I’ve spent most of my free time this past week playing the S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat mod S.T.A.L.K.E.R Anomaly, and having one hell of a good time. I would say it’s surprising that I’ve only just now bothered to give it a go but there are two reasons for me only now giving it a try.
1: I am not a fan of modding games, with some exceptions for sandbox titles.
2: I haven’t really played Stalker to any serious degree in nearly a decade, so it’s a case of “out of sight, out of mind” so I wasn’t thinking about the games, let alone paying attention to anything related to them, so I didn’t even know this project existed until the past month.
After spending December powering through all 3 of the original games: Shadow of Chernobyl, Clear Sky, and Call of Pripyat, I decided the time was right to try some of the better regarded content made in the fan community.
This coincided with the release of True Stalker, a new CoP mod that looks to be quite the production. One that, sadly, doesn’t want to run on my system.
That’s fine, this is an older system and while it should run on my machine, I can think of quite a few reasons it would act up and I’m honestly too lazy to try to figure it out: The game isn’t going anywhere so I’ll wait till I finally get a new system running.
I decided then to try another mod of the original SoC (one which shall remain nameless for the moment) and I found it absolutely insufferable. This was supposed to be one of the best mods of the original game, but I found it to be just trash. I will provide more on that in a follow up article, but it suffices to say I wasn’t impressed and wanted something better.
Move on to Anomaly. Based on Call of Pripyat it was already starting from the best possible4 origin point, as I really like the feel of that game, but they went beyond and used a custom version of the xray engine (the game engine that the Stalker games ran on) to improve performance and capabilities, and, well, it shows.
For me, having just played the original games again and having never previously touched any mods (beyond the one which shall remain nameless) I didn’t know what to expect, but what I got was something awesome: an experience of the entire Zone as the first 3 games had established it, and then some.
In what I found to be an interesting twist, the game is fully open on customization: you can toggle many gameplay parameters to your liking, disabling or enabling some features at will, and while even then the game does have its difficult aspects compared to the core series, you quickly begin to understand how Anomaly should be played, improving my sense of immersion in a world I’ve otherwise been familiar with for over 15 years.
While it has a story mode which I feel isn’t half bad, the game really shines in its almost sandbox like nature — it’s as close as the Open World nature of the original Stalker games can go into being a sandbox, as you can play as you wish, not even enabling the story mode and simply playing the game as you wish…. even if that way includes having only one life, limited saves, and everything and anything out to kill you, something I at least want to try at least once before I burn out on these games for a while.
It’s really the potential that hooked me immediately. The fact that, once I finish the story I can go on and do whatever or, hell, start a new game as any faction and play as the bad guys, or… anything, really. The fact that there is no wrong way to really play this rendition of a game series and world that I love is just awesome.
The crazy thing to think is this mod goes back to 2018. It’s been updated, I’m running the current 1.5.2 version as I type this. It’s not perfect — not by a long shot. Several little aspects are broken slightly, it does crash on occasion, and I have had my fair share of moments where I force quit and didn’t play for the rest of the day out of frustration at something cheap happening, but all in all I’m quite happy with the mod and its presentation of the Zone.
Really I feel it’s a disservice to call it a mod. It’s a game on its own, a fan entry into Stalker made in the same way as the previous games and, to me, it’s a valid continuation for those who wish to accept its slightly peculiar storyline. If ignoring that, then at least the gameplay, as annoying as it can be to micromanage everything, feels like a proper continuation and development of the Stalker game series in and of itself.
With that said, night is falling, and I’ve still got some business to finish in Lemansk.
А ну, чики-брики и в дамки!
