Recent reviews by Hieric

The STALKER series, and especially SoC are flawed gems. Buggy, glitchy, poorly optimized, SoC realistically *requires* you to play modded for a better experience. And yet, a gem.

What SoC does right, and why I think it's amazing, is atmosphere and immersion. SoC will make you feel like you're in someplace beautiful, and lonely, and strange. There are few other games that have made me feel compelled to seek shelter because of a thunderstorm.

This goes hand in hand with the other feature of SoC, which is that it hates you. It dares you to try and get it running smoothly. It has no use for a hand holding, danger free first mission. Your weapons throw spitballs, a wrong step will kill you, with mods the very air will turn into deadly blowouts. Maybe there's intent there, maybe its all misforture, but the zone wants you dead. In short, it's Fun, ala Dwarf Fortress.

SoC is flawed. But just try and not get sucked in.

There are flashes of what this game could be. The good: a vastness of scale, where you're surrounded by huge battles on the ground and in the air. It's free.

The bad: It needs a lesson in design from Valve. For players new to PS, expect no clear indictations of what to do, tactics to use, where to go. There's a video tutorial for parts of the game, which I did not find particularly helpful. The UI is not bad, but is more confusing than it needs to be and gets in your way. Social functions and game settings (besides video) are unavailable while not connected to a server, which might explain why there are so many idlers at spawn.

It's one of those only good if everyone is using voice chat and working as a team, otherwise expect frustration.

It's a simple game; run through levels beating up monsters and collecting money and items. This repeats itself for level after level....and just as it's starting to get old, it's done.

That's when you find yourself starting a new run, because that simple game sucked you in with it's charming writing, art, voice acting, everything. The character handles perfectly with a controller. Every weapon and drink is useful, find those that work with your playstyle, or tailor your loadout to the level you're playing. All that and a very well done ending. PLAY THE GAME ALREADY.

It has guns, rocket launchers, swords, and hundreds of monsters to use them on. What else do you want?