Broken Medal - Completed
Review:
~The first 3 titles of the review are my reasons for breaking stars and the reason for getting a broken medal. After that, I explain why I enjoyed the game. But I couldn't give a high star when there were so many bugs. If there were no bugs and design problems in the game, it would even be a 5 star game. Normally, games with both bugs and design problems, even for this game, would get half a star maximum 1 star. Nevertheless, since the ‘core’ gameplay, the feeling of being a stalker is a unique experience, I gave the game the highest medal rating I could give it. (Check profile for medal system)
~Oldschool
First of all, my review may annoy some stalker fans. As someone who played stalker for the first time, the fact that a game released in 2024 is ‘oldschool’ like the first game released in 2007 did not appeal to me. It feels like the same mechanics of old games with better graphics.
The game does not respects your time at all, walking for hours, dealing with drudgery, the location of the mission is incorrect and searching for the location of the mission for hours, guessing the location of NPCs in non-explanatory missions, even when I wanted to enter a base, I was looking for the door there for hours, like a joke. You also need to constantly take manual saves in the game, f5/f8 style. At one point, this was also a bug for me. I was going crazy because the game's automatic save is extremely bad. At one point, when the mission ended, new one is not started and the game pretended to be in constant conflict and prevented me from saving, we will talk about this in the bug section.
~Production phase problems and bugs etc.
The game is full of bugs and glitches this is obvious. More bugs have happened to me in this game than in all the games I've played. T-pose, NPCs passing through the door, artificial intelligence that shuts down, these are not a problem. I have never experienced input lag and ping in a singeplayer game in my life. In the game-breaking bugs, my main mission appeared to be completed but did not start the new mission. I installed a mod and started the main missions by typing a command from the console. I really spent serious effort to finish the game, optimisation mods, mods to enter console commands, crash problems, etc. The only thing I didn't rewrite the game with a command. In the last mission of the game, an NPC that needed to teleport was not getting to that location. I solved it by speeding up the game speed so that it suddenly jumped there.
~Design problems
Now we come to the most important part. Bugs and glitches in the game can be fixed, but there is a big problem. There are concepts like energy, weight, money cycles. All of them are connected to open world exploration. The problem here is the open world itself. While all the missions of the game progress linearly, there is an empty open world in the middle. It's just a blank open world: There are absurd anomalies; they slow you down and damage you, waste of time, random mobs can attack, waste of resources and time, creatures with no loot attacks, wastes time (at least we could drop and sell things like skin, teeth etc), and we walk, we walk for hours. I played the game for 60 hours, I must have walked for 10 hours, except for the effort to find my way, if we add it, half of the game I already searched for quests, stash etc.
To summarise, we have an open world, there are side and main missions, stashes and regions. Stash and regions are the exploration part and the part that makes the open world exist. If you run straight to the mission, you can advance the game without losing time and resources. But if you say lets go see some regions, exploring locations and explore loot. You're at a loss. This is the design problem. You have marked the stash and set off, the already long walking session gets even longer because the energy keeps running out. After arriving, you fought with creatures or soldiers, weapons and armour were damaged. You spent health, energy drink etc. The loot that comes out 90% of the time does not cover this. Sometimes you can find good armour and weapons. But I was stubborn in the game and opened almost all the stashes and only 3 or 5 of them have this items. There are locked ones in the open world and you will find a key in the open world, constant labour. Anyway, we did our loot, this time ‘weight’ came into play. When we carry items we walk slower. For this reason, we want to go and sell what we have on us. If we don't sell, the character almost can't walk, even when it stops full, it fills up. When we go to sell, we go heavily. We sell and become lighter. When we sell, we incur a loss because the money we receive goes completely to repair, we go to the next loot lightly and become heavy again. In other words, when you make exploration difficult with negative effects such as weight and repair and give a shitty loot, that exploration is useless. When you go to the place already marked on the map, you will most likely not find the stash. Most of the time, even if you stand right on top of it, there are loots that look like they are under you. Should we go to the bottom of the ground? Or they are at a ridiculous height etc. There is another very funny thing, even if you do not explore any stash and region in the game, the game throws loot al lot on you in the main mission. I mean, the environment etc. looks nice, but I would enjoy it more if it was linear, not open world, instead of torturing weight energy and money to get the stalker feeling.
