Recent reviews by White ⁧⁧Wolf

90% of my playtime has been compiling shaders.

Technical issues: Jokes aside, the game needs a lot of polish. There's a lot of small bugs(didn't encounter game-breaking ones so far, unlike some folks) and visual issues. The game also needs a serious optimisation pass. I exceed the recommended specs but still encounter a lot of performance issues, even with DLSS on 'Performance' which looks really ugly.

Politics: There is little or no 'woke' present in the game which is great to see(though I've only maybe finished 15% of the map). Did see two very dark-skinned Africans(African Russians?) so far which was odd. Not really sure how realistic that'd be.

Gameplay: I've only been playing on Veteran with all possible HUD elements off. It can be very immersive(though some missing graphics effects even maxed out to tend to kill said immersion now and then). One big issue though is how terrible the economy is and how absolutely tanky the non-human enemies are. I just fought a pretty early enemy and I had to shoot it in the head around 60 times with a fully upgraded AK. That's just not OK. Repairing and buying gear is also FAR MORE expensive than what you can earn in the game - even if you sell everything you find, which I wouldn't recommend anyway. Upgrading armour is really bad too and pretty much pointless.

Spawning issue: The enemy spawning mechanics are really bad. Enemies can suddenly spawn in an open field you just ran through, for example. Enemies can spawn anywhere anytime it seems and that does ruin a lot of the experience. The previous 3 STALKER games used a different engine with a very different and highly-praised enemy spawning system. I hope it's possible to replicate that in UE but I somehow doubt it.

The map seems pretty huge, and is filled with interesting locations. However most locations have nothing really special(no unique enemies, events or loot - and yes I REALLY looked). That does make those few special locations exciting, I guess.

It's also good to see there's no Denuvo or any other anti-consumer crap. I don't like that it's using UE though, but that can't be helped anymore. I did notice when the game crashed(once so far), that it didn't give me the option to close the window or cancel the crash reporting - only to send. I just forced closed it through Task Manager. I can't speak for if the game connects to the internet as I have it blocked, but UE is known to connect so be aware of that possibility.

If the game's various issues get fixed I would recommend this game with a slight discount at the very least.

Current launch score: 6 or 7/10

ALWAYS-ONLINE

There is no offline mode for some reason.

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████████████████It just works.████████████████
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8 years later, still Denuvo, while it was removed for the GOG version.

???

EAC

2K Launcher needs to go away.

2K Launcher needs to go away.

2K Launcher needs to go away.

Very nice RPG, definitely worth the money. Reminds me of the recently-released Disco Elysium but also the Divinity: Original Sin games. It's a mix of a lot of good games, and I think heavily inspired by the earlier(1 & 2) Fallout games. Definitely worth the full asking price! Game length is quite long if you read everything(there's a lot to read but sadly no spoken dialogue). I'm not a fan of reading but have read a LOT so far, so it's definitely doable. Replayability is there but it'd take quite a while to do multiple full runs of the game. Maybe if you skipped dialogue... All in all I'd highly recommend this for anyone even remotely interested in (turn-based)RPGs. Like many games there is some (current)political propaganda in there but that's difficult to avoid these days.

One of the best ARPGs ever, and it's free. Devs seem great and are still supporting the game to this day.