Recent reviews by fiery

The final entry of the original STALKER trilogy, Call of Pripyat, is the most polished and coherent game of the three. Which is to be expected, considering that GSC Game World already had nearly a decade of experience with the X-Ray Engine at this point due to how long Shadow of Chernobyl's development cycle lasted. It's so polished, in fact, that I actually could play this on Master difficulty completely vanilla! No mods whatsoever, and the game ran mostly fine (unless I put on DirectX 11, which the game turns into a complete stutter-fest) with few major bugs, which is a huge step up in comparison to both Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky where I practically needed a mod pack to stabilize the game.

There's a ton of improvements and quality-of-life changes introduced in this game that make the experience so much better as a player. In terms of changes from the prior two entries:

- Multi-tiered bleeding is toned down drastically, and both bandages and medkits are frequently dropped by enemies, so you're never really on the verge of running out. This sounds like it'd make things too easy, but considering how fast you get shredded by bullets in the first place, this is a very welcome change to what Clear Sky had and makes fighting actually worth a damn.

- Weapon accuracy is much better. It's not "bullet goes where your crosshair is" perfect, but it's way more manageable and overall reasonable. I had countless deaths on the prior two entries due to the game arbitrarily deciding I wasn't going to hit anything, and while there were some instances of that in Call of Pripyat, they were very few and far between. The upgrade/repair system introduced in Clear Sky also is overhauled considerably and is much more incentivizing to partake in, since the cost for both is relatively low.

- The A-Life system has been noticeably expanded and works really well in this game. You frequently come across mutant hordes, other stalkers, bandits, or Freedom and Duty members when traveling across the map, and it does wonders in making this game feel more lively. It might not be as in-depth with enemy tactics like Clear Sky's faction war system, but, in my opinion, it doesn't really need to be.

- Sprinting can be recharged when walking (♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thank you). You can also get to a point where you can essentially sprint indefinitely if you pack lightweight enough, which is very welcome, even if the maps here aren't as big as the prior two games.

- Enemy grenade usage has been toned down considerably so that whatever the hell Clear Sky had for its enemy grenade mechanics doesn't happen here.

- Artifacts have a bit more purpose to them and are more fun to collect in this game thanks to the new points of interest feature on the PDA; generally speaking, any anomaly point of interest will have artifacts to collect in them, which helps give more incentive to searching for them rather than aimlessly wandering around.

There's plenty of other improvements under the hood, as mentioned prior with its relative stability compared to the past entries -- the game is overall much more fun to play due to all of this.

With that said, though: while this is most definitely the best game of the trilogy, I'd argue it's not the best STALKER "experience". A lot of that has to do with how the game is structured in comparison to the other two entries.

I kind of alluded to this prior, but the overall scale of the game world has been decreased pretty significantly. The environments in this game are restricted to three primary zones: Zaton, the Jupiter plant area (later known more generally as Yanov in STALKER 2), and Pripyat, with the latter being the only returning environment from both Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky, and is only really seen in the last hour or two of the story. While this allows for much more focused and refined gameplay with a lot less running around, this change also has the effect of making the game world feel...a lot more cramped in comparison. One of the things I liked about Shadow of Chernobyl was the environmental detail and overall atmosphere, and while that is still present in Call of Pripyat, it's much more subdued in comparison since there just isn't much variety. I also feel like the improvements to A-Life ironically contribute to this "cramped" feeling -- it's nice to have the areas be as lively as they are with constant new things happening, but it gets to be a bit much when I'm hearing gunshots in the Skadovsk 24/7 from fighting outside or having dogs up my ass any time I exit a point of interest.

On top of that, the game is honestly pretty short. You can breeze through the main quest in five hours or less if you wanted to. A lot of this game's content comes from optional side objectives -- which isn't a bad thing, necessarily, but I feel like it relies a bit too heavily on it to pad out the game's length. I will say, though, the side missions are more thought-out than the fetch quests of Shadow of Chernobyl and have more staying power (i.e. there's actual in-game reasons to do them outside of "give me money"), which does help this aspect a bit at least slightly.

