Originally Posted by Snail88

headshots are your friend Also, a scope really helps.

Unfortunately, there isn't much ammunition at the beginning of the game. It's quite risky wasting it on headshots. Once you kill a few guys, you can start wasting ammo on headshots but even then... sometimes it seems like the bullets aren't going where I'm aiming. The person can be so close that the entire ironsight tip is within the person yet I'll still miss.

I tried another test with some bandits and the AK-74 (no silencer). It was almost the same result at point blank range. Sometimes it took 12 body shots to kill the bandit. I switched to the shotgun and sometimes it was 2 shots from close range.

There's something missing from this game. It's nice to be able to sneak around but I'm finding that it's fruitless to get that silenced kill (knife or silenced gun). The AI is pretty good at spotting you so you end up in some drawn out gun fight (only because it takes so many shots to kill someone).

The mini-map is a little awkward. The compass icon is a set of two arrows (blue and red, I can never remember which one represents North). There are constant encounters with bandits. Typically, they're in narrow areas because of these odd fences or hills that prevent you from circling around.

I can't believe how much I miss surround sound. Apparently, there's a fix by copying the BF2 OpenAL DLL file over Stalker's OpenAL DLL file but that doesn't seem to work in Vista. Often, I hear noises that seem close by but aren't or I can't figure out the direction very well.

Eating seems like a weird requirement. My first "hunger pang" came in the middle of a firefight with a couple bandits. I opened my inventory and ate a sausage then continued fighting. Hardly rewarding or worthy of a feature if all I have to do is click on an icon representing food to get rid of some other icon representing hunger to prevent a red bar from going down. It's even more ridiculous that I can do this in the middle of a firefight.

Bandit: "I'm going to shoot you in the face!"
Marked One: "Hold on, dude. I gotta eat. It'll take a few seconds so time out, man."

What this game needs is a bit more polishing. The idea and presentation is really good but the implementation needs a lot of work. There's a meter for sound detection but there needs to be a better indicator for visual detection. Splinter Cell does this very well. It was also very intuitive. Hide in shadow, avoid detection. In Stalker, hide in bush and get shot. Yet, pop out from manhole with flashlight on and soldier in tower ignores you. The damage has to be heavily tweaked. I don't care if the guy is wearing armor. Shooting him 15 times in the body is way too many bullets. With the accuracy of the guns, we should go back to the Napoleonic Era and stand in line formations taking turns shooting at each other. There are certainly enough bandits around to set up a reenactment.

Despite all this, I still feel the need to scavenge for items and survive in the Zone...