Despite the wait, Stalker isn't very impressive. A lack of polish, loose controls, and many bugs are only the beginning
...I've got to say that I'm -quite- disappointed.
The experience of playing the game leaves a lot to be desired, with an unintuitive control scheme, a somewhat confusing GUI, graphics that don't really impress despite being technically proficient (and are nowhere close to the quality in Half-Life 2, despite the official Gamespot review) and the act of moving and shooting is very "unfun" to put it simply. Movement and aiming feels too loose, and shooting just doesn't have a sense of real impact. The action really feels rather humdrum compared to any other serious shooter out there, and the character you control doesn't feel the least bit powerful.
To top it off, the storyline isn't all too interesting or clear, and the "Roleplaying" elements simply boil down to doing repetitive random missions that give you cash rewards that you don't really need. NPC's aren't very interesting or fleshed out, and it's not very satisfying to interact with them if you're a "Real Roleplayer" type (like I am), and most of the dialogue in this game is actually untranslated from the native Russian, without even English subtitles to give you an idea of what going on.
Given that this -IS- supposed to be an FPS-RPG hybrid and one that's been in development for years to boot, I find this situation to be completely unacceptable, and it pretty much totally kills a large amount of the immersion that could have been had from being able to understand what people around you were saying. Plus, there is no leveling up in this game. Aside from getting better equipment, there aren't any stat-building RPG-elements in this game to speak of.
The thing that adds insult to injury however is the incredible difficulty level. I won't say that I'm the best FPS player in the world, but I've pretty much played and finished every major FPS out there on Medium and Hard difficulties, and after reading other reviews that said that the "Easy" difficulty in this game was equivalent to the "Insane" ones in other games, I started this game on the "Rookie" difficulty setting thinking it wouldn't be all -that- bad, but it turned out that I was dead wrong. This game's difficulty is brutal even on the lowest setting. I have no idea -what- the game designers were thinking when they designed it that way.
All in all, although I'm the rare gamer that is both an avid FPS -and- CRPG fan, I have to say that in both departments, Stalker falls quite short. It's very unsatisfying to play and control as an FPS, and too hard to boot, and as an RPG it's too shallow, has little to no immersion/storyline factor (especially since most of the dialogue is untranslated), has no character levelup features, and is MUCH too hard for the RPG player with slow reflexes that normally wouldn't play FPS-es. Hell, like I've said, it's too hard even for most FPS fans!
THQ and Game World really should have spent at -least- a few months polishing up this game, adding things like subtitles for the Russian Dialogue (or full English Voiceover, really, which is the norm these days) bug fixes, numerous performance optimizations (I'm shocked at how poor this game looks and runs with my new ATI X1650 Pro given how well every other game I've played recently including FEAR, Neverwinter Nights 2, and Doom 3 ran on my Geforce 6600GT), and tweaks to the controls to make them more precise at a bare minimum.