In the Zone, life is cheap and good guns are expensive. If someone's bragging that they just found a Gauss rifle on a body? Well, you might want to keep that name in mind, and perhaps liberate them of their new treasure. Be ready to run and react, or just keep an eye on the online chatter. Troops are on the march, and mutants hunt in packs out in the wild. While some quest NPCs are invulnerable and factions won't expand too far outside their borders in story mode, there's a lot more happening. The sense that there's more going on with Anomaly isn't just smoke and mirrors. It's always nice to hear that the locals are impressed by my mutant-hunting skills. While you sadly can't join in on the shitposting yourself, your exploits will be reflected in the chatter. There's also a constant feed of who was found dead and what did them in, usually followed up by whatever cool items were found on the body. Sometimes you'll see calls for support, reports of people taken hostage or even just job postings. Some characters will comment on the weather, others will dutifully share reports of where they've heard gunfire and monsters. And yes, there is a bandit radio station. One other cute feature of the PDA is a radio tuner, letting you listen to several channels, including one that runs authentic late 80s/early 90s post-Soviet pop hits. Personal ads in a post-nuclear (and extremely haunted) hellscape just adds another layer of strained humanity to Anomaly. You can even walk up to someone and say 'yeah, I saw your job posting online' and take work that way. It makes an astonishing amount of difference, and gives you a real sense of activity and life outside of your field of view. So long as your PDA is powered, you get a constant feed of info from a zone-wide chat channel, filled with dynamic chatter and observations from the hundreds of NPCs around. But the biggest change is that everyone's using Discord now. Some areas have been tweaked and rearranged, and overgrowth feels denser in places. Not that Anomaly will be entirely familiar to returning veterans, though, as the passing of time has left its mark on the Zone. You're free to play as a member of any of the original nine factions (and unlock another three new ones by playing through the story), although first-timers are best off with the Loners (the one true neutral party), as they offer tutorials. While story objectives are mostly just 'go here, talk to this person, recover this item', it's an interesting enough reason to explore deep into hostile territory. Strelok, the player character from the first game, is apparently back too, and following rumours of his return leads into several large story quest arcs, in-between dozens of scripted side-quests and procedurally generated jobs. The Zone - the haunted, irradiated and mutant-infested land around Chernobyl - is bigger and more detailed than ever. That extra year has done wonders for stability and performance, too.Īnomaly presents itself as a sequel, set some years after GSC Game World's original trilogy, and combines and expands the environments from all three of those original games. An overhauled, polished UI, a main story to follow, a glut of alternative modes, and it's not too tough on the default settings. While this standalone mod has been around for a while, the recently-released version 1.5 brings a lot to the table after a full year of development. games feel like they're built exclusively for folks who've played nothing else this past decade (see the fittingly named Call Of Misery), Anomaly could almost pass for a commercial product. While some of these fan-made S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Free, standalone, polished and stuffed with irradiated promise, here's why Anomaly is a must-play whether you're new to Pripyat or know it like the back of your hand. The likes of Lost Alpha, Dead Air and the upcoming multiplayer Ray Of Hope are all impressive, but the recently re-released Anomaly is the closest we've seen to an unofficial sequel. Between a vague but permissive modding agreement and an engine-code leak, fans had all the tools they needed to make their own successor. The past few years have been amazing for fans of the gritty survival shooter sandbox series S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Every other Monday, Dominic gives you a reason to dust off one of your old games and dive into its mods with Modder Superior.
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