Better than the SoC in almost every way, but there is really nothing to do, and faction wars don't work.
Pros~
1.Great graphics
2.Runs great on my system (e6300, 7900gs, 3gigs ram, XP)
3.Quite stable, only 3 crashes in all of my time playing. Zero save game corruptions.
4.Great enemies, they are interesting to combat and can kill you as easily as you can kill them.
5.Excellent difficulty on Master. Still a little too easy to get money and supplies, but its much better than SoC.
6.Lots of voice acting, some of it is actually pretty humorous.
7.Upgrade system works, it feels good to upgrade and will compel you to do so.
8.GUIDES! Yes! Running back and forth in SoC was sooo lame!
9.Getting artifacts is actually enguaging and fun.
Cons!
1.Enemy AI. Sometimes they shoot you through cover, sometimes they kill you in 1 hit, sometimes it takes 10+ hits to kill you, its all really random and can drag the fun down a lot when they constantly kill you through cover. I have no problem with the grenades. The enemies clearly announce that a nade is coming so they are easily dodged.
2.Same guy does like 30 different peoples' voices. Its weird hearing Strelok's voice in some stalker camp >.>
3.Big, empty world. So much potential to hide more stashes, add more camps, add secrets spaces, more squads, ANYTHING! But nope, most of the maps are just there to annoy your sprint meter.
4.Faction balance is non-existant. Duty>freedom>bandits>stalkers. Its really rediculous that its ALWAYS like that. No amount of increasing your faction's munitions or manpower will change that, they simply can't win a match vs a stronger faction. You have to babysit every location to defend them from enemies if you choose a weaker faction.
5.Faction wars don't work what-so-ever. I'm not going into detail about this, it simply doesn't work, there is no triggering, no logical fixes, nothing. Waiting for patch 1.5.07.
6.Not enough weapon/armor types. There really should be more choices seeing as the existing weapons are too similar, and the armors have clear cut tiers.
7.Story crapped out at the end, but I don't mind.
8.Most artifacts are crappy save for 2-3, and some of the cooler armors can't hold artifacts :(
Closin' comments~
Its a good game, but it seems to be stunted by its own creation team. GSC just can't seem to get it right. I dunno if they are lazy or just too unskilled to make the series great. I would suggest that they give/sell the stalker series to another company, but any other company would just turn it into a generic action shooter. Its like choosing to eat burned pizza, or bread for the rest of your life. Eating bread would get old quickly and be very boring, but the pizza would be hard to completely enjoy because its burnt. The burnt pizza being gsc's stalker and bread being any other companies stalker, of course. Oh well, maybe a conversion mod will make this game excellent. I'm already kinda bored with it...not much to do when faction wars don't work.