This review contains spoilers
This game is loads of fun. I've had more than a few sleepless nights because I stayed up playing this game. This game is actually a standalone mod, which builds up on another standalone mod of the original trilogy called Call of Chernobyl, which sought to fuse content of the three games while adding in extra content that was scrapped. While Call of Chernobyl is fun and I had lots of fun playing that, the game had its limitations, particularly with the engine. Anomaly sought to remedy this with the new Monolith X-Ray engine (an open-source custom fork of the X-Ray engine used for the original games). The results are absolutely wonderful, with graphics and gameplay that can rival most AAA survival FPS games (or their equivalents, I'm not sure of any modern survival horror FPS games to be fair)
Anomaly follows the premise of the STALKER series where we get to play as a random stalker of the zone, a place full of danger and profits. There are a ton of different modifiers beyond stat changes to enemies and the economy that can add a layer of difficulty to the game, such as an ironman mode and only being allowed to save in certain parts of the map and the gameplay is really immersive, where you get to feel that you are exploring a mysterious and unknown part of the world where the laws of physics seems to bend at the zone's will
Base anomaly is one thing, but thanks to the strong support of fans and a big modding community, there are tons of mods that can further enhance Anomaly, with new weapons and models, different fixes and changes on top of a whole other bunch of cool features.
Of course, this game is not absolutely perfect as (almost by virtue of the game's titles), the game has its buggy tendencies which can lead to a lot of jank and bullshit. This actually ruins one of the game's "endings" with the wishgranter (which is a monkey's paw so don't fall for it) where if you wish for the zone to disappear, it closes your game (which is technically correct). However, due to the nature of STALKER games the close does seem more like a crash, even though it was FULLY intended to happen.
(NOTE: The time played I have here is only the time I logged since I started using backloggd, as I've been playing this game for way longer but haven't been tracking the time since I launch the game via MO2)
Anomaly follows the premise of the STALKER series where we get to play as a random stalker of the zone, a place full of danger and profits. There are a ton of different modifiers beyond stat changes to enemies and the economy that can add a layer of difficulty to the game, such as an ironman mode and only being allowed to save in certain parts of the map and the gameplay is really immersive, where you get to feel that you are exploring a mysterious and unknown part of the world where the laws of physics seems to bend at the zone's will
Base anomaly is one thing, but thanks to the strong support of fans and a big modding community, there are tons of mods that can further enhance Anomaly, with new weapons and models, different fixes and changes on top of a whole other bunch of cool features.
Of course, this game is not absolutely perfect as (almost by virtue of the game's titles), the game has its buggy tendencies which can lead to a lot of jank and bullshit. This actually ruins one of the game's "endings" with the wishgranter (which is a monkey's paw so don't fall for it) where if you wish for the zone to disappear, it closes your game (which is technically correct). However, due to the nature of STALKER games the close does seem more like a crash, even though it was FULLY intended to happen.
(NOTE: The time played I have here is only the time I logged since I started using backloggd, as I've been playing this game for way longer but haven't been tracking the time since I launch the game via MO2)