In terms of more minor things that I thought were questionable:

- The currency system in this game is way too easy to break. I never once felt like I was struggling to get by due to how generous this game is with its drops, and as such, the only usage I ever really had for money was to upgrade or repair my stuff. This isn't a huge problem, but it takes away a pretty sizable chunk of difficulty.

- As cheesy and frankly low quality as some of the CGI intros and endings were for both Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky, they had infinitely more personality than what this game has -- both sequences are literally just slideshows with a voiceover and hard-to-read text stapled onto them. It's not bad, but it isn't as engaging or interesting as the prior two entries.

Overall, though, this is a really fun game. I can see myself replaying this if I ever want a quick open-world single-player experience. And it doesn't even necessarily have to be single-player either -- there's a co-op multiplayer mod for this game that works surprisingly well, all things considered, and it's how I first experienced this game. Definitely give it a shot if you haven't already.

What else can I say?

It's not Clear Sky.

This was the first "true" STALKER game that I've played, considering STALKER 2 is in a state where...well, it's definitely in a state. I had a pretty weird order of playing the series, honestly; I started with STALKER 2 up until roughly the halfway point, and only then I started Shadow of Chernobyl, progressing onto Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat afterwards.

This is a franchise I've heard about for a long time, dating all the way back to when I first got Garry's Mod, funnily enough. I remember messing around with some addons in that game which ported weapons directly from Call of Pripyat (I assume, at least), and that's about as far as I ever went with the series. I've heard about it here and there in passing afterwards, but never felt like it would be something that interested me off the small bits and pieces that I gathered. Not to mention the game was already looking dated by 2011 standards, which is when I first heard about it. I only really decided to get into the franchise after STALKER 2's release, something one of my friends was very excited about. Needless to say, in that game's current state, it was a complete disaster for him. But that's a topic for a later review.

With all that said: I completed this game on Master difficulty, only downloading the Zone Reclamation Project at the guidance of that same friend. While that does mean that my review doesn't apply for the vanilla base game, what I played is more or less the same as vanilla, just with less bugs and crashing. And I can say one thing for sure:

It's not Clear Sky.

This game isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination -- in fact, there's quite a bit that I don't like here. Weapon accuracy is frankly atrocious, and only serves to be an annoyance. While I can understand the intent behind having your gun being less accurate to give a feeling of tension with gunfights, especially when your weapon's condition is low, it's taken to an extent here which makes shooting damn near anything incredibly frustrating at long distances. It's not fun to have your cursor aimed dead-on at someone's forehead only for the bullet to magically go 5 meters up and to the left; all it does is add unnecessary difficulty and make engagements less of a reward for a player and more of a "thank Christ I can move on from this section" moment.

Outside of that: the sprinting mechanic in this game sucks since you have to stand completely still to regain stamina, effectively stopping any progress you might be making in the game for no reason outside of padding the game's length; this is something Clear Sky also suffered from (albeit there were much bigger issues in that game). Artifacts just...exist, and there's not really a challenge to get them like in every subsequent entry in the series. The "non-linear story" and "multiple endings" that the game boasts about amount to nothing, as the story is most definitely primarily linear, and all endings outside of the canon ending (the "true ending") are laughably shallow in content and execution.

But all of those issues I can push past, and what I'm left with outside of those flaws is a surprisingly good and well-constructed open-world game.

I mentioned that the graphics looked dated by 2011 standards, but for its time, this game looks pretty good, especially when it comes to the environments. Even if side quests are mostly relegated to being fetch-quests or "kill these guys for a reward", I genuinely just have fun exploring the world in this game, so I don't really care most of the time. It also helps that a majority of those quests are in-between areas that you're going to be passing through anyways during the main story. The world feels really lively, helped massively by the A-Life system which a lot of the game was designed around. Although it's not nearly as noticeable in this game as it is in Clear Sky or Call of Pripyat, it still does a decent job at making things seem active, and showcasing that you aren't the center of everything that's happening.

