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

I naturally dislike Misery and Mods that incorporate elements from it, such as Anomaly. However, I do like that you can change progression with the the F1 menu key while playing. This fully changed iteration of CoC turned CoM turned Last Day turned Anomaly is very interesting to say the least.

Update. It's good.

What I Liked.

-The Gunplay is what I expected and more. Just because an Exo is rated Level 4 doesn't mean you can't put down an Stalker in an Exoskeleton with a MP5SD. It's very different as the full combat model via damages vs. Misery's crazy Bandit Sponges in Leather coats.
-Anomalies are somewhat okay but you'll find that Burnt Fuzz's are overly ridiculous, as they can hit you through the floor if you are above them. Burners are on my second most hated anomalies thus far. Everything else is relatively easy to avoid.
-To be able to change progression to make sense or to make the world more immersive. (Play as Monolith with lower prices and cheaper upgrades or have everything be cheaper but upgrades be very expensive to decide to keep a particular shooter/suit)

What I disliked.
-Mutants are a mixed bag, but what I didn't like was the new Poltergeists in X-18. Damaging through walls while wearing a Light Assault Vest and Screen helmet while the normal Poltergeists are throwing things at me is unbalanced. Also hate the BS Psy Auras some mutants have, Only mutant that should have Psy Auras are Controllers imho.
-Artifacts are not really that useful, only good for completing the artifact quests. The junkifacts are also pointless only netting 1-4k each.

Everything else was peachy so I give Anomaly my rating of 5 With the idea 5 meaning average.

Bloated mod pack with no original content, absent gameplay balance, absent atmosphere. 64 bit engine is a dubious feature. Overrated mod.

Looks great, runs mostly stable, atmosphere and sound design are on point but that's it.

Played it for several hours and other than looks and stability it comes nowhere close to CoC and I honestly don't get the hype about this mod.
Tbh many aspects of it are just bad in my opinion.

You know, warfare sounds great on paper but mostly just doesn't work the way you'd imagine it and together with the all out war and dynamic faction relations options turned on the whole thing just becomes a clusterfuck. The A.I. of the faction
you choose always starts out as neutral (except Monolith, they're the only one's treating their boys as friendly from the start) and doesn't give a **** about you, neither do they when relations suddenly change and you're being attacked by someone they now consider friendly or neutral. It just doesn't work to any kind of real satisfaction. The NPCS and the worlds "hubs" feel bland and boring. Everyone says the same, they tend to run around absolutely clueless and it doesn't feel very alive tbh. Everyone's just there and occasionally shooting at something, doesn't matter if 2 guys sit around a campfire in some level somewhere else as long as there are a dozen of others that behave like they barely exist. This also used to feel way better in other mods.

No matter which alife options you choose, mutants (except for certain hotspots) have become almost to none-existant in some areas. It's more about shooting other stalkers now as it seems and this is where things really start to suck. Where are the bloodsuckers that roamed the buildings in dead city @? Pseudo-Giants wreaking havoc over several levels? The snorks in Limansk? Tushkanos in cellars? And no, 10 ******* pseudo-dogs in the Red Forest don't make up for that. The new additions like the lurkers can't make up for the general lack of mutants either, even if their design as weaker chimeras seems quite cool.

And well, then there is the "realistic" combat. I won't rant about the aim, I've always been okay
with it, even in the base game. But there's just a lot of other things no one seems to give a **** about and these things just make the general gameplay loop frustrating.
Enemies are bullet-spongy as all hell, never tend to bleed out, nor do they have to use bandages. They always manage to spot and track you down. And the player? Put 10 ******* bullets in the chest of a bandit whose protection is made out to be far worse than yours (atleast thats what stats and conditions of the enemies gear tell you) and watch him hipfire you right in the ******* face, doesn't matter if you die right on the spot, you'll bleed to death from every single scratch anyway since no one seems to have even something like bandages with them. You can call this hardcore all you want, but it's just cheap. Loot from firefights is unsatisfying and unrewarding as everything is in a ******-up condition but still, I haven't seen the A.I. once having to reload one of their ****** guns because it jammed, while a Glock at 70% condition has regular jamming, which is ******* ridicoulus enough. Like, wtf, even ammo can be damaged and old now, like who the **** asked
for that or what sense does it make if you can't even sell that anymore.

I think unrewarding is the right term to sum up the gameplay loop here.

"But the gameplay is highly customizable". No, it isn't. Most sliders seem to do jackshit. Weapon degradation, population density, warfare settings etc., etc. all seem to have barely any effect on anything and even if, barely positive. And yes, a few have an impact on gameplay, thanks for letting me sprint freely now. But then again, things like "Player Protection" don't matter,
because you're already gonna die and bleed out in a few hits from whatever weapon, even
if the setting is already put to good. Setting it to "Great" barely helps and just hurts your ego.

