S.T.A.L.K.E.R. S.U.C.K.S.

***Warning: Ranting and Spoilers follow***




I finally managed to play Stalker to the end, and I honestly can’t recall when I last felt so disappointed in game after all the excessive waiting and all the praises I heard about it.
Bugs:
The game, even after the latest patch installed, tends to crash to the desktop-or do horrible swapping on every damned level despite the fact that the graphics were set to minimum and my machine has 1 Gb of RAM installed, in company of a GeForce Go 7400. After Googleing it up, it seems I was not alone with this problem. At the duty farmstead after the camp elimination and at Prijpaty following the squad of Stalkers the leader both got shot down- yet the game showed I should return to/follow them even after them being dead… and the problem remained after reloads, too. Ridiculous. Sometimes enemies tend to disappear after being shot down, and my favorite bug is when I save just after eliminating an enemy… it simply respawns every time after I load the savegame, to the effect of I getting shot in the back unless I manage to kill the zombie bastard turning aroud madly and shooting without aiming, only hoping to be faster in killing him than he does me. I also almost run out of ammunition after turning off the Brain Schorcher, despite the fact that I loaded up totally with ammunition at the bar… most enemies tend to drop about 8 pieces of ammunition for the “big guns”, and it forced me to clown around with my knife during the onslaught… pathetic. And I didn’t even mention how all the time my marker disappeared from the map randomly, only to come back after restarting the whole game, and how jawbroken-looking NPC’s tended to be during talking totally out of lipsync. At least it brought back nostalgic memories from Commandos 1, back from 1998. 
At entering one level, the game simply spawns you in front of 10 enemies, only to be shot down unless you are lucky to grab the right second to run after the intensive loading…way to go, dear level designers.
Many levels of the game feel rushed, and the overall feeling of the game is too linear and short–despite the side missions- the fact that the game is divided into smaller maps was pretty disappointing, I was expecting something like in Morrowind 3. More so, I felt the story to be unepic, incoherent and badly told which leads to my last and biggest problem…

The ending.

So I climbed to the Wish Granter (after running around in circles on the damned last level, and wished, only having a perfect reputation to end up being blind.

WHAT?

Oooooh yes, my friend told me what I was “supposed” to do to get a proper ending.
The game is simply being a total dickwad expecting you to pick up a totally uninteresting looking, and pretty damn hidden quest disguised as a side mission to get to the “happy ending”.
What on Earth were the developers thinking?

This game is the biggest letdown in recent years for me.



Overall score: 73%