Edit: The well thought out and kind developer reply helped me realize I went into this expecting stalker and that was a rather disappointed because of that. Gonna give it another go at some point, so take this review with a grain of salt. Some points still hold up, but most of my frustrations were shattered expectations. Still annoyed about the model clipping crap though.
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This is... possibly one of the worst STALKER-styled games I've ever played. The graphics, voice acting, and story are all great from what little I could tolerate playing this game... and that's as far as my pros go.
The inventory system is absolutely awful. Grabbing the backpack from your back only works about a fourth of the time, and the odd choice of making you manually sort everything you have into a teeny tiny space is infuriating. You have to stack ♥♥♥♥ inside of other ♥♥♥♥ and it just becomes confusing as hell. Just give me a damn GUI like every other game.
The need to not have the player model collide with structures or props is also infuriating. I have a natural urge to simply bend forward and pick something up off of a table, but instead of letting me do that they simply move me backwards so my model doesn't clip into the table. It is SO jarring and it literally makes me nauseous. They expect you to use this super unintuitive "out of reach item" grabbing where you aim at it and press trigger and THEN grip. The problem with that is you have to aim at the item before pressing trigger or it won't work, and if you move your hand between pressing trigger and grip you have to repress trigger to make it function again. Just let me grab ♥♥♥♥ from a distance without the extra step for the love of god. Stupid af.
Everything about handling firearms in this is so unbelievably tedious, too. You can't unload a mag into your other hand, you have to catch it midair or pick it up from the ground. Then loading the mags is terrible because you can't load them while they're out of your hand. If I could set them all on a surface and load them from there it'd be a LOT simpler. Also picking up individual bullets if you load too many is THE WORST. Especially when they randomly fling into oblivion and are lost forever.
Then the exploration comes into play... there's an anomaly every 2-20 steps, completely randomly placed with no sense of order. Every other STALKER game has randomly placed anomalies but they're few and far between and they always come in groups. This game has no open space where there isn't anomalies randomly scattered. It just feels like one giant anomaly maze rather than a world with groups of anomalies to be wary of. I could get past that if they didn't bury the damn artifacts in the dead center of anomalies. Having to take damage to get an artifact or skip getting it just feels horrible either way.
I think my biggest pet peeve though is the tablet map automapping the place but for some god forsaken reason there's no marker that shows where you are on your map. Are you serious? How bloody hard would it have been to add a small marker for the player location?
Playing this game just feels so bad. It doesn't matter how good the story is if you can't stand the gameplay. If I could refund it I absolutely would but unfortunately I went on vacation right after buying it so it's been more than two weeks. A shame, but oh well.
