It's System Shock 2, it's a classic immersive sim, and this is the best and easiest way to play it now in my opinion.

Holy hell, a game in 2025 not built on Unreal Engine 5 and not using ray tracing or real-time RTGI. Coincidentally it runs well, looks good in motion, has excellent global illumination (via a volumetric pre-calculated approach) and is stable, if not as beautiful in screenshots as something like STALKER 2. It iterates on its predecessor perfectly, it has depth and character. It feels like nothing else released since its predecessor. Good god I miss when games were good, but this feels like a wonderful reminder that no, we haven't changed, games have, and they didn't have to.

I feel as though I need to preface this with the following facts:

- STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl was one of the first 10 games I ever owned on Steam.
- I have over 300 hours in STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl
- I have over 250 hours in STALKER Clear Sky, which I own a boxed copy of.
- I have over 500 hours in STALKER Call of Pripyat, 300 hours on Steam alone.
- I have over 200 hours in STALKER GAMMA
- I've played OGSE, LURK, COMPLETE, and so many more mods for this series for over a decade.
- My system specifications are:
- > CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D
- > GPU: Nvidia RTX 4080
- > Memory: 32GB (2x 16) DDR4 4800MT/s
- > GPU Driver: 566.14

So to put it lightly, I did not get into the series from GAMMA, I didn't have any expectations for how this game was going to play beyond it being a STALKER game of some kind. The people saying the performance is fine, I don't want to say they're gaslighting, but I think many people are saying this because the FPS counter shows a high number while frame generation is enabled. Frame generation is not equivalent to the the same native framerate, and this is noticeable with input lag and accumulation based technologies like temporal anti-aliasing and other features Unreal Engine uses for many of it's effects. The real framerate is really not great, now I can run the game about 80FPS with frame generation in the majority of situations, but those with weaker systems are almost certainly going to have issues.

The thing is, at least for me, there is no scalability in the graphics settings, it isn't the GPU or the CPU that are bottlenecking here. My CPU usage is less than 50% in areas where my framerate is at it's lowest, and my GPU usage varies from 50% to 70% utilization in some cases, but this does not correlate to the framerate in any way. I checked if there were specific cores on my CPU that were maxed, but that isn't the case either. Disabling graphical effects like the entire lumen system via console commands doesn't impact framerate aside from maybe 1-2 frames per second. After an hour or so of playing and wandering back and forth between areas I will consistently have to restart the game as my framerate drops to 2-10 fps when walking near traders or other important NPCs.

On top of all the performance issues the game has incredibly flickery unpleasant lighting. This is a game that looks excellent in screenshots, but the CSM shadow resolution is very low (this is an Unreal Engine term, these are used for foliage shadows), and lumen simply doesn't offer a performant global illumination option that doesn't artifact very significantly. It would've been much smarter for GSC to utilize staged pre-baked lighting for interiors, there are tradeoffs with that approach and it's not a trivial change, but utilizing a very early technology like lumen was never going to be the right choice here in my opinion. It does sound like from their interviews they were struggling to get the game looking presentable until lumen, this, in addition to other issues I'll talk about in a minute, lead me to believe the developers simply didn't have the technical expertise to capitalize on their ambitions here.

All of that notwithstanding there are the bones of a good game here. The art direction is good, and the world is interesting to explore on the surface level, and the writing seems surprisingly good (at least as good as the previous trilogy). There are however significant issues with the way random events are handled in that they are too frequent, clearly hard linked to points of interest, and the distance from which they occur can be incredibly close to the player character. There has, in my 15 hours of playing, been many instances where I rotated my camera and NPCs, particularly monsters, would spawn within 10 feet of my character where I was just looking a second prior. The developers, as of the time of writing, have acknowledged this system is not working as intended. They have in the past referred to this system in marketing as "A-Life 2.0" and if you're reading this and already know about STALKER that might mean something to you, it did to me. This is not related to A-Life as it was in the previous games, that doesn't mean it's bad inherently or can't be comparable, but it's a different system made with clearly different development goals in mind. Regardless of how one might compare it to the previous trilogy or FarCry or Fallout or anything else, in this game, as it is currently, it is very bad.

The game is also very poorly balanced and the statistics given to the player don't seem to be totally accurate or explained well. An example I noted was being able to kill mutants with less than half the rounds as it took with the viper, now the viper does do less damage than the pistol, according to the stats it does around 10% or 15% more damage. It doesn't add up, I did careful testing of this, single round shots at close range (just baiting a boar around a table.) They didn't give us *any* numbers though, everything is on bars or explained with words like "weaker" or "strong". It's frankly a baffling choice, I mean if anything it makes it more difficult to localize, compare, and make educated decisions going into encounters. Also by default mutants absolutely shred the player, which is great, that's fine, they're supposed to do that. However they take an absolutely insane amount of damage to kill and it seems like they designed them to be dodged, but you aren't really given that kind of mobility, and weirdly make me wish we had a short dodge or a melee counter or something. I just can't understand how they landed on this design.

I bought the game, I'm not getting a refund no matter how much I might've thought about it (I literally can't), I hope they can fix this. I suspect it'll be another year before the game is in a more functional, performant, and feature-complete state.

EDIT: I finally just decided to slog through it and absolutely 100% ♥♥♥♥ this game. It's a tremendously unenjoyable experience. The final mission is complete dogwater and the I have zero faith in the developers.

As others have said this is a cut above The Chinese Room's previous games, they're doing more with the medium here than their other games. It is still at its core an interactive cinematic experience, but it is actually interactive in a way that keeps it engaging throughout. Excellent writing, absolutely recommend giving it a shot.

As of writing this DLC is the lowest rated thing the in Souls series on Steam, and it has absolutely earned that slowly dropping review score. I took time off work to play this, I didn't watch any trailers, I didn't watch any videos about it at all, I just wanted to go in and be blown away at the incredible new content. I made a new character that I leveled over the past week, a bunch of my favorite weapons maxed out, my favorite armor sets.

I started the DLC, and after a few hours I can safely say this is the worst thing From Software has made in two decades. It's beautiful, but the performance is lackluster, and the engine is really starting to show the seams from insufficient technical updates. The enemy and boss design is just frankly, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. All the worst aspects of their worst enemies are here, single frame grabs that heal the boss, 30 second long combo bey-blades, ridiculous enemy hyper armor and strike priority. I've played every game they've made except BloodBorne (Sony please), and beaten every one I've played, this just ain't it chief. It's soured me on the entire game and after over 450 hours with this being From Software's last big addition to the game, their last send, I guess it's mine too.

Starfield consistently repays your investment with mediocrity in every facet. This could be acceptable, but nearly every game excels at something, but Starfield simply excels at nothing, everything it does has been done better elsewhere. It's not so buggy that it becomes entertaining, nor so stable and well performing that it just feels good to play. Speaking of performance, not only does this game not perform well, it performs quite poorly considering the kind of graphical complexity on display, it's not unplayable (on most systems), but it is absolutely sub-par.

I don't really have time to write a long review, but I've been playing the game on and off for a few weeks, it has rock solid gameplay, good game feel overall, fantastic sound design, presentation, and writing. It's really a very good game, I can't personally see why it was reviewed so poorly on release, perhaps it was the instability on console, or maybe it was the reviewers rushing through and burning out on it, I couldn't say.