Project Silverfish

I have played 30+ hours of this game and I am still absolutely clueless, A+ highly recommend

It's S.T.A.L.K.E.R but it's furry. What is there not to love?

This is the most STALKER a non-STALKER has ever gotten. Also an interesting experiment in paring down everything that isn't strictly absolutely necessary for a STALKER game to be playable while still making it... STALKER-esque. Things you took for granted are now item-gated, forcing you to rely on your actual STALKER instincts and feel rather than relying on a UI element or chime to tell you what's up. Oh and it's $30. It's so, so good.

Not recommended in current state - tl;dr NPCs are god-tier operators and armor seemingly doesn't work In what self-respecting RPG do you buy 10,000 dollars of good armor and loot tons of good weapons just to get absolutely smoked in 3 seconds by a NPC that locks on to you in a fraction of a second from 100 meters away after you just came from out of cover. I want to like this game so bad but at a certain point every death just feels outright unfair.

While a generally great game overall, there are a few problems I have experienced regularly: 1. Sound design needs a full rework. A full-sized Buck running through the concrete streets is completely silent. A regular NPC enemy makes running sounds but while they are motionless are completely silent (no rustling of fabric, no breathing, no equipment noises). A wild dog will run up to you and the only indication will be that you took damage or a bark occasionally. 2. Enemy spawn and strategy. You can run into a town, get into a firefight with Faction A's squad and suddenly a team from Faction B walks up (mortal enemies of Faction A) and join them in blasting you, THEN kill each other. You can wake up from your safehouse, walk out and be instantly surrounded by heavily armed NPCs with pinpoint aim. Enemies that have had their whole squad wiped out won't run away but silently hide in a corner waiting for you to loot (Monolith from STALKER but applied to all NPCs) 3. Player and NPC movement speed. Normal humanoids (Player and NPC) can cover the distance of a small town in seconds by sprinting. Walking and crouching feels like you are constantly sprinting, there is almost no sense of character physics other than a camera wobble and, combined with the sound issues mentioned previously, this means that a squad of troops can run into the town you are looting, surround you and wait silently or just constantly run in circles around you while accurately hitting you. 4. Enemy accuracy and vision. While I mentioned accuracy in my previous point, I don't think the problem is as simple as "Enemy aim too good!". If you are motionless, popping off shots and generally not moving around then you should get your position zero'd in on pretty fast. In my opinion the two main problems are the lack of locomotion in movement/character physics and lack of general cover and concealment.

listen man just put up with the scalie stuff and its good i swear i like the way combat feels, i like the different environments, some of them feel very much like wandering somewhere no one was ever really meant to go into. i like the hidden stuff like the different dimensions you can access by eating stardust, all the anomaly stuff is great and it generally feels like open world STALKER. the setting (once you get past the scalie stuff) is interesting, humans are a dead or dying race and there's an entire new society of deviantart OCs taking over. there are four different factions you can side with plus some minor ones and you can weaken their control by clearing them out and all that, but that hasn't been fully fleshed out yet. im not sure if it had an impact on the gameplay, though I swear i noticed the enemies getting weaker. generally your non-anomalous enemies are as difficult to kill as you are, which is to say they aren't that tough but neither are you. at best top-tier armor will save you from one or two extra bullets. there's even different gameplay mechanics depending on your starter faction, the military faction start has you dealing with requisition forms and completeing missions to get new gear instead of taking bounties or just selling artifacts. you also need to disguise yourself to get around anywhere so people don't shoot you on sight. the cult start has its own mechanics too, like trading artifacts in for new equipment. biggest problem with this game is the glacial development pace. i think it's one guy but at this rate this isn't gonna be fully released till like maybe 10 years down the line.

Project Silverfish is a fantastic game for anyone looking for something to play with classic S.T.A.L.K.E.R. style gameplay with its own twist on things. The guns feel good to use, the game runs very well (it never crashing on me was the thing that least resembled STALKER lol), and it features somewhat 'arcade-y' movement compared to most games in the genre (which was a welcome change of pace to me, it feels quite like a source engine game in some ways). The roster of anomalies/enemies/events, while featuring obviously featuring some that are exactly what you would expect (orb that sets you on fire, field of electricity, etc), are interesting and varied and include some nice spooky unique things. I had many moments in the game that made me go "Man, I gotta get the hell out of here." The progression is good too, you'll go from a scavenger using garbage weapons afraid to turn your flashlight on at night to a veteran with powerful weird guns and a satchel full of artifacts launching yourself across the map and throwing ghost grenades at anyone in the exclusion zone that so much as looks at you wrong. The game is early access, and obviously not finished yet and it is very up front about that. You can get out of bounds if you want to (but you can obviously tell you're not supposed to be there), some areas are clearly less finished than others, you will eventually run out of quests to do. But all that said I still put 50 good hours into it before deciding to put it down for now. A public beta was even released recently that I opted into, and after opting into it I saw new weapons and areas I'd been to before expanded on and made more interesting, so progress is very promising. I do have a few small gripes with the game, no game is without them. As others have pointed it it can be a lot easier at times for the enemies in the game to identify you than it is for you to identify them (especially if you don't want to start shooting friendly factions), but I found this was mostly mitigated by experience and gear, and was no longer such an issue once I knew where I was and how to move around in the maps and had some armor that could prevent me from being instantly deleted. I also found that I was going into my inventory more often than I'd like to switch out my utility items (crowbar, lighter, lockpicks, etc), but this is a fairly minor complaint. I very much look forward to coming back to the game after it's seen some updates, and can definitely see this being a game I come back to over and over.

I love this game. I wish creator luck.