Recent reviews by peΛce

VOID of a spine Interactive
Not VOID of money from Sony Interactive

As a giant fan of the series this one hurts deeply. I was excited to get achievements on PC like console versions did and to get somewhat a nice remaster of the original trilogy even though I am tired of remasters and remakes in today's gaming space.
However this 'remaster' is complete ass. Blurry visuals, AI enhanced HUD that looks smudged, reload animations getting canceled randomly, knife hitboxes are inconsistent, more bugs somehow than the original had which is baffling and the existing quest bugs from the original like the infamous "attack the Freedom base quest" given to you by Skull are still insanely buggy AND the absurd censorship of the Soviet influence on the accident and the zone itself.

Not to mention they removed the originals or delisted them from the store front just like R* did with the original GTA games, forcing people to buy these poor excuses of a REMASTER instead of the good old versions. The mod workshop support also doesn't allow any complex script mods for some reason? The censorship is really nonsencial to me, why would you remove the Russian dub or subtitles from the game? I understand GSC's decision in regards to the war going on but you are not hurting anybody with this except players who have nothing to do with the war or Russian players who might not agree with what is going on. The Russian dub was iconic, the statues and signs dedicated to the Soviet Union in the game were testaments of Russias failure and incompetence during those times.

Removing those only does more bad than good. Please fix the visual issues and bugs, rework the Steam workshop and relist the original versions back onto Steam. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. as a series deserves better than this.

Team AI will sit in their base gathering up units and resources just to have their armies sit around and wait for Christmas, meanwhile the enemy AI will lay siege to their bases and when YOU decide to attack an enemy your team AI will do ♥♥♥♥ all to help but when you lay siege to one enemy AI's base his other team mates instantly rush in to help him repel your attack, ♥♥♥♥ THIS ♥♥♥♥! ♥♥♥♥ THIS GARBAGE ASS ♥♥♥♥!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The team AI in this game is utterly BROKEN.

Chore to get this game to work on a modern system and even if you do you can experience random crashes during crucial mission parts which set you back all the way to the beginning since the checkpoints in this game are terrible. Also too many repetitive missions back to back. I understand this game laid the foundation for the rest of the series, but yeah. It did not age well.

A massive blast all the way to the end. A must own for any enjoyer of boomer shooters.

The love/hate relationship I have with this game is insane. The core structure of the game is highly enjoyable but the developers are nothing but incompetent when it comes to updates and stabilization plus the premium "warbonds" which you can buy with irl currency or grind in game which takes a long time to do so and not everyone has 5+ hours each day to search for "super credits", are starting to have less and less content but the price of the mentioned warbonds stays the same.

When it comes to the updates each of those cannot be released without the game absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ itself. The last update which was a few days ago at the time of this review broke anti aliasing and some of the in game items in the superstore and warbonds are invisible or blurred. And every update that came beforehand is the exact same. Content followed by bugs and more bugs since the game runs on some ancient Mayan coding that not even the developers themselves understand enough to work with. The game also runs like ass even on high end systems.

The last update also introduced a new subfaction of the Automatons which is cool, if it wasn't for the absolutely broken new type of "devastator" enemy which can one shot you even at medium range wearing HEAVY armor. I don't know who's bright idea it was at ARROW HEAD to make a new more deadly type of devastator when the base type was already annoying enough to deal with, not to mention giving it the capability of one shotting you wearing full armor and this isn't some type of big enemy or tank, it's a regular chaff/trash enemy. This isn't the first time an update released that introduced a new enemy that was absolutely broken, the armored scout strider which did not telegraphs it's attacks or the barrage tank that did not have a weak spot like the other tanks in the game or the impaler enemy that could attack you from insanely long ranges with it's tentacles.

Why would you also introduce a new subfaction for bugs for a week or two only to remove them and not have them appear at all except for one planet attack that occurs like once every two weeks when people were having fun fighting that said faction? Keep in mind that said subfaction comes from the GLOOM area which players could go into ONCE so far and then they removed that feature which comes after the fact they haven't done anything with the gloom for a YEAR. The Illuminate also are still without any new units to fight against and have been boring since the release in December. They are the most boring bland faction to fight to date.

The galactic war is a complete joke and trickery, the playerbase isn't responsible for what goes on except for developer decided major orders. You cannot decide as a community to attack a planet and make territorial gains because those said planets will get a boost in enemy capture percentage since the developers want a tight grip on how the war actually progresses. There is no choice like in the first game, it's just an illusion.

I love this game but I just wish the people behind it were more competent.

The best GTA entry undoubtedly, have too many fond memories with this one and will probably never stop playing it. R* made something special here. Got to love the atmosphere and coldness of HD Liberty City.