And so about Stalker through the prism of time, on maximum difficulty, we can only say that it is a rather banal shooter, seemingly with a lot of possibilities, but with an even bigger bunch of bugs. Fortunately, there are no ways to catch a softlock, and the game can be fixed with an amateur pack of “unofficial patches.”
A huge complaint about weapons, especially at the beginning of the game, as if the guns did not have a muzzle, but a hollow. Bullets fly anywhere but the center of the crosshair 80% of the time. When in almost every other shooter, the mandatory rule for the first bullet is to fly exactly in the center. If you take a Kalash now, you’ll shoot better than a stalker who’s been in the zone after a shell shock. The general situation is taken away by the atmosphere of “post-Soviet” devastation/abandonment and renunciation of the world. Everything else is either tolerable or tolerable. I can’t name any specific good or excellent moments, except perhaps the music from the start menu.
In general, it’s worth going through it at least once, and then a couple more times in an attempt to speed it up in twenty minutes, or even less (eight seconds for the world record).