S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat Review (Harris)
This is the best game in the franchise. And the reason why it's the best is they didn't make it into a theme park or a guided tour through the 60 square kilometers of land that's an empty wasteland outside of the main story. Instead, CoP limits its scope to just 3 locations: Zaton, Jupiter and Pripyat (with the latter mostly endgame one), but each of them has several times the content depth.
Due to having to spend most of your time within the two locations, it works wonders for your experience. You no longer have to travel very long distances between objectives, and guides (that serve as fast travel) are available not only at major hubs but can be random stalkers and can move you to any location within the area. Every location is filled with things to do and oftentimes has some quests associated with it. Anomalies are mostly kept to dedicated areas and you don't really encounter them traversing the map, leading to the ability to move around faster and less equipment degradation.
This "less is more" approach is characteristic of the whole game. CoP doesn't have dozens of redundant armor suits to pick from, but what it features has a purpose and oftentimes comes with unique upgrades aimed to distinguish the suit from everything else. Same goes for weapons - in fact, there is a trader Nimble you encounter very early on, who can get you a lot of cool stuff provided you've got money for it. This way very little content ends up gated behind story progression.
The story is a bit sidelined in this one in favor of side quests and side quest chains, and this works wonders for this game. There are oftentimes 2 or 3 ways you can approach quests, and you get in-game achievements for your actions - achievemnts that have tangible impact, like change in reputation, better prices and even unique stock at traders, not accessible otherwise. All of it gives the game a lot of replayability, which is made feasible due to the fact main story doesn't take some 100 hours to clear (looking at you, Heart of Chornobyl).
As for issues, this one definitely has some, so let's list them quickly:
1) It's dated. Duh. Grab some visual mods and a 4gb patch. Maybe a weapon pack.
2) Tier 3 upgrades for weapons and suits (read - most interesting ones) are not available until you reach Pripyat.
3) While it's the first and so far only Stalker game to feature "freeplay" after the story ends, it's very bare-bones with little things to do.
2 and 3 combined lead to a reality where you want to rush through the story ASAP and save the side quests for last, because otherwise you're locking yourself out of some cool set pieces to use your weapons at - and outside of those set pieces, the game doesn't feature a lot.
Overall, CoP is the closest Stalker series ever got to a world you'd want to live in rather than visit, to a game not unlike Skyrim or Fallout 4. It's a shame Stalker 2 decided to go back to its roots as opposed to further improving the formula found in this one.