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.
The fact that they deliberately went with the Ukrainian spelling on the title told me everything I needed to know about it and how much it was banking on "we are poor Ukies doing our best uwu" to dodge criticisms.
Like, the original games were janky beyond jank, but they still had a lot of soul and clearly they were trying to make something well beyond their ability. This comes across as a cheap nostalgia grab (copying things from the original without understanding why they were like that) using the War as a huge marketing gimmick for them.
And at the end of the day, its still a broken buggy mess. So it has nothing over the originals (which you can fix easily with decade old mods) except a massive price tag, absurd harddrive space, and a seemingly absent or broken A-Life system.
I have seen a few replies in the stalker reddit about "they are in a warzone!!!" used as an excuse for the jank.
Tbh I think when your average redditor thinks about Ukraine in their minds eye they picture the whole country being little more thana cross between ww1 trenches and The Road.
If its anything less than that, then their insane bloodlust and desire to genocide the Russians isn't as valid. They need them to be actively turning the country into rubble to allow them to act the way they do.