Nice ideas lead to bad executions
This mod is the equivalent of bashing your head against a wall repeatedly for enjoyment and hoping at least a couple times out of ten you won't die or be knocked out from doing so.
Which is really unfortunate because its obvious the modders behind AREA have put a lot of effort into it. Especially when you look into how long the mod has been around for and how extensive the changelogs are.
There is few features with this mod that are good when you compare it to the huge bucketful of machoistic unnecessary 'muh realism' features it has; most of them you can't even turn off or make less pain inducing which is a huge reduction in my opinion of the mod.
The AI is really smart. You may even want to say too smart sometimes but personally I don't think that's a problem its something you can easily get use to. If the mod wasn't trying to make you pop a blood vessel every moment.
All the AI can climb up buildings and always seem to know where you are even if you are out of sight. This is personally really annoying - especially when you compare the inability to purchase a reasonable starter kit in the character creation menu; you can't have a basic everything you need. You must take reductions which honestly doesn't sound very realistic to me. The character creation menu would benefit from having the ability to pick a difficulty that allows you to have more money or some perks that could do that.
That said I do think the character creation menu is good. Just needs more options if you want this level of 'difficulty'.
The default 'options' for mutants are way too high especially when you take into account what I've previously said above. So I could barely get out of cordon without getting mobbed by every Tom, **** and Harry every square foot. Which when I did get to 'garbage' I got assaulted by a boar right at the spawn entrance.
The entrance which is down the road from the gate you would usually spawn at. So you've got a long walk before you even get to garbage proper to do what you wanted.
That is where sadly I closed the mod down. Because it was making me too angry. So I unfortunately can't give a reasonable go of this mod to experience a good portion of it. The mod does have a good amount of features you will see in many other popular mods both on the Slavic side of the modsphere and English. Albeit altered to this mods ethos.
I want to write more but I can't due to the aforementioned. But I will say simply that the many neat little features that usually are sprinkles on top of the ice cream are too small or on their own ineffective - from the pieces of glass inside and petrol induced flavour of this ice cream the modders served up.
I suppose if your m-o is seeing how much pain you can take before your mind tells you that this is a pleasurable experience you will be right at home with this mod. Otherwise your time would be better spent elsewhere.
I personally recommended GAMMA if you want a similar experience and a moddpack to do it.
Why? Because despite its 'hardcore' muh realism nature it is significantly more fairer to the player and once the basic systems are learned isn't that difficult of a mod but it at least does the 'muh realism' with its extra features and mechanics with a satisfying sense of accomplishment when you overcome obstacles in your way. Which I can't say about this mod because rather than going "yes I did it!" you're saying "what nonsense is it going to shove in my face now!?"
I would like to say that this mod could learn a lot from GAMMA (yes I know its a popular mod that has been shilled by youtubers who probably never touched vanilla STALKER before) or other similar modpacks or even standalone mods but I don't think the modders care.
If its not obvious already whether you should try this mod then I'll spell it out. Not worth your time. Try GAMMA if you haven't already or EFP (Escape from Pripyat). Maybe try one of the story mods that have been translated into English and aren't in Slavic runes if you can't read them. If you haven't done so already. Or maybe just basic vanilla. Because this mod is nowhere even close to capturing the actual feeling of the originals.
On the one hand, one of the most expansive mods for Soulstorm, with many fleshed-out factions and enjoyable mechanics. On the other hand, balancing can be somewhat wonky at times, but far worse, there is an inclusion of a massive amount of immersion-shattering content, from scantily-clad anime women (especially the Renegade Guard, they seem to be a homebrew insert faction of your average fanservice anime, with a mandalorian in there as well for some reason), to an insane amount of memes and unsubtle references (play a game of standard Imperial Guard, then go play the Death Korps or the Vostroyans for a good showing of that). Fun if you can look past that, but it really hurts the experience for me. IF I could have one thing, I'd ask for a submod that heavily reduces the amount of anime, if nothing else. Warhammer 40k is not Genshin Impact, please think about this.
needs more unit options. guns aren't accurate enough.
It's ok I guess.
I Opened Up The Mod And Opened Up The Settings Got Bombarded By About A Million Settings Like Abut Much. Also The Game Is BUggy
Ted
Bad level design, enemies spawning like i'm playing doom on nightmare mode and race x doesn't fight with xen aliens >:(
Kinda bad mod in general.
A couple of good scared mixed in with confusing sequences, goofy corpses, and obnoxious effects.
Why is GLaDOS less intimidating than in Portal?
Why do people and things just teleport sometimes?
Why do we jump perspectives to some no-name scientist?
Why does the horror mod of a game that had an ominous cliffhanger ending, have a happy hopeful ending?
its okay, playable, has smol storyline, n stuff.
Short.
Buggy.
Unpolished.