The other type of loot is artifact hunting, these are also random anomalies that come across by chance, if you are going to look for them without looking on the internet, you have to come across them. Just like stash keys and passwords. Even deluxe and ultimate rewards come with discovery. I have no problem with exploration, but as I said, energy weight and money make exploration impossible. I have to throw away the loot I bought so that it doesn't weigh me down.
There is also the difficulty, the game is extremely difficult on standard difficulty, the artificial intelligence is unbalanced (it shoots through the wall or something), stealth is a joke, the creatures are unnecessarily high alive, it takes hours to search for something, there is input lag and delayed ping value despite being a singeplayer game, (start an upload etc. in the back, you will feel it), the enemy moves fast and shoots by running, on the contrary, our weapons bounce incredibly and you can't even put the cursor on the enemy because of the mouse delay, I solved it by playing with the gamepad. There is also a bomb, I was playing the game in ukrainian language, the word ‘granadoo’ still enters my caverns. Every second you get a bomb from an incomprehensible place.
There's a curse called emission. The world sometimes turns red with menstruation (!). Meanwhile, you have to wait in the bunker. Once I came across while chasing stash and I couldn't catch up in any way because the shelter was far away. I had to save/load. I left my work, set the game back 10 minutes, walked 5 minutes and went to the shelter. I waited there for 5 minutes and hung out on instagram. Then I walked 10 minutes back to the loot place. So the game took me 30 minutes on the shit road. Is this atmospheric? Anyway, the game gives you plenty of breaks. When your game crash, you have a break while rebooting and waiting for the shadows loading, the game sometimes swells and gets 10 fps, then a break while restarting, a break when the emission comes, a break while waiting until the npc decides to give my mission. Half of the 60 hours were empty.
~So what did I like?
Being a stalker in the game is a unique and very enjoyable experience. We can make choices and act as we want, attack whoever we want, find and arrange weapons, loot, and the game has my favourite mission design. You take a mission, go through it according to your own choices, get to a certain point and do the job. But they all work unbalanced. So I balanced it with mods.
~Dialogues and endings
This is a neutral section. While I liked the dialogues, I didn't like the endings, including the final endings of the game. The characters are also very little memorable, I can't say that they are not memorable at all, but I couldn't connect with the new additions except for the characters in the previous games. I didn't play the previous games anyway.
~ Mods
Console command entry mode was a mandatory mode for me to finish the game since my main missions did not start. Apart from that, at the 30th hour of the game, I got overwhelmed and completely removed the weight and made the energy a little more balanced. In this way, I was able to play until the 60th hour. Also, the creatures in the game have incredibly ridiculous health values, but I didn't touch it because there was no weight anyway, I have unlimited inventory and I can carry as many resources as I want. BUT IT WAS HARD. Although I had much, much more health than I should have, I sweated to death. I also opened god mode to confirm my stash theory. (I said 90% of it was unnecessary) If you go to the first zone of the game from the main quest, you move to the new zone in 1-2 hours. After chasing stashes for 15 hours in the first zone, I decided not to buy stashes anymore. Since I don't go to them, I thought I would take a look at the remaining stashes while I had the cheat. (Despite the cheat, I found some of them difficult). 90 of them were life and vodka. Armour and weapons from the rest. Which you already go and get them on the road, there is no discovery. The stashes you come across on the way to the mission. So if I were me now, I would neither wander around the open world nor chase stashes. Main mission, side mission, roadside stashes are enough. In the last part of the game, they already give more health and ammo than the sum of the stashes in a single room.
~ Conclusion
If the game didn't have design flaws and bugs, the review would probably be one paragraph long. Loot and combat are extremely enjoyable on paper. Being a stalker is a unique experience. But even if I put aside the bugs in the game, the main design is very bad. Oldschool design was also a tiring and often headache-inducing experience. I wish I had only 15 hours of main story rush instead of 60 hours, because some of the main missions worked as they should and worked well. Then I was seriously enjoying it. But these are only 5 hours of the game.
Check profile for medal system.