You know, Misery was always mean to the player, but never came across as cheap as this. Neither did Call of Chernobyl.

I'd give it not even 2 points, if it weren't for the great looks and all the effort that was put into the atmosphere/sound design etc., gotta give credit where credit is due, but everything else, just no, thank you.

I have been playing Stalker Anomaly (with addons) for almost half a year now and since then this mod has kept me away from playing ANY OTHER GAME. It is the #1 mod for a reason.

The mod combines the maps of all three Stalker games + the maps that were cut from the first game and thus offers a large world to explore. Not only that, each area has its own character and offers much to discover, be it a small town, a dense forest or everything in between.

The story (if you want to play it), although not perfect imo, makes sense and as a sequel to Stalker Call of Prypjat it adds nicely to the whole story of the Stalker universe. So far I have been playing story mode only but when finished I gotta try the other modes!

The development team did a great job on the Alife. The zone, although being hostile and deadly to almost every living creature, really feels alive. Stalkers as well as mutants can be encountered in a very healthy frequncy. The zone is not dead nor overcrowded. Of course you can tweak that.

Speaking of tweaking (i'm a poet lol): when it comes to customizing the gameplay Stalker Anomaly offers many settings to tweak almost every aspect of the game.
The modding community has even more to offer. There are so many different and wonderful addons which change or ad things that make Stalker Anomaly even better then it already is. Don't know if it's appropriate to say but I'm not gonna lie, vanilla Anomaly is very good, but modded Anomaly is almost perfect.

All in all the Stalker Anomaly experience (+addons) is a full 10/10.

There is a reason why this is the single most popular mod in Moddb: it's the best thing that happened to Stalker so far. It gets the best of two worlds: the "complete" zone that Call of Chernobyl brought to us, and the complexity of Misery. Anomaly owns a lot to them, but surpasses both: vanilla CoC is too shallow for experienced players, and Misery just tries too hard to be miserable.

The biggest asset of Anomaly, compared to all other mods I've played (and I played thousands of Stalker hours) is simple: choice. Out-of-the-box, the mod allows you to play the way you wish. Want to just freeplay for a while on a weekday night? Choose forgiving settings of progression and gameplay and have fun. But now, want to spend a weekend trying to survive and perhaps have a good jacket and a 70's rifle by Sunday night? Crank up the difficulty and have fun (or not). Moreover, tweak the settings as you wish. For instance, I like to play as Survivalist, but with Scavenger values for quest rewards, artifact spawning and finding stashes, to reward exploration and make quest worth the trouble.

Another pleasant surprise for me was that Story Mode was actually worthwhile (besides the random "go to the other side of the map to talk with the trader" stuff - just forget it, there isn't payoff at the end). But the three main story lines were well written and not far from the vanilla games in quality (well, they were never thaaat good). The best thing of the story is that it gives you things to do on several locations that otherwise are relatively uninteresting for freeplay. Not that I would play it that often: I'm really sick of turning off the Miracle Machine and Brain Scorcher for the 1000 time. But try to finish them at least once, as a bonus you unlock some new factions for freeplay.

Now, there are some issues, naturally. The item bloating is scaring at first, but there is an inventory tab system that helps you to organize your stuff (I discovered it just recently and it changed my life). Cooking is really unbalanced and hardly worth the trouble. And then there is the nemesis of most players, the extremely over-complicated repair and crafting system. It took me ages to get into it, and even now I still don't bother with some parts of it. However, choice here is great: you can just adjust the economy and completely ignore crafting and weapon/armor parts. Sell everything and stay just with repair kits. I suggest you to do this in the first playthroughs, otherwise you could be overwhelmed. But give it a try after a time: the first time you build a neat rifle from scrap is quite rewarding.

I also enjoy the level of customization, because I've spent hours tweaking files of other mods to remove item use animations, annoying dying and breathing sounds and so on. Here you can turn them off directly in the menu. Even the Debug menu is organized and easy to use (yeah, just spawn a box at Clear Sky base). Naturally, there is still plenty of customization possible through addons. Stability and performance is great, I had 0 crashes after hundreds of hours, and can make the game looks pretty even in a gaming laptop.

Thus, I cannot recommend enough this mod. A while ago I thought CoC was the definitive Stalker experience, but Anomaly is much more. Better than this, just if one day somebody merges the polished and enticing gameplay of Anomaly with the detailed and sprawling maps of Lost Alpha (putting more life on them, naturally). This may not happen before the Apocalypse, but until there I hope Anomaly keeps being developed and improved.

