If you’re a fan of hardcore, realistic, and immersive first-person shooters, you’ll be glad you came across this article. Today we talk about Radiophobia 3, a AAA-quality FPS game that’s free to play.
Radiophobia 3 is actually a mod of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., but you don’t need the base game in your library to play this. It’s completely standalone and available as a free download on ModDB.
What is Radiophobia 3?
When you talk about free-to-play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mods, Anomaly or GAMMA might be what comes to mind instantly. Those games are large-scale AAA-quality FPS games themselves. But they don’t have great storylines that are canon. It’s true that no S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games that are fan-made are canon, but Radiophobia 3 could be a different case, depending on how you look at it.
Radiophobia 3 has the same exact story – with restored cut content and additional dialogue and quests – as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl. SoC is the first and, to some, the best game of the franchise. The original was released in 2007, and it still holds up very well as an excellent survival horror FPS.
That’s why I highly recommend you play the original trilogy before trying any mods. But you are free to do as you wish, in the end. But keep in mind that you might be able to enjoy Radiophobia 3 all the more if you have played the original games and experienced their atmosphere and general mechanics.
Gameplay
As with every S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game, the gameplay of Radiophobia 3 is its best part. When you compare it to the original game, it’s easy to see the vast and drastic improvements and changes this mod has. Let’s first talk about the gunplay.
Gunplay is one of the most important parts of Radiophobia 3. This game features the excellent Boomsticks and Sharpsticks mod that’s mainly used in Anomaly GAMMA. This mod adds a great number of new weapons with numerous modifications and the ability for you to customize them. The guns look excellent, behave realistically, and sound satisfying. It’s important to note that Radiophobia 3’s gunplay is extremely difficult. You can kill an enemy with a single shot and an enemy is also able to send you on a short trip to hell with one well-placed shot. This makes the gunplay extremely satisfying once you get the hang of it.
Radiophobia 3’s mechanics are not nearly as hardcore as that of Anomaly GAMMA, but it’s still quite difficult to get used to. It also features animations for usable items, making the game all the more immersive.
Other aspects, like hunting for artifacts, have also seen drastic improvements and are riskier.
Visuals and audio
Radiophobia’s visuals look par with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly, with high-resolution textures, excellent lighting, physics effects, vegetation, and much more. For a player who has played the original, this game will be a treat for the eyes.
As for Radiophobia’s audio design, it has to be some of the most immersive soundscapes I’ve experienced in any FPS game. The guns sound loud like they should, and the entire world sounds alive, with wind, growls of monsters, and distant gunfire all sounding incredibly immersive and realistic.
New additions
Radiophobia 3 features new areas and around forty new quests. This game will allow for more than a hundred hours of gameplay, easily. It also features vehicles that you can drive, new weather effects, companions, mutants, and enemies that were cut from the original game, and much more.