The gameplay itself also isn't bad. Outside of the introductory fight (which flat-out sucks ass, there's not really anything good I can say about it) and the aforementioned weapon accuracy problems, the core gameplay loop does enough to keep you engaged in what's going on. It never felt truly unfair in difficulty, either -- yes, I had to save-load quite a lot in some places, which was annoying, but most of my deaths were by and large my own fault. I do think the game does a good job at balancing stressful combat (i.e. through gun jams, bleeding, radiation, etc.) while also being fairly forgiving to those that remember to account for those additional hazards while fighting. There's a lot of tense moments in this game that really shine because of this -- it never felt like I was under-equipped entering a fight, but I still had to work my ass off for a victory sometimes, and damn does it feel nice to have everything click together in those cases.

The main story here is...fine. It's not going to blow anyone away, but it works. It kept me interested in what was going on and what was to come later. There were quite a bit of comedic moments scattered throughout too, although I'm not entirely sure some of them were intentional ("Get out of here, stalker" lives rent-free in my head). The only real downside is, again, there's not really any point in going for any ending outside of the "true" canon one since all of them lack any substantial content. You can quite literally look at every single possible ending besides the canon one online and lose nothing -- they are incredibly basic and unfulfilling.

This is an overall decent game. I don't think it's something I'll revisit all that often, but my experience with it wasn't negative. If you're interested in this type of apocalyptic / intensely polluted and radioactive setting, you'll most likely have a good time here. And if you're even remotely interested in playing STALKER 2, I'd recommend giving this and Call of Pripyat a go, as well, mostly to better understand that game's storyline.

Finished the game. Master difficulty. Practically vanilla outside of a stabilization mod (Sky Reclamation Project) to make the game not ♥♥♥♥ itself every 2 seconds and fix a multitude of bugs at the same time.

Let's start with the positives: there are some actual decent moments in this game. I honestly had fun joining Freedom and fighting off Duty with squad members once I understood that this game forces you to upgrade guns in order to have any chance of hitting things farther than 5 meters. It was engaging and tense, and it didn't feel like the game was actively trying to screw me over at any given point (although the constant barrage of defense missions made running around from place to place kind of annoying). But that is an insanely small part of the game. Faction wars, while fun in concept and executed decently here, play essentially zero role in the story. They're pointless to do unless you want a chance at better loot and more money -- which is helpful, sure, but it's not required at all.

I'd say about an hour of my 13 hours of playtime was spent on the faction war system after the introductory sequence (where you're forced to partake in it for a bit). The rest of the 12 hours I spent on this game? Utterly ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ miserable. This is one of the worst games I have ever played.

There's way too many glaring flaws in this game, whether it's through mechanics they introduced here or through changes to existing mechanics from its predecessor. Almost all of these introduced mechanics and changes to existing mechanics are negatives that detract from this game substantially.

From what I gathered in my playing time:

- Bleeding has different tiers. This was the case in Shadow of Chernobyl as well, but it rarely was utilized outside of a few areas. Generally speaking, if you get shot, you're required to use a Bandage twice -- occasionally you'll get lucky and only require one. This in and of itself is not a problem, and I think it could work well if done properly. The problem with this system rears its ugly head when enemy mobs a) shoot at you through walls like they have aimbot, causing you to start bleeding, b) have inhuman reaction times to the point where even if you could get the drop on them, if you miss once, you're ♥♥♥♥♥♥ regardless, and c) barely drop bandages or medkits to begin with. The end result of all this, especially the last point, means you're going to be spamming save loads constantly whenever you get shot -- a majority of the time, you aren't going to have a Bandage, and you're screwed if you get shot at all. This turns the game from a frantic open-world exploratory survival game into an absolute slog. You have zero reason to bother getting into random encounters because of the risk of being shot and/or mauled by mutants solely because this game's bleeding system is fundamentally broken. This is my major gripe with the game as it stands, and it's what prevented me from enjoying 90% of it.

