Majorly disappointed with this game. I had been looking forward to it ever since the first teaser trailer years ago. I'm sorry to report that this game is a piece of hot garbage.

Imagine I give you 5 dollars every day. It costs 4 dollars to survive daily, assuming everything goes well. It costs 10 dollars to make any upgrades because all of your "friends" are f*cking wimps and think that awww the quality of life in the base goes way down when you just built that crafting table!!!!! So this means it takes 10 days of perfect luck and circumstances to save up for one upgrade. Now factor in that AI is unreliable, can practically hitscan you in the middle of the forest where you can't see them AT ALL, they do significantly more damage than you, the radiation is getting worse and worse the more the days go by, AND if you take too long in any one mission then a dude with a f*cking ray gun will teleport around wherever you are to kill you until you waste all your ammunition to just send him away temporarily.

What I'm getting at here is the game isn't proportioned properly. Things cost too much and there's too much against you at all times to make any kind of significant progress and feel accomplished. The companions are relatively useless on their own missions, often failing ones that they have a 70% chance of completion.

I would be willing to forgive these terms if it also weren't such a drag to die. Because when you die, you don't die, you just get taken to prison, which still fails the mission you're on, and progresses you to the next day once you escape, which takes more time, and for some reason you have to repeat all the dialogue and mission progression even though it did happen since it's the next day. And if you die during that section then you get to go to magic land where you can reverse A or B choices you've made in the past which makes the entire point of the choice existing in the first place pointless. Makes no sense. Speaking of repeating, the NPC's in this game will not cease to stfu EVER. I just want to spend skill points, I don't wanna listen to this guy's boring life story.

Lastly, the story and quest designs. I may have only made it halfway, but I can confidently say that it's tedious and boring. Fetch quests. Same maps. Beautiful, but awfully repetitive. Combat sucks. Searching for resources is cool for about 5 minutes then lame. The horror that was emphasized so heavily in the original trailers has been reduced to random jump scares that serve relatively no purpose. Wasted potential.

I tried. I really did. I just can't anymore. I'm having to fight to just enjoy the game, and that's not fun.

Stalker 2 at home.

"You're obviously no f#cking gopnik, but you'll learn."