Solid, fun survival crafter.

You get to craft, build, survive, explore and always with a goal in mind: grow more tiny humans and send them into space. Building bases is fun, and you get to lay so many cables, so many cables. Kabelsalat ist gesund.

The only downsides are that there still some bugs: certain cables get unplugged if you leave the area and return, and also sometimes things will glitch down into the ground and are never seen again. I might have lost a crafter, and a few deck lights that way.

Then there is the combat: it is servicable, but the game can and will throw hundreds of little bugs and critters at you which are annoying to fight. Flame thrower is a must, and so are the electric rifles for the robot enemies.

Chill little drive and repair game, but sadly its horribly optimised. Still, kind of addicting and fun making sure your car is in tip top shape.

Playing the Stalker games was my child hood. I spent so many hours in SoC, CS and most of my hours in CoP which I think is the underrated gem of a game. I love the atmosphere, the gun fights, the world building, the horror, but most importantly all the loony characters you get to meet while exploring the zone.

So I all I wanted from a Stalker 2, is basically that same experience. And I got it. So thanks G.S.C. Gameworld!

The only major gripe I have with the game are the long walking distances between objective/quests, which do get tedious after a while. I think there the older games had a clear advantage as their maps were smaller.

I am also missing a few of the iconic guns from the old games, like the SA80 that jams the moment you pick it up and fire it, or the FS2000 and the SIG SG-500. But I'm sure mods will fix soon (if they haven't already).

Game let me hit things as a muscle mummy. 10/10

On a more serious note though: this game is good. A solid 7/10 and perhaps with a little tweaking it could reach 8/10.
I'd also like to add that I heard about this game when it went single-player/coop. I don't care about MMOs, and I also don't really care about any "drama" that this game "might be involved" in or not regarding going from an MMO to single player/coop.

First the good things:

Graphics, and sounds are good. The world itself looks and feels great, I am always reminded of the arcana-punk world of Eberron whenever I run around in the main area. I mean this game even has a few warforged running around.

The combat in this game feels good, and many of the fights are very well designed. I tried out three classes, and I generally enjoyed all of them, but especially the tanks with the massive sword felt just right to play. Nothing like hitting a boss with a big arse sword until they break.

But honestly, where this game shines the most is the other "stuff" in the game. When I was tired of running instances for crafting mats, or doing the main quest, I could just spent an hour or two and just redesign my player home with new furniture. Or go out and do some side missions, some of which are well written. If you don't grant the ghost puppy dog his final rest, you are officially a monster. And I honestly also quite enjoyed the drive to unlock cosmetics so that my character would just look awesome.

The neutral things:

The main story. Most of it feels like a vehicle to teach you game mechanics, and doesn't really come across like a "story" because of it. They do repair the overall immersion and story part with the side quests, and a few awesome secondary characters like that Reaver witch in the second area.

The balance of the characters. I leveled three characters to 30: Senja, Niss, and Venomess. I kinda feel like the big hitters - Senja - are easier to play with, as their breaking power just makes a lot of things easier. I also played Niss as a glass cannon which does great damage, but overall felt harder to play than just a "breaking power tank". I honestly felt kinda disappointed by the ranged options with Venomess felt underwhelming overall compared to the other too. Guns felt "weak" and somehow "off" compared to just using a melee weapon. However Venomess' abilities where incredibly fun to use, and after I leaned into ability damage with her instead of shooting things, I had a much better time with Venomess overall.

But now for the bad things:

This game could use some QoL improvements, especially in the UI. Marking several things for sale/decraft is a PITA, and anytime you can craft/apply multiple of things (with those left and right arrows to increase amount) I fell asleep from the slow UI input.

A certain set of quests are a ridiculous PITA to complete: the "No Honour Among Thieves" and the "Last of the Woodwen" quests take forever to complete, because RNGesus does not always give you the quest giver NPCs in the instances. And then especially "No Honour Among Thieves" was the worst of the two.

Combat wise, the main pet peeve is "the floor is lava". The devs love this mechanic too much, to the point it gets frustrating. Tone that stuff down, nerf it even, as some of the boss fights are absolute hell because of it. Looking at you Archon commander where 99% of the arena is lava at some point.

Well.

Sometimes I wish Steam would allow you to rate a game as "Meh". There is something interesting here, and for 40 hours or so (with a lot of fails and deaths), it was a decent enough survival experience. But in the end so many small things have piled up that made just go: okay, enough Occupy Mars.

