Recent reviews by Rithe

Pretty solid game. Doesn't work too well with a controller though

This game has too many bugs that penalize you with no possible way of getting S rank without restarting the entire mission and doing it over again

Hotline Miami meets stealth gameplay. That said, playing stealthy is entirely optional. You can just as easily rampage through a level with an assault rifle and hand grenades. Well worth the price and I also recommend buying and playing the remaster of the first game.

A lot of good fun an builds quite a bit on the original games arena mode

A souls-like action RPG with out loss of any resources on death. Combat is very fluid and there are upgrade paths for skills, weapons, and armor to tailor to a preferred playstyle. Beautiful environments that also reward thorough exploration as there are split paths that can lead to additional rewards. The game is primarily characterized by its boss fights and there are numerous boss encounters at that. Overall quite a bit of fun if you enjoyed NioH, God of War, Sekiro, or Dark Souls types of games.

While the game is largely faithful to its original, it could have done more to improve upon previous games.

It has all the nostalgia related content you associate with stalker but there are some pretty glaring issues with the game that will consistently take you out of it.

Enemy and NPC AI is just stupid. Enemies will shoot and throw grenades at you with pinpoint accuracy regardless of range or weapon. NPCs have significantly less interaction with the world such as not looting bodies. There also seems to be spawning issues as sometimes enemies will just pop up out of nowhere. It's not always noticable but it can be a headache.

There are areas of the map that have unexplained instantkill barriers so if you don't go online and read about them you might just wander into one while exploring near certain areas of the map and die without any warning.

A few bugs cropped up in my game that soft locked progress and forced me to roll back a save several hours in order for the game to work properly.

Boss fights are an absolute slog as you just sprint around their arena trying to battle whatever annoying gimmick they have as they just sponge up bullets like it's nothing.

In the late game all the enemies you encounter, except bandits, will have top notch weapons and armor to offset your own. It really cuts down on the feeling of being more powerful with better gear when even enemies in the beginning area have the best weapons and armor.

Hopefully fixes eventually come out for some of the mentioned issues as I cannot recommend a game that has known softlocks and has had them since day 1 and have gone on without a fix.

A decent open world RPG game that's more grounded in reality than others. Fair warning though, it plays pretty slowly in the beginning and doesn't really give you full freedom until several main story quests in. You start out as a pretty mundane character with no real skills, which makes rising up to be a prominent figure quite a bit more satisfying. Combat is a clunky and can be an absolute slog towards the end of the game. Engagements against multiple enemies and on uneven ground tend to get a bit frustrating as some attack animations will lock you into something that whiffs even though its supposed to be an automatic hit. The AI is about on par with Oblivion so prepare for weird interactions that make no sense.

Overall pretty decent, plays fairly slow, AI is buggy.

The Pros:
-Building system is quite good and fun

That is about all that I could find enjoyable for this game

The Cons:
All of this is written about playing on default difficulty settings, which I would not recommend.

-Combat is abysmal to say the least. Enemies of new areas scale up significantly faster than you will. Enemies mostly have 1 or 2 different attacks so combat itself is rather bland and is only further emphasized by a terrible stamina system that feels clunky and significantly slows down combat. Most enemies will deal a very large amount of damage in a single hit regardless of your armor, making melee combat extremely punishing if you miss a dodge or a parry. Additionally the only way to effectively recover health is combat is potions, which unfortunately have a cooldown for each usage that further slows down combat should you make a mistake and need to run in circles waiting to heal again.
-Dying is very punishing. While you can set the difficulty to be 0 penalties on death, the normal difficulty makes you drop all weapons in ADDITION to losing several levels off of all of your skills depending on what level they are at. To make this even worse. If you die in a region that is very dangerous, you essentially need to build an entirely new set of gear to reasonably get back your old gear before you die. It is almost required to play with friends so they can secure your dropped loot when you die.
-Progression feels awful. The only way to increase your max health and stamina is by eating food which is only a temporary buff that wears off and needs to constantly be refreshed. As such if you decide to play singleplayer much of your time will be dumped into making food just to not get obliterated by enemies in 1 hit. Again pushing that you need to play this game on multiplayer to break up the monotony of tasks like cooking and farming. Additionally, the gear you get doesn't scale very well with enemy damage in the game. On normal difficulty, the weakest enemies in some regions will kill you in a few hits.
-Gathering resources, mainly metal, for crafting additional gear is tedious to say the least. You can craft teleporters but they deny you the ability to teleport when carrying certain materials. Metal is already extremely heavy and requires multiple trips or a cart to move effectively. A cart is not particularly reliable unless you build a road and resource nodes aren't that big. The game seems to want to encourage you to move and make bases in each new area which is not a great alternative to loading everything up on a boat and sailing back and forth constantly.

TLDR: I do not understand how this game is rated so positively. Outside of base building the game is just a slog to play through and is horrible unless you have a group of friends to play with to make up for all the horrible game mechanics. Wouldn't recommend.

It had a bit of a rocky start and was generally handled poorly in the beginning but the recent patch has made it quite fun again instead of just tedious. Unfortunately its a bit front loaded with content and falls off into repetition pretty quick. Still a great game to play with friends

Top notch game worthy of the series, massive overhauls to old mechanics to make gameplay more fluid. A bit shorter than expected but thats made up for by increased replayability from decision based endings and additional content with NG+ and NG++