Bravo!
We all chase the feeling of starting a new game, then falling in love with it, only for it to end so shortly, leaving you wondering what could've you done differently?

The entirety of this game is a one big plot twist, lots of questions left unanswered, but in the end you'll understand everything, or nothing, depending on how immersed you were in your play through.

Graphics: 9.5/10
Story: 10/10
Soundtrack: 10/10

Its sad to see another gem go, I'll probably go back to grinding some of my other games, but for now my itch for another excellent story game has been satisfied.

Doing a bit of a gamble writing an early review, but there's no better time to write one before patches roll in. It takes quite a long time to settle in the game if its your first Stalker game (it was for me), but once you move past the performance issues, its not so bad after all.

I'm playing on stalker difficulty, 1440p, FPS around 100 avg, settings medium with textures set to high, dlss balanced and FSR on. Crashes are mild, they happen yes and sometimes you're set back some 20 minutes, but I've yet to run into an actual game breaking bug. Trading is fine, brightness is okay and most issues are resolved by reloading the save file.

I'm enjoying the game a lot, it feels kinda stalled at times, story may feel overwhelming with all the names and different quests. Since its UE5, graphics look awesome whether you turn them to low or high, it doesn't matter. UA voice acting is lovely, ENG subs could've been better.

Buy it now or buy it on a sale, or wait for patches, currently the game is fine as is apart from the mentioned performance issues and mild bugs. And I don't want to hear people whining about FPS, I have a damn 3060 ti and its fine, learn to customize settings and maybe tune your hardware a bit.

I'll update the review after I finish the story. Again, its not as bad as everyone makes it sound like.
Happy hunting!

Edit: If this game wasn't riddled with 'fake' anomalies aka glitches and it wouldn't crash randomly (I count like 50'ish crashes for me), I'd give it GOTY and be done, no voting even needed. Stalker is metro on steroids, except here you don't even have to follow the story. Go in the zone and have fun, period.

But otherwise I voted Metaphor as GOTY.