I’ve been playing it a fair bit the last two days. Prior to learning in this thread that there were Nazis among the voice cast (which truthfully I’d suspected would be the case before the game came out) my only issues were that the controls could be smoother and the frame rate is pretty choppy. I haven’t run into any serious bugs yet, but I’m still pretty early in the game.
As for it being boring, I think that’s going to be subjective. It plays like I expected it to so far: a somewhat polished version of OG STALKER (or, like the better Fallout 4 that never was, minus the retrofuturism aesthetic.) I like them both for the same reasons. If you liked the original, I can’t see why you wouldn’t like this one as well (though of course, I’m a masochist who played it vanilla, a modded experience could be far superior for all I know.) But I’m far from the most avid player of the original games, so my word is only worth so much.
Edit: I should note that I’ve been playing the game on Xbox gamepass via my girlfriend’s Xbox account; I might have a less favorable opinion if I’d actually payed for it lol
Further edit: Spoke too soon. I did encounter a bug when switching weapons that locked the camera and trapped me in the weapon select menu, and I had to restart. Also, the combat is very unbalanced. Bloodsuckers in particular have been a major problem, even in the early stages of the game. They’re everywhere, and they’re incredibly bullet spongey. Scripted encounters with them also tend to be incredibly unfair. In one early story quest, you encounter one in a very tight cave, at a time in the game when you likely haven’t progressed very far and don’t have very powerful weapons. It wrecked my shit like 10 times before I decided to just juke it and hope it didn’t follow me further into the cave.
It does a better job capturing the whole ‘lonely wanderer in a hostile post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland’ vibe in my opinion, but yeah, there are some core gameplay similarities to Fallout 4