You might ask yourself then why is this review positive? Because I did stick to it for 40 hours to get to the "end game", and overall the journey there was tough but rewarding. But now a brief overview:

1. Graphics: serviceable
2. Sound: serviceable
3. Controls: Janky
4. Survival: Rough, very rough, but fair.

But now here is a list of complaints (in no particular order):

The pickup to hand mechanic for most items (except cables) is just weird. It needs to go, and I much prefer to just always pick up to inventory and move things to the hotbar.

The mining part of the game has a serious progression issue. Hand mining larger rocks, and then grinding them down to small usable junks in the early game is a painfully slow process of getting mats. So much so that I only did it if absolutely necessary. It picks up once you get the truck and the small dump station, and once that comes along its easy to get 1000+ of each ore easily completely trivializing mining and building. There needs to be a step in between those two extremes. It gets even more OP once the rover comes along. Maybe add a tiny grinder were you can place one ore rock at a time in there that you have to hand carry there? Or perhaps the drone can carry one stone at a time to that tiny grinder for you? Or strap one ore rock onto the ATV instead of those pathetically small ATV storage things?

So many rooms feel utterly pointless. I built a cafeteria and never used it since you cannot really use it for its purpose as a central "food, drink and social" room. The same with the lobby. Its only real purpose is to allow you put on the heavy suit. Why can't we just put CO2 scrubber, battery rack (to charge batteries) into the lobby and use it as a sort of "prep room" before heading out of an airlock? Same with the cafeteria, you cannot place a water sink in there to fill up your water. Why devs? Why? The HQ is similarly confusing, but at least it allows you place most essentials (water, battery recharge, storage and science benches), even though where you can place what is not always clear. This needs a complete overhaul. IMHO there should be no reason to restrict where we can place what.

I hate the tablet system. Basically you have to find tablets while exploring that randomly gives you the opportunity to unlock a tech once you have enough points in said tech tree. Tablets don't unlock tech, they *allow you* to unlock tech with points you have to earn through other means first. Sorry but that RNG factor is just horrid. Easy solution: much like the pen drives which are coded to a certain tech tree, just give us coded tablets that gives us one 1 unlock option the tech tree. We can then choose were to spend that point, depending on what makes sense for us. Or remove tablets entirely and re-purpose the pen drives for that. Or even better, just steal Subnautica's mechanic of allowing us to scan those things in the wild at those random POIs to get the blueprint.

Progression in the tech tree seems horribly imbalanced as well. Once I had the medium solar panels I gained electricity points rapidly, so much so, that I was lagging behind with the tablets. Lots of points no place to put them. Botany advanced really quickly with every grown plant, while mechanics and materials were very very hard to level.

The power usage of rooms seems horribly unbalanced. Why does a long corridor need like 4kw of energy? Why does the workshop the most useful of the buildings need so much power? Why can't I manage the batteries outside remotely from inside with a terminal?

There also needs to be some touch ups in terms of QoL features. For example the hangar has power slots to charge vehicles, but you cannot fill the rover's oxygen tanks in there. Why not?

Why aren't there just generic sockets everywhere in my base where I can charge my CO2, O2 and power? Why do I have to fiddle with batteries and tanks right up to the end game? Just give us a charging station, and perhaps a better suit between the light one and the heavy one, that just makes all of that charging easier and more convenient?

Wind power seems really useless to me. Solar panels are the way to go and the new nuclear devices (kilo power) will never ever leave you wanting for power. Maybe give us steam engines that use water? Or allow us to ferment some plants to create bio fuel for burning?

Grinding down things for mats is way better to get mats but also arbitrarily locked behind tablet tech. I'd argue that needs a balance pass as well. Perhaps allow us to grind everything from the start, but how much we get is locked by tier? Maybe add some things that can only be gained by grinding POIs, while other things have to be crafted? Or even better, give us the option to grind with the rover, dump scrap, trash and wrecked buildings into the rover to deliver to a recycling station?

Storage cabinets need power. Why? Devs, why? But why? Its not a freezer, its not some magical preservation storage box, its just a cabinet with a display on it. Perhaps overthink the entire storage concept a bit. The small storage boxes are neat, but it they'd be a hundred times better if we could just place them on the walls. So many spaces above placed work benches are just free for a little shelf with a storage box on there.