WARNING: MAYBE SPOILER!? CAUTION - DETAILED INFORMATION (Well, somewhat... okay vague, I didn't want to spoil it so I cut out names and such)
Just gotten through the game myself, and I understand them for not having a review out so soon. Personally I'd have to play it through twice round about, to make a fair judgement of the game, because of it's depth and longivity.
To put it simply; you HAVE to try atleast two different paths to see if you can complete the game either way, if they have any impact on eachother and how it alters the game. During half-time you have to make a profoundly radical choice between A and B, and from what I can tell on first play-through, there's no middle ground or going around it. That alone is atleast 5 hours of gameplay added.
The difficulty of this game is varied at best, and murderously unforgiving at worst (Mind you, thats AFTER you turned the difficulty down to Novice) There are simply stretches in this game that'll take you somewhere between 3 and tearing-out-your-hair-frustration X amount of quick-loads to get through. Between your gun missing, you getting pushed out of the way by your team mates, your gun locking up, running out of ammo, reload animatio moves your cursor off target, grenade flickers your screen, trying to reach medkit/bandage at the OTHER end of the keyboard (yes I'm aware that you can just make some different hotkeys, I likw it RAW) and lag preventing split-second reations, you have to get up a fair amount of times and stop playing, unless you want to sacrifice 5 years of your life due to stress.
Add that to the many repeatable tasks, continues cries for help, and "Should I go there or there in 3 seconds to save 6 strangers from certain doom" there's a fair amount of complexity to all this. NPC's takes time to get from point A to B, usually moving in patrols, which isn't exactly up to the player's movement speed, especially after tracking 10km because you couldn't afford the guide, leaves you alone and running into a fair amount of these encounters, some which you simply cannot ignore because you need the NPC's to stay alive for another task.
Ohh yeah, and the objectives that never resolve, saying "Capture this area" with you and 2 of your team mates standing in the middle of Lars Tyndskids mark without any hostile of any form within the whole damn map looking at the damned captured area, which you effortlesly walked over and stood on unopposed.
Mind you,some of these are all minor complaints as they don't come into play until late-game, and with patching will be fixed proper. The idea is there, and it's definately a better, smoother and steamlined (For the better) S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
Though, as someone (I think Brad) pointed out, a game is reviewed as is, and that could result in a lower-than-desirved score (say 3 out of 5 stars) due to some of the gamehalting problems, such as the above mentioned.
Personally I'd give it 4 out of 5 as of Retail version.
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