- Enemies throw grenades. A lot of them. They're programmed to land directly where you are no matter what, so you're required to move whenever one is thrown -- and they give you very little time, if any, to react to the HUD indicators for it. While they are choreographed through voice lines most of the time, which does help the latter issue, occasionally the game just gives up and throws one at your forehead with zero warning, killing you instantly. At some points it's honestly laughable how many grenades are thrown at you because of how often enemies are programmed to do so. You can find videos online very easily showcasing just how bad this phenomenon can be.

- Indicators have been changed on the HUD. While most of this is straightforward and easy to understand, the game doesn't inform you that these indicators still apply even when grayed out. As an example, if you go into a radioactive area and suffer from radiation poisoning, even after getting out of the area, you will slowly die and nothing on your HUD tells you about this. Occasionally you'll get text on your screen if it's severe enough, but a vast majority of the time, there's nothing to inform you about what's happening. This becomes a huge problem later in the game, when it throws radioactive areas in places seemingly at random with nothing indicating it as being radioactive to begin with.

- Level design in the new areas are horrible. Without getting into heavy spoilers, the new areas introduced in this game not found in Shadow of Chernobyl are a complete joke. You're railroaded into going a very specific path, and at times this path is not clear in the slightest. Impassable areas generally use radiation as a deterrent (which then tanks your health unless you use anti-rads, as mentioned above), and pathways are rarely coherent or have thought put into them to usher the player in the right direction.

- The entire ending sequence is laughably bad. For the last 2 hours of this game, I felt like I was throwing my head against a brick wall doing anything. Enemy encounters are, for the most part, entirely scripted, which completely ruins any immersion that would otherwise be present through the game's A-Life system. These enemy encounters also happen to give you very little cover most of the time, so you frequently get melted by bullets or grenade lobs. The final boss sequence is also a complete joke and feels like it's tailor-made solely to piss you, the player, off, and nothing else. Enemies spawn out of thin air both in front of and behind you, and there's no cover to utilize at all. I literally had to run past encounters and hope I got lucky with the AI missing just to progress through this part. The ending cutscene itself is horrible, too.

I could go on and on about more minor nitpicks that I have with the game, but they don't matter in comparison to the issues I mentioned above.

This game is not fun. It's a chore to start, with its unfair difficulty thrown right at your face in the beginning (through god-awful weapon accuracy and you only having a pistol to begin with for long-range fights), and it's a chore to end through one of the worst ending sequences I have ever played in a video game. You can find some enjoyment here, like I did with the faction war system, but you can also find enjoyment in watching colors flash on a screen for 10 hours, so that doesn't really mean much.

If you're interested in getting into the STALKER series, hard skip this one. You will hate yourself and this series otherwise.

Well, after my journey through the original STALKER trilogy (which I started around 20 hours into the game while waiting for bug fixes to a major mission), I beat STALKER 2.

I have no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ clue what to think of this game.

I can't say this is the worst thing I've ever played -- I obviously wouldn't have stuck with it for 80+ hours if that was the case -- but it most certainly is not the greatest. The developers clearly wanted to make the biggest and grandest STALKER entry yet, and they obviously have the talent and resources to do so. Unfortunately, I don't think they succeeded; there's too many issues present for me to say this game is worth your time and money.

There is a decent amount of stuff here that is good, don't get me wrong. The graphics (assuming you can run the game at the highest settings in the first place) are top-notch and look stunning. The attention to detail in the environments and locations themselves are genuinely super impressive. In some areas, particularly sections where there's a lot to do in a more confined area, I felt like exploring just for the sake of exploring, which is what I think an open-world game should strive for. The gunplay is leagues better than Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky (if not solely because your shots actually go where you're aiming), and the animations for weapons and interactions as a whole is sublime. They even made completely unique weapon jamming animations, which was never present in prior games -- you just reloaded to fix it. These changes help add to the overall immersion of the experience quite well, and it's this type of detail that I really appreciate.

With that said: this game had it extremely rough from the get-go.

