Recent reviews by the fourth macro: white monster

now-functional dopamine harvester

Very true to the history of S.T.A.L.K.E.R's previous titles. Random crashes, a third of the main quests being totally broken, the first mission included, and spending half my play time trawling through reddit to find fixes to things that should have been QA'd months before release. Had to install mods to access the command console and attempt to fix bugs the devs somehow managed to overlook. This title is a cossak vodka induced, nostalgia fuelled romp through what could have been the crowning achievement of the series. A-Life has been gutted, the factions are bland and working with/for them has little to no impact on your experience in the Zone. Traders overcharge like crazy, and you spend more on ammo and repairs than you get from loot/mission completion rewards. Artifacts are mostly terrible, as the radiation they emit means that you can only have one or two good ones. Mutants are bullet sponges, and the AP/HP ammo types seem to have no effect of damage. Most settlements Techs are useless, and cannot upgrade mid-tier gear, with no way to get them the upgraded tools they would need to improve guns/armour. Upgrade blueprints are only for a specific gun/armour, meaning that even if you go trawling through stashes, you're unlikely to be able to upgrade your favourite gun unless you go hunting after researching online, taking the joy out of exploration. Most of the quests are simple fetch quests, with no depth or reasoning besides bloating playtime.

I finished the main quest out of spite, and may come back to the title in a year or so once mods have fixed what the devs somehow managed to botch after a 15 year wait.

If you want a good stalker game, just play Anomaly, it even crashes less.

The DLC is also stupidly expensive for basic reskins.

Great game made unplayable by the 2K Launcher

I am a huge fan of the BattleTech series, and this game is a banger. For those not massive geeks the DLC's are not worth the price point, because the base game is so good by itself. Highly recommend if you want to wander around in a 100 ton chunk of steel and ♥♥♥♥ people up with massive guns and lasers.

not too bad tbh

im no longer surprised Firaxis has the balls to charge money for their bulltshit

Fantastic gameplay, realistic setting, attentive devs. What more could a player want? This game is a real gem. Rewarding gun play, intersting customisation options, a steam workshop full of sweaty nerds and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ memes, and realistic Australian callouts, this game has it all.

That being said however, i have two major complaints about the game. First is being shot behind walls. It feels like BF4 sometimes. Being shot when in full cover, surrounded by concrete, and only seconds after entering cover brings back harrowing memories of the BF4 launch.

My other complaint is the Acheivements. From the beta launch NWI have had serious issues with acheivements not being tracked properly. Boomstick, for example, doesnt count the Commonwealth's White Phospherous grenades or the No.69 impact kills towards the acheivement. Sniper class kills with the G43 dont count towards Gatekeeper. Sometimes the kills dont even count. Bayonet kills are such a pain to grind. They dont seem to stack up even if I get the thrusting endscreen acheivement with 12 kills.
Looking forward to the devs fixing the issues and to playing more of this great game

A terrible port for a bad game. I have loved the DQ series for a long time. This re-release almost brought me physical pain. Copy-paste story, bad voice acting, unresponsive controls, glitches and bugs, poor graphics fidelity even on max, annoying cut scenes, 2D characters who i felt no attachment towards, boring character customisation, extremely repeditive gameplay, and incredibly disruptive game mechanics. Square Enix stripped all adventure elements from the game. It is now an on-rails repeditive grind. Gameplay "innovations" dumbed down what made the original iterations of the game a classic. Combos are impossible to pull off with mouse and keyboard. The roles of tanks/fighters/mages/healers do not come into play. The AI is downright terrible. They rarely do anything useful, and seem to be very prone to getting caught in massive crowds of enemies and dying. All the tactics and finese of the previous tiles has devolved into Button Mash Simulator 2k15.

Huge props to the advertising team. 10/10 would get ♥♥♥♥♥♥ over again.

An excellent game. Great fun, intuitive gameplay, and just enough difficulty all wrapped in amazing asthetics. Definately reccommended

Good gameplay, and an enjoyable setting. I love the time period and found the weapons to be mostly realistic. What became very obvious was that the game was pay to win. Not in the "skins get wins" sense, but the "pay us money for super powerful guns" way. Weapon unlocks were slow and tedious, and i had to level to unlock them, and then actually buy the right to use it! Repairs for weapons and veichles were expensive and seemingly useless. Although enjoyable, the fact that the game quickly became a millstone grindfest really put me off