Recent reviews by Ivy

balln't

The legendary prequel to the Metal Gear Solid series, more beautiful than ever.... IF you have the Hardware to run it. At the state of release tho, i encountered a couple crashes VERY common to the Unreal Engine and in THE FEARs Bossfight, once he launches his grenadebolt, it would break the physics and therefore making the mk.22 useless and grenades no longer get thrown, just simply dropped. IF YOU DIDN'T PLAY ON EXTREME; THIS WOULD MAKE A NONLETHAL TAKEDOWN ON THE FEAR BASICALLY IMPOSSIBLE
Simply for these reasons, i cannot recommend a purchase at full price. It bears to mention that the game is also capped to 30 or 60fps, and anything else but 16:9 is unsupported. USE THIS MOD FOR A FIX [www.nexusmods.com]

That aside, this is a dream come true for myself and many other KOJIMA fans, but you have to ask yourself if you really want to support Konami in their endeavor to milk Kojima's Fans for an easy revenue stream. Paid skins at launch provide a pretty certain outlook on how Konami wants to monetize the Metal Gear Solid series.

I love Stalker. I absolutely adore the Metro Books and videogames. I went on to watch the original "Stalker" movie from 1979 which was based on the book "Roadside Picnic"! On top of that, i usually never preorder ANY games but i still went out of my way to preorder the limited edition for Stalker 2!

That being said, so far my experience has been quite a letdown.
I knew to expect slavjank. I expected bugs. But i am a little let down regardless.

So, why do i feel so disappointed?
Simply said, the original games, while janky, essentially had a dynamic Zone, where other Stalkers and mutants could be engaging each other, camping out or doing escort jobs on their own, completely independent of the players location in the game. This really helped immerse you into the gameplay of being a stalker in an extremely hostile anomalous zone, which resulted in gameplay that even made doing simple jobs like "killing some mutants" to gather their flesh to sell, hunt artifacts throughout the Zone and improve your reputation among the factions to get stash locations and ultimately, upgrade your gear to repeat the cycle, VERY fun.

To cut the chatter a bit shorter: what we and GSC called "A-Life", which gave the Zone it's dynamic feel, is completely gone. Mutants spawn at specific locations, and when they do, it's usually less than 50m away from the player. NPC's do the same, usually clustered around structures, tending to respawn as soon as you move out of sight. This came really apparent to me when i went back into the Bunker of the "Sphere", where you pass through while completing part of the early main quest. Went in to the base, killed all NPC's, down into the bunker, check the stash i missed on my first pass, went back up, entire base is again full of NPC's i just had gunned down, less than a minute ago. Bummer, i guess. Just sucks that GSC proactively removed the mention of "A-Life" after the games launch from the store page. Yikes.

Then we get to the mutants. Jump on an object that is slightly higher in elevation, problem avoided..? Well, they have no answer for this. Even the poltergeists or Burers that have ranged attacks are completely dumbfounded by the 2 feet of elevation you have on them, moving about like idiots, not knowing how to respond.

To make this worse, mutants now are absolute bulletsponges, regardless of what ammunition you use. Bloodsuckers are the absolute worst in this example. They turn invisible and will easily tank 4-5 Grenades before they even go down. Or a couple full magazines worth of ammunition. Plus they are invisible until they launch themselves at you.

Oh, and they don't drop any body parts anymore, so this let me to just completely ignore and avoid most mutants, as they turned out to literally be a waste of ammo, as you can easily outmaneuver them. On top of the piles and piles of medical equipment you can stock up when you play carefully like i did.

The thing is, they also botched the cost for repairing equipment, which pairs unbelievably horribly with the absolute tanks that are the mutants.

As for hunting artifacts... it is very buggy. Some artifacts can literally be stuck underneath the ground, where you can't pick them up, let alone SEE them, because you can't even get close enough for them to appear. Or maybe, they just launch themselves completely out of reach when you discharge electrical anomalies. This sucks.

And, as beautiful as the unreal engine is to make the muddy brown-greenish zone feel visually pleasing... it doesn't outweigh the fundamental issues with the gameplay. Especially if you consider that the game literally as a memory leak, so frequent restarts are needed if you want to keep your frames at a somewhat playable experience.

I love when my games look and sound reeaaally pretty, but if the gameplay is this shallow... and to be honest, kind of boring... what is preventing you from just playing Stalker: Anomaly or Stalker: GAMMA again, instead of this? Or just go back to replay Shadow of Chernobyl?

Writing a negative review for a game that you have been anticipating is a painful endeavour, as i do have an incentive to want this game to be good. but i'd be lying to myself and especially interested potential customers of this franchise that this is the anticipated sequel that we all wanted.

So for me, as of know... i am going to wait for patches and hope, with the help of modding and looots of time and patches, that this will eventually become the sequel to the franchise me and so many other stalkers were looking forwards to. Now...

...get out of here, Stalker.

lmao ♥♥♥♥ no

Refunding this due to breach of contract.

pretty neat.

This is the HD Remake made by Bluepoint Games, with the additional screen-play book.
What this essentially means is:

- 720p ONLY, no support for other resolutions, no ultrawide support
- Audio quality is worse in this version than the HD Collection on PS3/XBOX360
- Game is locked to 60fps
- Texture quality is the same as in the HD collection, a far fetch from what i would consider "HD" by todays standards
- Mouse and Keyboard only emulate controller input
- spelling errors, bugs and glitches from the HD Collection still persist in this version

Truth be told, this is lazy, but mods can atleast make this port more bearable, and atleast you won't get any engine slowdown like in the PS3 HD Collection. This all doesn't sound so bad until you take one thing into account:

KONAMI PUBLICLY CONDEMNS MODDING!

Giving a company money when they don't even implement basic support for resolutions other than 1280x720p is a horrible idea.


So, all that said, here is my definitive guide for anyone who wants to relive this masterpiece before the release of MGS: Delta.

Step 1: Install MGSHDFix [github.com]
This fixes practically all issues regarding your choice of screen resolution and aspect ratio.

Step 2: Install MGS3MC Better Audio Mod [www.nexusmods.com]
Self-explanatory, fixes the low-quality audio

Step 3: Install Upscaled Textures [www.nexusmods.com]
This will upscale the ingame textures to a much nicer resolution. Not perfect, but makes the whole experience much nicer. Do consider looking through Nexusmods for more tweaks, there are a lot of smaller improvements for other textures that have not been upscaled.

Step 4 (Optional): Install MGS3 Crouch Walk[www.nexusmods.com]
Implements crouch walking and sneaking using animations from the 3DS version of MGS3. Experimental, adjusts the Camo-rating dynamically but CQC doesn't work from the crouch stance. Though, overall a great addition to the game.

Also i'd recommend a programm called "Lossless Scaling", available for purchase on the steam store, adds frame-generation for a much smoother experience for users with high-refresh rate monitors.

Once you are finished, enjoy one of the best games of all times! Kept you waiting, huh?

Absolutely underrated software! Especially great for framecapped games like the MGS Master Collection. The recent update improved the image quality massively.

one moment you buy a game called signalis and all of a sudden you see you played 8 hours in a row.

Would recommend melancholic yuri depresso simulator, beware of clunky combat with outstanding artwork and resident evil inspired puzzles. Also give me a radio module irl please.

update: it hurts

watch me put 50+ hours into this game post review