Reviews - S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

64 bit x-ray engine
HD modells
HD maps
HD HD
No lag
No CTD
Do i need to tell more?

Very VERY polished mod.
The 64bit engine is amazing. I can run stalker at solid 60+fps on a clevo now.
Textures and models are really beautiful. The AI is less uber powered than Last Day but stays dangerous at the same time.

Another good point? The economy! Reworked and for the better... cause expensive things like armor and such are still expensive so you have a nice curve of grind for money but you're not wasting it in zone produced bread worth 3000+ rubbles.

I recommend this for it's general feeling of a more polished and clean mod than most of the COM clones (imo).

Credits where it's due, the mod patches are put into a new, separated folder and in individual .db files which is, for me, a very cool option to not loose tracks of changes and merges if you need to devel an addon for this mod. Clearly what most of the mod teams should do. Huge bravo for this sergedp.

One of the only thing I would consider "bad" for this mod is also it's strength: the many texture packs included. Sometimes I must say I miss the Misery/Last Day feeling on some textures like bushes/trees/grass/general feeling/structures.

Everything is much more detailed now but also more vibrant and colorful. It has it's own style. Maybe one day an optional pack for original architecture/foliage/general textures from Last Day? I may do it if I have some time. For the people seeking the miserable feeling of a dying zone.

Anyway great job on this mod. It's been a while since the last time I stopped on a mod and played more than 20 hours without switching back to another one...

Ethic stuff/disclosure: I helped with some porting of sound files related to stealth gameplay capabilities in patch 3.

64-bit engine is truly a revolution - it removes at least 50% of crashes and stuttering you would encounter in Last Day mod pack.
When you use at least DirectX 10 as renderer the visuals are very pretty. Especially noticeable on a sunny in-game day.
Although Last Day itself is a horrid shitfest, because made by drunk russian teens, the one most important thing I like about Anomaly mod pack is that the creator does his best to solve any problems you encounter, no matter if engine related or poor script, he solves them all quick.
Shiny blows and whistles matter null if stability null.
All this combined puts all the rest of STALKER mod packs into trash bin; I prefer stable full release and none of that early access pre-alpha **** made by alcoholics and drug addicts.

One of the best mod packs out to play and the support from searge is amazing. It's been a long time since i saw something like that!

Greatest freeplay mod so far, it's balanced in the right way, hard in the right way and you don't need the strongest assault rifle to survive, a 9x19 pistol can do the job most of the times.

Everything is done just the right way with a very slight polishing need.

Definitely the best S.T.A.L.K.E.R mod pack i have played. The amount of dedication from the Devs to fix bugs and keep adding content is amazing. If your looking for a very good preforming S.T.A.L.K.E.R Mod pack this is what your looking for. I have a somewhat decent system and i have no problem runing it at max settings. Now nothings perfect and i don't expect it to be since it is on the xray engine (very much improved though).

All the technical upgrades are great, a 64 bit engine with HD assets and superb stability is incredible, but they're held back by the horrendous gameplay design choices they've made. My review would've been a 5 or a 6 but this mod is so grossly overrated I feel it needs the low score for the average to budge.

•Guy shoots 250 bullets at you only stopping for reloads, but when you get his loot he had an unusable rifle with a blown barrel, broken receiver, rotten wood stock, etc. That's beyond loot balance, and just stepping into outright dumb territory.

•Enemy AI is on drugs, they'll always instantly peek & shoot first no matter their distance to walls, death cam easily shows them tracking through walls as well. None of this was the case on the original games, not even in Master difficulty.

•On the other hand, ally AI is probably dumber than mutants, they'll rush into danger, friendly fire you, never use cover, oh, and their guns DO JAM if you give them trash ones. They also keep their lamps on when you tell them to stealth, only to be seen and again rush into the enemy.

•Headshots don't kill unarmored enemies. Not even sure why they'll make it this way to be honest, even a .22 would do the job if you're wearing a hoodie, a plastic gas mask, and with 9mm you'd even easily go through the glass front of a SEVA.

•The parts/repair system is just convoluted, unusable, expensive trash. You need repair tools to repair the parts, which requires a vice, and then another set of tools to install the part in a weapon, which still requires a vice. Even with brand new parts, you can't get to full condition, that requires oils and lubes. If you go through all that, you'll probably spend 2x the amount of a new gun, unless you wait 2 years to loot all parts and finding appropriate tools as loot. Suits are mostly the same just more expensive.

•You found an artifact in a body? you need to put it in your backpack first, to taste the cancer, only then can you put it in a container. You found an artifact in an anomaly? buy a lottery ticket, because most times anomalies only spawn junk (as in literal junk, not just bad artifacts).

•Crafting system is even more of a joke. You disassemble literal piles of junk electronics and acquire exclusive parts off factions (after grinding goodwill) to make binoculars... or just buy them for the price of a water bottle. If you grind enough trash it might save a few bucks down the line with expensive upgrades, but that's really piles of junk you need to find and disassemble.

•The crafting system along with the repair system create huge and unnecessary parts bloat

•The story is absolutely subpar and you're still forced to babysit dumb AIs.

•Red forest is trash, and so are the new maps. I don't accept quest or go to darkscape anymore, it's really just ugly, empty and badly designed.

•Mutants and outfits ripped from other games kill immersion, and any sort of realism too sometimes.

•Not only did they turn the zone into its youtube meme version, they turned radiation into its mass media version as well. Stepped off the path? red dose, apply pills immediately or die.

•Speaking of meme mutants, most mutants one-hit you, supported by funny mechanics such like 20 meter long pounces, which used to be reserved for the chimera, but now cats and stolen "lurkers" also use. Most mutants process their hit before they do an animation, and most also have huge hitboxes completely unrelated to whatever movement they're performing. They also have 0 cooldown between hits, enjoy pseudodogs and tushkanos attacking you 3 times in a single second, simulating a one-hit but giving the devs the technical ground to say its not a one hit.

•Some of the solutions to problems THEY THEMSELVES created are incredibly dumb: NPCs are immune to anomalies and emissions, "essentials", which didn't exist in the base game but now do, are just stationary turret bullet hoses, and ally NPCs are magically resilient to mutant attacks just to survive.

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.

positive: stability.
negative: mediocre alife, useless mechanics (workbench), essential npcs too weak to take care of themselves, 90% of the artifacts are useless, npcs are not affected by emissions or anomalies they can enter and exit them without protection or any detector, the npc can shoot you through the bushes, and a long etc ... a mod that lacks immersion and uninspired. one more of many.

Solid, stable mod pack based around Last Day that improves visuals, audio, performance, and economy. If your rig is up to the task, this is the way to play S.T.A.L.K.E.R.