does carry the story...thankfully. I do like the mod nailing to the player that the MC is just an average man and not a crowbar wielding Demi-god, who's also under the favor of a space-time bending deity. This gives combat more weight and forces one to approach battles more cautiously.

Right off the bat you can notice the amount of care and attention to every detail in the environment. The Abandoned factory looks like an derelict facility, the combine structures are believably combine and so on. However I have to agree with others that the city, what with its low structures and tight streets more resembles Ravenholm instead of City 17.

The weapons? There's 4 of them, a pistol that resembles a Walther Ppk, an mp7, crowbar and grenades. The latter 3 sport a welcome, slight redesign and the pistol's model looks amazing. As it befits modern shooters, you can aim down sights.

An interesting aspect comes in form of Hud's absence (which does great to immerse a person into world) and it means that the player must check the magazine manually. The character will call out the state of the magazine, giving off a vague indication of their arsenal. Reloading the weapon does drop the entire thing, which forces one to space their shots carefully. The problem is that the character only says 3 lines, each for Full, half, almost empty, which may not be too bad for a small demo, but is grounds for going stale in a full-scale mod.

Your health is also vaguely indicated by the screen and the sounds of heartbeats. It would be interesting to add some manual way of checking one's state (maybe the player looks at his wrist to examine the damage taken and such).

Mind you, the game only has an autosave feature. The concept is good on paper but half of the game is based on nigh-unfair platforming, which when coupled with lack of sprint is a fertile ground for a lot of rage. Apart from that the autosaves are placed in such a way that some combat sections are forced to be redone because of a simple slip up. Also, showering a player with hostiles while they're locked in a battle with unforgiving platforms and little to no cover is not the best gameplay choice.

The dialog also needs some work. I refuse to take the "This is not their native tongue" card. hell the legendary Skyrim mod, Enderal is made entirely by a team of Germans, yet the dialogue in game is amazing. This simply means that the devs should put more emphasis and attention to character interactions.

To sum up, the mod has neat ideas, great visuals, meaty combat, optimal voice acting, which are dragged down by the lack of sprint, frequent absence of direction, slightly poorly placed checkpoints and infuriating platforming.

Thank you for coming this far.
Sebastian Stag Agner

Before i start, i'll say...
Since the day i laid my hands on games, i had a masochistic tendency to always start with the highest difficulty possible (apart from few exceptions), which taught me to consider difficulty as an important criteria when making a good game.
For a mod that is this famous and praised...i found its difficulty nothing short of an insult, which mentally exhausted me since the first 3 minutes of which i played it.
Don't get me wrong, i saw a lot of love, work and passion put into it, the graphics, the new models of monsters, clothes, new weapons and even classes!
But, i just find the hardness of everything heartbreaking, i'm not talking about artifacts (hunt of which i lost all wish for), i'm talking about the loot system. I don't know what were the developers thinking, when decided to go from abundance of loot and ammo, to absolute nonexistence of said loot and ammo, you call this balance? Realism? Immersion? Every stalker is battle ready and have everything they need at hand for survival at ALL TIMES, especially ones in the wild, i find it ironic that when i kill a stalker (who has just reloaded his weapon), to find his inventory empty of ammo and his gun magically unloaded before me. And zombies, i have always shot those goons in the head, so the change didn't really affect them for me, but loot...They have nothing...battle ready stalkers who turned on a whim (and were not robbed and thrown naked into the zone) 95% of the time have their inventory completely deserted and their weapons empty.
Look, as a "certain developer" might not get it, i don't ask for things to be like in CoP, i want to say, you didn't achieve balance, you just moved from one far side, to the other. And what's with the enemy placements? A pack of blind dogs spawning a kilometer away, yet magically always knowing where i am (got saved by random stalkers who took them out on 10th try). And jupiter...i was supposed to go against 6 poltergeists (that have a deadly psy field), a burrer, 4 bloodsuckers and god knows how many zombies AT. THE. SAME. TIME? with what? A half-broken piece of junk with barely enough ammo, repair of which costs more than i have accumulated through that very playthrough? The side quests have lost their purpose for me, because it is simply not worth it, it doesn't pay off. How am i supposed to complete the game if on a spot of a main mission i meet an obstacle that is mind-numbingly difficult to overcome and further i go, the more insane they become. I wanted to love this mod, respect and love it, but in the end all i did was go on a 6 hour journey with no accomplishment in the end. This mod left me more mentally exhausted than ">Observer_" a polish game me and many others named "The father of all seasures." If i were to judge, i would misery 5/10,
It looks good
it feels good
It is complex and well layered
But it's unrealistic balancing and enemy placement breaks the game and kills all the fun CoP provided, just giving the mod artificial (the worst kind of) difficulty, which doesn't border on insanity (Like Dark souls (a game i despise), Super Meatboy,etc), it exceeds it.

I gotta say i love this mod.

Great story
Nice world re-designs.
INteresting characters.
Cool weapons and artifacts.
Hours upon hours of gameplay of story and sidequests you can sink into.
And an inhumanly good plot-twist (which broke my heart cause i came up on it all by myself) and wrap up. I have to say, even though the whole time travel thing just turned me off, i am inhumanly happy that it all was a ******-up imaginary memory, of the protagonist who is a clone of a currently deceased stalker.

Because of crashes and frustratingly bad translation (at least half of which is copied from Google translate) i give this piece a 9/10. An experience that is fresh, original and interesting from start to finish.

I hope i will see this team working on a project of their own.

I wish you all the luck in the world.

Sebastian
Stag
Agner

P.s if you actually want someone to translate the texts, contact me. I am fluent at both russian and english.