Alright, ti address these.
- Lost Alpha recieved a mixed reception
- Lost Alpha was released earlier than intended, and the finished product is incomplete and broken. Despite being highly hyped prior to its release, the release was met with a large backlash. Prior to release, the mod was very highly rated on Moddb based on teaser content, but after the actual release, the majority of reviews have been strongly negative.
- The worst criticisms center on the broken and unfinished game design. Unlike SoC, the large levels are nearly empty and NPCs have little to no A-Life; meaning the player will spend excessive time just moving from point-to-point to finish quests with almost no action in between - resulting in an extremely boring and tedious experience (a player may have to run for 15+ real-time minutes simply to finish individual quests).
- The initial release was also full of many game breaking bugs, though patches have been released to correct the worst bugs. Nevertheless many serious problems still exist, such as broken vehicle mechanics, and the ability for key characters to be accidentally killed (resulting in the game being uncompletable without reloading an earlier save).
- The in-game voice acting and cinema sequences were also widely criticized as being very bad and harming the immersion; the deviation of the plot from the original SoC (ex. including Illuminati references) is also very unpopular with STALKER fans.
Doesn't seem very good
8.8 on moddb does not seem like a mixed reception, even if some recent reviews are more negative.
The game has A-Life. I encounter STALKERs and others all the time in the game.
No bugs so far, enemy AI is good, they'll hunt you down. Again, played 20+ hours so far.
The plot is intriguing so far, that's all I can say. It's very immersive and quite interesting so far.
Most importantly it feels like a proper game, not cobbled together but actually full and robust.
I'd recommend giving it a shot for several hours to see if it really grabs you. It takes a bit to really get into it, but before you know it you're hooked.