Reviews - gunishmentguy

I've played stalker for a long time, since I picked up a $7 dusty boxed copy of the SoC from Best Buy when I was 14. I've played all three games vanilla, and modded and beat them all to the end. My history of playing mods range from something as innocuous as ZRP to expansive overhauls like Misery or any number of the current CoC standalone mods. I only say this to establish that I believe I've tried a pretty representative sample of all that the stalker modding scene has to offer, as well as being able to compare them to the vanilla games.

Despite having played such a wide variety of mods, I have to say Anomaly is probably my current favorite overall. Anomaly took the sandbox of CoC and it's predecessor Last Day and expanded and improved on all of their features in nearly every way. In addition, Anomaly has a wide variety of add-ons and has a modularity that allows you to tweak it to your personal taste. My current Anomaly is tweaked to be a high risk, high reward kind of experience with various add-ons from many modders and a few tiny ones I've sprinkled in myself. But you could tweak it to be a much easier or much harder game than I've made it to be with not just additional add-ons, but the plethora of options provided out of the box. Damage modifiers, spawn rates, fast travel, squad behavior, the nature of the Zone itself and many others I probably missed is all able to be changed

When CoC was first dropped, I thought it would be the quintessential stalker sandbox, but Anomaly is the experience I wanted and even more due to all of the options you have at your fingertips. And this is all built on the first stable 64-bit build of the X-ray engine. Anomaly has more features, is more moddable, more stable and runs better than almost all of it's peers. Anomaly is the current torchbearer of the stalker modding scene, and may be into the foreseeable future if development continues to be steady.

Anomaly definitely had many more positives than negatives, but there are still flaws worth pointing out. Anomaly may be too easy for some players that are looking for a hardcore experience like Misery for CoP, it can be tweaked to be pretty damn difficult but I doubt you could match the masochistic nature of Misery. If you want the #1 most hardcore stalker experience, you won't find it here. I personally don't tend to enjoy that kind of difficulty, but I know others do, so this is not for those stalkers that want their time in the zone to be as difficult as possible. Additionally, the story line is pretty weak like most other CoC based mods. If you want a strong narrative I would suggest you play Road to the North instead. Lastly, the modular nature of Anomaly can work against you if you run a lot of mods that increase loot drops or general difficulty tweaks that make the game easier without also compensating with increasing difficulty elsewhere. You might end up with an absurdly easy playthrough. Otherwise Anomaly is just about the best stalker sandbox experience out there at the moment.