This starts with a new NPC, encountered when you leave the starting bunker, who guides you through a few small quests and becomes your first ally.Īmong the list of improvements are a few features taken from Call of Pripyat, including the very nuanced gunsmithing, enabling you a lot of control over your arsenal. There is also a much kinder difficulty curve, with a series of quests in the starting area offering a much nicer ease into the challenges of the Zone and making sure you’re well learned before you venture alone into the truly dangerous areas.
Still, for a free and standalone game, it’s a small price to pay for an experience that remains as novel as Stalker. It’s still rough around the edges, with plenty of dodgy animations and awkward translation work. Developer’s Cut now brings along a level of polish that makes it more consistently enjoyable. Much of what Lost Alpha did made the core of Stalker new again, restoring the mystery fans encountered the first time they stepped out into the Zone. It manages to immerse you in this strange role within a strange world, a real delight in videogames. The new additions to the game make both these tasks exciting again. Learning the behaviour of the mutants, who roam freely under the control of the game’s much-lauded A-life simulation, is another important part of survival. They seem a lot denser than before as well, requiring a lot of careful tiptoeing as you throw bolts a few paces ahead to test for unseen dangers. Anomalies litter the hills and navigating these physics-defying traps remains a novel pleasure. Making the already-alluring Zone even stranger has made Lost Alpha a near definitive-experience for anyone looking to play the series. What they’ve brought back from the forgotten version of Shadow of Chernobyl is additional strangeness, like the weird alien growths clinging to the ceilings of abandoned shacks. The environments are much more expansive, too, as they were in the original version of Lost Alpha but now populated with entirely new NPCs and secrets. Washed out landscapes and dreary buildings remain but with a dose of lush foliage and high-res textures, the Zone is able to exist in the haunting beauty you recall instead of the now dated version from 2007. Nowhere in gaming has ever captured my imagination quite like the Zone, the radioactive and twisted world surrounding this alternate universe Chernobyl. Time hasn’t been kind to the character models but the environments, lighting and weather still have the power to make you pause.
This is easily the best-looking version of any Stalker game and certainly the most appealing for modern players. The Developer’s Cut, then, is an attempt to turn the original Lost Alpha into a polished, coherent experience.
0 kommentar(er)
