I bought it but got a refund. I was a huge fan of the first game and enjoyed CoP well enough, though it felt like a completely different game that only shared aesthetics with the SoC.
I think I played for about an hour and in that time it felt like I was being led by the nose through the "quests". I don't know if the world opened up after that a linear "curated" experience isn't what draws me to that game. The first anomaly you went through had an obvious path so you didn't have to throw bolts, (I'm not sure that was even in the game unless I just missed it).
I'm a tard who plays PC games with a controller and there didn't appear to be aim assist which I know is lame but is also standard at this point when you use a controller in FPS (or it is there and I just suck terribly). Also the inventory interface was rough with the controller with some seriously counter-intuitive control scheme decisions.
The game was pretty enough and ran fine but just felt kind of cheaply slapped together compared to the obviously lovingly crafted first one.
And really minor complaint that there was no Russian voice available. I know there us Ukranian voice and its close enough to Russian that it doesn't matter for atmosphere, but it feels unnecessarily petty considering you know everyone who worked on the game probably spoke both.
There's a brief 1 or so hour intro and then the game opens up. You refunded the game because it had an intro? Lol.
It's still stalker. The OG stalker survived for so long because of mods. This one will get better with mods and it's already pretty cool. Performance isn't great though. You need a $2000 PC to run it smooth
If a game's intro is dragging on too long without properly engaging you, then that is a massive mark against the game and not the player. Especially if its over a fucking hour by your own admission. Kingdom Hearts 2 is still famous 20 years on for its horrendously long prologue and that's maybe 45 minutes if you never played it before.
At least the originals most of us got for 5$ or less before needing some other guy to fix it for us, and those games were breaking new ground in a lot of ways to justify being so broken.
Ehh, you do now that the reason why we got great mod for the last one was because someone stole the source code and then release it, which means that we need the same level of access in order to get that and in which case you might wonder why not just build it from scratch (I mean the engine they are using is the standard UE5 and the little I can see it does not seem to be that customised...)