This is a decent fun, mainly when you just wander around doing you own stuff, sometimes progress the story a bit, or not, w/e, but very buggy and gameplaywise inconsistent. First 2 attempts to start a new story mode game caused ctds, 3rd worked, but the rookie vilage got under attack by exo-outfitted military squad and was wiped right away, me included, 4th attempt was finaly succesful.
I get this big transparent rectangle on the screen anytime I move or look around, something is fked with motion blur no matter what value is used (all dx options, 11 is least noticeable). Only thing to make it even less noticeable is to have the game really dark.
Sky on clear weather is like looking into a floodlight. Had to disable all bright weathers.
Most guns are utter crap, do not upgrade anything before you fix and try it out on someone first and save often even during the upgradind, some upgrades are worse to have than not.
Some things are extremely op, like controler attacks, most monster dog/cat/tushkano/snork movement speed do not fit the animation so they slide around, glitch a lot and their attack ranges make them strike through walls or not hit at all and just push you away.
AI is worse than original, first it is comletely blind and oblivious to anything around them, many times I had enemied factions sharing camps till something made them turn around and then they rather shoot each other than w/e attacked them (free loot), or they turn full eagle eye shotgun sniper mode and f you up halfway cross the map.
That stupid melee attack makes Ai unable to shoot/hit anything in close proximity, they just stand there in their exosuits, gun in hand, staring into the pseudodogs eyes as it slowly, very, very slowly bites them to death.
Pseudodogs can bite from 2ft away. (not the jump attact, normal bite)
Many ctds on both quick and normal load or level transit in military warehouses after I did the barrier defence q, I had to load the autosave after the crash to get away from there over and over till the thing causing despawned on emision.
Ctds on wishgranter riches of the zone option.
In Zaton some zombies wiped sevchenko and Spartacus died, since then the whole map if looking towards the ship lag af.
Respawn speeds are ridiculously fast.
Sleep deprivation option is bad as you need 4-5 meals/day, food makes you sleepy and 5 hour nap make you starve to death-loosing hp and medkit to refill hp will make you sleepy and sleeping makes you hungry... Better have it off.
After end credits the option to return to game causes ctd. (agreement choice).
Edit:
Warfare is a ******* mess. Give it half an hour and monolith owns half of the whole map, play as monolith and every single map will in 5-10 minutes get overspawned with your squads, endless streems of friendly zombies and some randoms in the mix. There are firefights everywhere, then something glitches, map starts to lag and whole game starts crashing like a ************ on crack.
Setting starting area does not work for monolith, tried two new games, both set to prip spawn. One threw me into cs base in swamps and second into radar, that was not that bad.
In the begining I thought all those setting available in the mod were a good thing, but it creates infinite amount of possible problems and troubleshooting is almost impossible.

So immersive, probably one of the best games i ever played......and it is free, well, it has some bugs and frustating ones, however this is still awesome.

Heya fellows!
This review is going to be a little anecdotal. With that in mind, read on if you wish.
Anomaly has undergone almost two years of development and, after watching it grow over time, I feel ready to write something about it.

I first came across this mod in May 2018, when it was still just Searge's personal collection of tweaks for Last Day (with the plot twist that he also got it to run on a fancy x64 bit engine - something that was revolutionary for Stalker at the time).
Back then, I was trying out various Stalker mods like OGSE, Wind of Time and was even looking forward to Dead Air.
Last Day felt promising, but had way too many issues with it, so I was eager to see what Searge was doing when he first announced Anomaly.
That Searge got out a patch so quickly to let even incredibly low-end systems (like mine) play his mod is a testament to the care he has for the community as a whole. Despite originally wanting to design the mod for higher-end specs, ultimately he did what'd make the most people happy in the long run.

A lot has changed since then, so here's some things to keep in mind:

- The reviews on damage balance from 2018 may not be the most accurate. Damage and protection in Anomaly has changed much since then. Enemies are tougher, but if you fight sensibly and don't try to bum-rush hordes of people on your own, you should have an easy time. Something to bear in mind is that it tends to be better to go for cheaper and more reliable weapons. Going for the gun with the most damage tends to be highly impractical if it uses an uncommon ammo, for instance, and this is a decision one needs to consider carefully when choosing their weapon.

- Economy is actually rather good. One of my pet peeves with Last Day was how broken its economy was, and Anomaly sorted that out rather admirably. Sure, there's a few overcosted items, and a few exploits, but it's still practically perfect in comparison to Last Day. And still nice enough when compared to contemporary stalker mods. Main weaknesses in Anomaly are how tough it can be to make money off (or even use!) artefacts compared to CoP. Outfit drops also let you circumvent the Goodwill system this mod has if you have enough money.
Still, dynamic tasks are varied and are becoming more interesting as the mod develops. Combined with A-Life, this ensures even the grindier aspects of the game come with all sorts of surprises and unique occurences.