Much worse than the first game :(
This mod turns the game into quite the quickload fest on the intended Veteran difficulty. You die from two hits on full health + armor, and unless you have memorized every single spawn from the OG, you're going to have a very bad time. The healthkits are now completely worthless, the real healing comes only from health stations, some enemies have increased HP out of nowhere, and the lack of crosshairs with no way to properly aim is rather questionable. It's ironic that the difficulty defaults to Nightmare, too. I appreciate the version without the move bob, it was way too distracting.
All in all, if you want balanced challenge that doesn't resemble OHKO mode while focusing on the survival aspect, you should play Overthinked instead.
Sorry but this mod is more annoying than enjoyable. I was never a fan of loot, survival and crafting aspect in Stalker but thought the quest, story part would be greatly improved from CoC. Nope it's either very basic like go to x location and grab documents, talk to stalker or either recycled from vanilla games (Disable brain scorcher). The scripting is very basic for the quest and apart of it it doesn't exist at all. With the combination of degraded stalker/mutants spawn points/travel routes it makes all the map ingame feel empty. Just kill, scavenge and repeat which is not enjoyable at all. Other negative points: limited fast traveling (walking simulator), quests bugs(including completely broken quest), constant crashes.
This mod needs a complete overhaul. Frankly it is a hot mess. The idea of a full world mod, or half world in this case, is such an interesting idea but is always executed so poorly. First off, I'd recommend time uniformity with the assets, i.e. getting rid of all of the items(armors, weapons) that would not be in use at the time. You have units with chainmail and surcoats fighting with units in seventeenth century garb. It's incredibly silly to have this sort of mish-mash of assets. It's also an extreme eye-sore. The Spanish is the only one that is even halfway decent when pertaining to the early sixteenth century accuracy. I'd recommend looking to Zedpaolo's Renaissance mod and Suvarnabhumi Mahayuth for inspiration for assets concerning the European theater of your mod.
Mechanics for gunplay, weapon mods, NPCs and mutants behavior are great! Atmosphere is well set up, incredibly climatic!
But the amount of times the character is taken out of control and literally beaten in an incredibely dumb way is just... Disappointing. Playing as an experienced vet stalker and can't properly enter a room, after dealing with platoon of enemies, or when NPCs just spawn behind you, so there was no point in checking everything properly at all!
I've played the mod till the end, hoping that there will be something waiting, but I see that it was a waste of time, since nothing ot that has even mattered, because decisions were made by someone else in before.
Eh
This mod is supposed to be a remake with improvements, but unfortunately it is a demake, The parts of the catacombs until you go up to the cemetery are very decent and maybe awasome,but when you start to get to the church everything becomes a disaster, which instead of enhancing the level designs by recreating things simply makes it a tremendous downgrade, the gameplay is broken and far from entertaining it is boring Compared to the original they hunge, It's a real shame that the music is very good, the musical artist of this mod did a great job and the truth is I plan to reuse his music for an improved version of They Hunger that I'm working on
I finally felt this was a 4 after a campaign against the Aztecs that lasted for hundreds of years. I check to make sure I wasn't going crazy, but they were spawning armies out of thin air to keep it as this "Difficulty".
Was as much fun as a trench war.
El mod es muy bueno y divertido, sin embargo tiene muchos errores, como la movilidad de las unidades, e incluso posicionar a la caballeria, hablando de eso la caballeria es extremadamente lenta incluyendo el resto de las unidades y los mosquetes demasiado imprecisos, sin embargo el realismo de las unidades al formar y disparar es hermoso, incluyendo los sonidos que emiten, en mi opinion el mod no está mal, pero necesita mejoras
Pero seria posible tener un mod que unicamente mejore y de el realismo de las unidades de infanteria al disparar y marchar?
Decent writing and lore. I did the proofreading for this mod, however theres still a bunch of misspelling and stuff
Atmosphere was okay, theres a bunch of details and it looks nice in some parts. However the lighting and other details could be improved, plus some of the decals and objects are flying off certain furniture like the table in the dining room, etc. Plus the mod file size is like 2 GB when uncompressed, its because of the amfp asset pack being included in the whole mod despite it just using one short map
Also i feel like the player should walk a little faster but not to the point where he can just skip through everything and speedrun the entire mod lol, i feel like a bunch of amnesia players tend to just skip through everything instead of getting immersed. It might not be true because it's just my perspective, i havent been participating that much in the amnesia community because of dramas and whatnot, but lets not get too sidetracked
Overall pretty decent, it just needs more tension; the key-hunting and usage of notes for the lore should be kept to a minimum. Also the lack of monsters really just makes it less scarier, i was thinking maybe the author could add some interesting moments, puzzles and hallucinations; plus, dont end it with a cliffhanger (I can't spoil the rest so you probably need to play the mod for yourself)
I can see this mod having potential for a proper full-blown remake which extends the lore even further into new heights, I really wish i could see what would happen next instead of simply rolling the credits