Good Game Shines Underneath All The Flaws
There's a lot to like about this game, and a lot to be turned off by. I'll start with a list of positives about the game, then go through the negatives.
- Really Cool Atmosphere. The sky is dark, clouds shift and move, decrepit trees and buildings peak out over a shattered countryside. It really feels like a post-apocalyptic disaster area, with a Russian flair.
- Intriguing Story. The game starts out with several mysteries that you follow up on. Who are you? What were you doing in a truck filled with corpses? How did you survive the lightning bolt that killed the driver? What caused the Zone, and what's at its center? These and other mysteries keep you interested throughout the course of the game.
- Good Graphics. Even several years after its release, the graphics hold up. The game is very playable from this standpoint.
- Fairly Realistic Combat. You're not going to take too many headshots and live in this game. Luckily, neither are your enemies.
- Multiple Endings. I always enjoy the opportunity to shape the outcome of the story.
So clearly I enjoyed most of my time in this game. But that being said, there are several really annoying things that affected my enjoyment of the game.
- Bugs: Lots of 'Em. When you play a game several years after its release, you expect most of these to be ironed out. But there were a variety of situations where the minimap glitched and wouldn't show my current objective. For some reason, my map also left targets on from one of my first missions... for the entire game. That got old. Even worse, I had a series of game crashes near the end of the game, during a difficult fight, that would terminate the game when I attempted to save. That got old even faster.
- Lack of Direction. There are tons of side missions, but they are really repetitive and don't really do anything to advance any sort of plot. Worse, you can often skip parts of the main mission without realizing it. The game doesn't do a great job of telling you where you should go first. So I ended up missing a substantial amount of the plot even though I beat the game. I had to go onto YouTube to find out all the other cool stuff.
- Inventory Management. You will find yourself weighted down by weapons, armor, food, and bullets (yes... bullets have weight in this game) very quickly. Since there is no way to increase your carrying capacity, you will have to deal with this the rest of the game. If you're into inventory management, this might be a plus, but since ammo can be scarce at times, I found it annoying to have to evaluate whether or not I really needed to pick up the extra pistol bullets I came across.
- Plot Gets a Little Incoherent. This might be the fault of the translation, and it might also be due to the fact that I got a lot of the plot from the Internet rather than the actual game, but it kind of breaks down by the end.
At the end of the day, this is still a fun game with a good plot. I just can't help but think that it could have been great.
