Generally Speaking, Stalker is a fantastic FPS survival horror where you can explore a bizarre world filled with mysteries based on "The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Disaster" and Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker film released in 1979. The story follows "Skif" who after losing everything in a disaster decides to enter " The Zone" a post apocalyptic wasteland created after the Chernobyl reactor failure to get some answers. This game plays like a kind of FPS open world similar to games such as "Fallout 3-4" , "The metro series" or "Rage".
The original Stalker game was groundbreaking and is a direct inspiration for this game.
What I disliked:
You can't tell allies from enemies. The game is bad at explaining which side you are on, so you kill everyone (and most often for no reason).
You do a quest for the military, they give you tasks and their full support. You walk 200m from the military base and encounter soldiers. Your first thought is that they are friendly (They look similarly dressed to the folks who gave you the quest), but no.. they start shooting at you. The reverse is also true, you get a quest by bandits, stalkers and outlaws. You leave the premises and encounter a band of bandits, and they start shooting at you. Sometimes they will shoot at you, sometimes they won't. You never know. I often have to F5-F8 every time I see an enemy because I fear locking myself out of some quests.
I had to restart missions because NPC's would freeze. I would sometimes get One shot by some invisible enemy without any cause or reason.
During Monolith attacks, certain NPCs stayed in combat mode when the quest required me to talk to them. I had to restart the Colonel boss several times because he kept freezing over one of the blue beacons. The Duga outpost / Malachite outpost and Electric Plaza kept one-shoting me when entered from an incorrect entrance or if the quest wasn't done in a specific way. You would simply get one shot from nowhere without any warning. This is bad game design.
Trial and Error Dying, no predictable way of being precautious
The amount of unfair deaths you get can be ridiculous. Falling from 3 meters can kill you. Trying to swim in a lake can kill you. Some anomalies can 1 shot you. This is the kind of game where you have to constantly F5-F8 because otherwise you won't know what will kill you and what won't. An emission storm comes, so I hide under the ground (level -1) and I still die. Some parts of the basement kill me, others don't. I walk through a farming estate and suddenly a bright white ball kills me. No way to tell it was coming. The best part are the invisible enemies, which can kill you from behind because they are "invisible" and are very hard to see. If you position yourself in a tunnel, you can see a slight distorted blur which indicates that they are coming (and the distortion is very hard to see because they move fast) . It's impossible to fight 4-5 of these things in an open area. Eventually you get used to them and try to find some kind of corridor to take them down, but how are you supposed to know they are there in the first place since they are invisible?
This game is basically remembering what kills you through trial and error, rather than actually being able to predict danger.
So much walking and no fast travel, turning a 15-hour game into 30 hours for the wrong reasons.
This game is slow. You walk so much, even to places you have been before... I don't want the ability to teleport everywhere, but at least allow instant fast travel from the map. The amount of time you waste getting from "Useless Point A" to Useless Point B" is astounding. The only way you can teleport is by paying money to teleport from the main town in each region to another town. If you want us to enjoy "the zone", you can create less fast travel points because this game has none. A game I could have finished in 15 hours doubles in length due to the constant walking. Not to mention walking with an encumbered inventory and through swamps, which easily killed 2 hours for a mission that essentially should have taken 40 minutes.
The swamp is by far the worst level design I have seen.
The swamp area is the worst place I have seen in video games. You move very slowly. There is no way to tell which pond can be crossed, which one will slow you down 500% or where you will essentially drown There are various shacks which can start an emission storm (Ad Astra Quest) even if you happen to go through the wrong one which is instadeath because unless you don't go through the correct one, you won't find a shelter to survive it.
Unbalanced weapons
Shotgun weapons are average to weak. They are supposed to have maximum damage (as shown in stats) yet hit for less damage than your regular sub-machine gun when used in practice.
Constant looting and sorting
Manually having to unload weapons to get more ammunition. Enemies can shoot an infinite amount of bullets and their guns never jam. When you go to loot them, they have 3 bullets. If you unload their gun which is found on the ground next to the corpse, you will get 5 bullets. When I killed 20 enemies, I then have to run around the area adding all the weapons and drops to my inventory, and spend 5 minutes unloading weapons and sorting them.
Major bugs:
Stuck between objects. NPCs flying in the air and getting stuck in objects. My hands and POV perspective going all crazy. Unable to add attachment to Viper-5, enemies spawning and despawning in random places. Flashing lights in some areas. Autosaving just before getting killed or when stuck forcing me to reload my game.
And these are only the ones I can remember.