izigame.me

Pros:
1-It doesn't feel repetative, and it's hardly scripted. Random events and enemies, as well as a developed "life cycle" for NPCs, makes the world feel alive and dangerous.
2-Edit: Gunfights are properly deadly, and almost anything dies in 1 headshot. Spray and pray and run and gun doesn't work. You need to get low, take cover, and aim center mass until you have an accurate gun.
3-Mutants are uncommon and appropriately dangerous, if not outright lethal. Also pretty god damn scary since you find them in the lease pleasant or visible places.
4-Anamolies are plenty, making you constantly vigilent, and range from "ow that hurt" to "bloody meat chunks." They add a bit of puzzle/navigation type play now and again.
5- Edit: After finishing the game, I can safely say I found myself using almost every rifle for some time, 3 shotguns, 2 sniper rifles, half the pistols, at least 5 armors, and even a god damn RPG-7u. In the words of Gears, variety is the spice of death.
6-Immersion is great, with the zones ambience broken only be sporadically and properly placed fleeting notes of music. Turn of hud for extra immersion stalker. You will get scared sometimes, this is horror done well.
7-It unintentionally funny now and again.
8-The mod community is great, and there are plenty of great mods to not only fix some if the base games issues (if you can call them that) but also update the graphics for those who want a more modern looking game (Complete mod is a great place to begin.)
Neutral points:
1-Base game lacks the function of repairing weapon and armor. If you're like me, you will hate this. If you're not like me, you won't mind, you might actually like this as it may add to the immersion of having your weapons degree under constant use. I see it as if you get a cool and powerfull special weapon, you feel not inclined to use it in fear of degrading its durability. Easily cured with mod.
2-At the great time of 2007, surround sound wasn't exactly on point. This game very much has sound coming evenly at once from both left and right speaker, with no directionality. Not very useful for finding enemies, so much as knowing that they are indeed nearby enough. Not gamebreaking, but I normally use audio for that purpose in shooters.
3-Edit; Story is so-so. It feels a bit strung out since between getting missions and completing them, you don't get too much narration or explaining done to you until you literally beat (or almost) beat the game. The real story imo is the one you make while stalking.
Cons:
1-There are a few points in the game that are still bugged, since they never got fixed. One of them happend to be a NPC escort mission I had to redo for 3 hours to succeed and not get a bug/break in the mission(though it wasn't tied to main story progression, still annoying as hell). Needless to say, I don't believe any bugs are gamebreaking or impeed progression, but the game might work against you in a few occurences.
2-tldr; if you can't be arsed to read point 3 since it's technical babble; moding the graphics to be better will take a toll on your PC. Recommended you do so at your own risk and with a higher end rig.
3-Complete mod. Now, while it is a fully functional, non-game breaking mod that adds (in my opinion) several desired game features like a more modern look, there is one issue; optimization. Stalker doesn't run well on multiple cores and this compounds the mod; it actually took my first core hostage and ran it to 100% bottlenecking (I've got an OC'd i7-3770k 4.5Ghz processor, so not a weak CPU). This immense load is only in the modded game, since the texture overhaul is a big one. Now, disabling the first core and setting priority for the game engine to high distributes the load well among you other cores, but makes the GPU take a heavy brunt of it due to, again, optimization (I've had the game reach 70% on a few parts for my Gigabyte GTX 1080, no small feat for 2007 release). Stuttering is also an issue, but by setting the alife setting (go to steam games in your PC files, find stalker SoC, then just type alife in the searchbar) to be roughly 900, it prevent loading of things every time you move a short distance.
Verdict:
We thought the slavs only brought us the great joy of quality in the Witcher 3. We were wrong, since they've been actually doing it all the way back in 2007 with the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series.
Edited for grammer errors/ post game reviewing.