I can't really talk about this game without mentioning how absolutely godawful the launch was. The launch of this game was complete and utter ♥♥♥♥, plain and simple. The game ran like trash, hogged computer resources like crazy, and was an overall unoptimized piece of garbage. Granted, some of this is Unreal Engine 5's fault (the engine which the game runs on), but even then, there's no excuse to have a game run that badly at launch. On top of that, as I mentioned earlier, the game was littered (and still is) with bugs. While the major ones have been patched out, the launch version of this game made it so you quite literally could not progress because of bugs, both in the main quest and in side quests. Not to mention one of the defining features of the STALKER franchise in general, A-Life, was completely absent in the game at launch. This game needed more time in development. Yes, this game was already heavily delayed as it was, but holy ♥♥♥♥ it needed so much more time in the oven if the launch was anything to go off of. I don't know if it was Microsoft forcing them to launch it for Game Pass / XBOX exclusivity or what, but it massively ruined the first impression for me.

Coming back after the patches...I mean, this is definitely an open-world game. There's enough here to keep you occupied and make your own fun in some areas. You can opt to go for all stashes on the map while finishing any side quest you come across in your travels, or you can straight beeline for the main quest and ignore everything else. However, there is a massive problem that this freedom introduces.

A lot of the content of this game is just content for the sake of content. There's stuff for you to do, sure, but that's really all it is. Going off what I said earlier, some side mission indicators turn out to be one-and-dones that take minutes to complete at best, and don't contribute anything to the story. Stashes on the map appear at random whenever you loot enemies (much like Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky), and most of them are completely pointless. This also was the case in the prior games mentioned, but in this game, certain stashes have flash drives which are required to upgrade your weapons/armor, especially in the later stages. The game incentivizes you to look for these to gear yourself up better, but what the hell is the point of doing so when 90% of them are completely useless? It makes no sense logistically and feels like filler to pad out the game, which it did not need at all.

The open-world aspect of the game also falls flat. Sure, the environments are excellent and there's numerous different locations to explore, but the vast majority of these locations amount to nothing outside of a few stash locations and maybe a side quest hidden in there. The world feels huge with constant references to the original trilogy through easter eggs and straight-up remakes of locations, which is sure to please fans of the series, but at the same time the world feels completely barren of anything with how much running through fields you end up doing. I feel like a solid third of my playtime in this game was spent just running from place to place and nothing else. The scope of this game is commendable, but it is simultaneously one of its biggest flaws because of how it's pulled off. There's way too much empty space.

The ending for this game, much like Clear Sky, sucks ass. While there are certain missions in the game that are undeniably not fun to do (cough cough the stealth mission), the entire sequence past the point of no return is the epitome of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Enemies spawn at set points, which is made painfully obvious through indicators on the HUD and completely ruins any immersion for this section as a whole. One of the final bosses (yes, one of) that I had to encounter required me pouring over 200 sniper rounds into him, only to realize he had a completely unique artifact on that allowed him to regenerate health over time after not taking damage for a bit. Nothing in the game conveys this to you. On top of that, after a second final boss encounter, you end up having a whole sequence of fighting through hordes of enemies to then end up at another boss encounter -- this time an arena, with multiple enemies who can block your bullets at will, and who are also safeguarded by five Gauss Gun soldiers who will completely obliterate you if you even have a thought of trying to peek someone. Oh, and there's also no actual cover for you. Hell, even if there was, in my playthrough, the Gauss Gun soldiers ended up shooting through thick concrete walls to kill me in one shot sometimes, so I guess it wouldn't have mattered anyways.

The most fun I had in this game was probably in Pripyat. I ended up managing to get there earlier than intended through a cheesy parkour method which has since been patched, and I really don't think it should have been considering you're barely in the area for the end of the game regardless. The area was ripe with tense combat situations and hordes of Monolith soldiers to fight, which (prior to the A-Life update) was a huge contrast to the rest of the game's completely dull and lifeless open world where you just ran from point A to point B. It felt exciting and fast-paced, and I wish more of this game was like that.

I don't think this game is worth buying in its current state. I am not going to say that this game won't eventually become something worth buying, but as it stands currently, there's too many bugs, design flaws, and abhorrent performance issues for me to recommend this to someone at full price. I'm grateful that the developers are sticking with the game to fix a lot of problems -- I just wish they delayed the game so those problems wouldn't have existed in the first place at launch.