- Beautiful trees, lights and skyboxes! Anomaly's map makers and weather editors have outdone themselves by bringing the Zone to life, using photographs of the real Chernobyl as reference. Locations feel a lot more alive visually. One truly has the sense that everything is connected, rather than simply being on a square map in an empty void. Game looks significantly better than vanilla Stalker on top of running a hell of a lot smoother.

- Ye Gods, the Options! The main strength of Anomaly is how many options it gives you - whether it be the main menu or the gameplay. There's multiple difficulty settings that you can control and tweak to your liking to help create the Zone environment that you always envisioned. In the game itself, one often has room to get creative with how an objective is achieved.

- Disguises! You can engage in all sorts of hilarious shenanigans through the power of donning a faction's armour and pretending to be them. While it can be easy to mess it up, when done properly you can get away with a lot of subterfuge. This not only opens up new ways to perform certain tasks, but it also feels very, very satisfying.

- Quests. One issue I had, especially coming from OGSE or even Dead Air, is that Anomaly's quests tend to be linear in and of themselves. Even though the sandbox nature of the mod means there's still a surprising number of ways to approach any given task, and you have a lot of freedom as to which tasks you perform, this issue becomes quite apparent in the main questlines, where the first two only have one real outcome. For example, if you agree to collect documents for a person, then that is what you do - you can't hand them off to another faction or information broker. If you are contracted to hunt down someone, then that is what you do. You aren't able to subvert the objective by helping the target hide or go underground (if you could, disguises would be even more fun). There are some wonderful exceptions, of course (especially in Operation Afterglow and Hollow Boundaries - Anomaly's third and fourth main quests, respectively), but not nearly enough for me to bump the mod into the 9/10 or 10/10 categories yet. But this is less of a criticism and more of me just being spoiled because I love RPGs and thus love options when it comes to quest resolution (something I feel OGSE did near-perfectly, despite the HUGE amount of backtracking OGSE has).

Overall, this is one of my favourite Stalker mods, and easily my favourite variant of CoC by far! Highly recommend it to everyone!
-RFC

After extensive playthroughs of Call of Chernobyl 1.4, 1.5, Last Day, and all the original titles … Anomaly is my favorite. I enjoy a challenge. Last Day made me a better Stalker with it’s punishing difficulty and meager payouts so I was worried that Anomaly would be too easy … but it’s not … it’s just … BALANCED.

I’m having fun in ways I hadn’t anticipated because a surprise encounter isn’t always a death sentence like it was in Last Day. Anomaly made me realize that Last Day forced me to save-scum through so many situations that it ended up breaking the experience into artificial chunks. Chunks where I had to play perfectly, exploit the AI, know where the enemy is, how many of them there are, and experiment with different strategies again n’ again n’ again until I was happy with the outcome … which can be a rewarding “Dark Souls” type of experience but … Anomaly feels more “REAL.” There is a better sense of progression and fluidity here because … I’m still dying … but to use a tennis analogy … more of my loses feel like exciting “rallies” rather than my opponent slamming and acing me. So ultimately … I’m having more fun, and it’s ironic that I’m playing more cautiously in Anomaly than I did in Last Day because I’m not in that fatalistic F9 mindset. Anomaly is still a subjectively difficult Stalker game but if I’m prepared, careful, and quick … I might not need F9 … and that creates tension. So in Anomaly I’m using more med-kits, sucking up repair costs, and just moving on after less-than-ideal scenarios which has allowed me to settle in and role-play the experience more than I ever could in Last Day. I feel less like “The Perfect Stalker” and more like a “Survivor.”

At first I was worried about how payouts are generally 60%+ more for missions and artifacts and weapon drops are more generous than they were in Last Day … I was worried my climb to the top would be too quick … but … it hasn’t been. The overall prices for things hasn’t changed much … so there is still a lot to buy and upgrade if you want to experiment with different loadouts and become a zone legend ;)

TLDR:
- My favorite CoC inspired mod.
- Beautiful version of the Zone
- Great balance and gameplay
- Runs smooth
- No crashes for the first 20+ hours … very few in the next 40+
- Developer seems motivated, capable, and approachable.

Looking at this mod I thought this is exactly how I envisioned my perfect Stalker game. But playing it, sadly I have to say I'm disappointed. From having to eat/drink every hour to sneaking up on a bandit at night just for him to 180noscope me from 100 meters, I have to say I'm disappointed. Will update with more playtime.