Edit: The multiple endings have so many loopholes in them. In one route, Richter tanks Gauss Gun shots like it's nothing, and in another route, he dies to a punch to the groin. Basically all of the endings are piss poor in quality disregarding the route you have to take in order to get there in the first place. Nothing makes sense. It's so blatantly rushed. It's so bad.

I *want* to love this game so badly, man. But I just can't anymore. I've been an avid player of this franchise for over a decade at this point. I've seen some of the absolute lowest points this series has faced. But when the studio that made these games in the first place doesn't want to give a ♥♥♥♥ about pouring their heart and soul into making the game as best as it can be, why should I bother?

This past decade of fun, all overturned for a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Dungeons & Dragons live-service game? One that's advertised as having "lifetime commitment" to the GaaS model that you completely floundered here? Good luck with that, guys. I hope you go bankrupt for real this time.

It's pretty good

This was originally one of my favorite games. Back when this game first released, I considered it to be the pinnacle of single-player / co-operative shooter games. Which is why it sucks that I'm writing this right now.

Coming fresh off of playing Borderlands 3, unfortunately, this game is not really up to par in terms of raw gameplay.

The gameplay is dull. There's really no other way to put it. The guns feel clunky, the gimmicks of said guns don't mesh well with the overall combat, and there's just very little variance to it to begin with. This is easily the one thing that aged the worst about this game, and it makes coming back to play it incredibly hard without noticing the flaws in it. The guns rarely feel satisfying, and the gunplay is even worse due to the honestly terrible AI movement coupled with the lack of real variety. It just doesn't feel fully refined or complete overall.

As an extension to the gameplay, some of the controls and overall navigation aren't the best. Driving in this game is atrocious -- to be fair, this is the case in Borderlands 3, as well. However, you can use travel stations at any time in that game. On top of that, the movement options are much more diverse and refined; combined with some of the artifacts in the game, going on foot is not an entirely pointless endeavor. In Borderlands 2, you can only use travel stations when next to one. This means that, for some of the bigger maps that the game has, you're forced to either go by foot or drive. This is especially annoying for areas like The Dust, The Highlands and Eridium Blight, where there are several areas with absolutely nothing -- no enemies, no obstacles, nothing. It is *incredibly* boring and frustrating to have to traverse the entire map, just to get to one specific area in one of the bigger maps.

I'm also not entirely sure what they did recently, but there seems to be way more bugs than I remember when originally playing the game (or even just playing the game again three years ago). Enemies randomly float in mid-air. AI pathfinding gets broken very easily. The main menu has missing interface option text, for some reason. These aren't massive issues, granted -- most of the other bugs aren't as well -- but I don't remember these ever being as much of a problem as they were when revisiting this game again.

With that said, is there still enjoyment to be found in this game in comparison to its sequel? I think so, yes -- the main story is infinitely better than Borderlands 3 (although that's not really much of an accomplishment), and the main villain is written excellently. If you can get past the combat becoming incredibly stale within the first few hours of playing, as well as the relatively dated gameplay mechanics, you will most likely enjoy this game. Most of the DLCs are also up to the standard that the base game set; since you can get everything for 40 dollars (way cheaper on sale), there's no real reason not to buy this game without the DLCs, at least in my opinion. What you get for the price is much, much more than any triple A game I can think of.

Unfortunately, the clunky combat, dated gameplay and very hasty last-ditch-effort updates to the game (the main menu literally has missing text options which weren't there on release) pretty much destroyed any incentive for me to want to come back to this game again. The only reason I bothered trying this game again is solely because of how horrendous the writing in Borderlands 3 was -- and while it is very refreshing to hear actual writing in a Borderlands game for once, it's just impossible for me to really get involved in it when the gameplay is uninteresting.

If you're in the mood for a good time with friends, you could easily do a hell of a lot worse. It's still a relatively fun time; it's just unfortunate that the core gameplay loop gets stale *very* quickly due to the lack of variety.