1) Open notepad
2) add the line "gun_degrade_rate 0.5" (without quotes, 0.5 will halve degradation).
3) Save the file as "user.cfg" into your SShock2 folder. Make sure to set the file type to 'all files' or notepad will put a .txt extension on the end, and it will not work.

My god.... I.. I have no words.. What happened to gaming nowdays!?! Before starting playing the game I have read 3 giant game-guides. Are gamers of today that lazy!?! It's not like CoD, you can't... can't just walk through and clear the level...

Ave Maria... I don't wanna be related to homo-sapiens anymore... GLORY TO THE MASS! GLORY TO THE MANY!

I'm sorry, I ahem, sometimes I take these things really seriously and personal..

Anyway, there are tons of great guides that anyone, even new generation of brain-damaged-gamers can google (oh well, probably can't D =).

It's that that the game is not CoD. As a gamer who has been playing PC games since 1990 I find that offensive. I laid out several legitimate concerns with the game design. I wasn't trolling and I put time and effort into my critique.

Any game that purports to offer multiple ways to play the game and then makes several of those choices so unfairly challenging as to render them impractical for all but a novelty play-through is flawed. Playing through as a Soldier is punishing and unfun. That's how I like to play my RPGs- warrior class-style, combat first. SS2 purported to offer that opportunity, therefore it's a design failing when the game is clearly not balanced around the Soldier class.

I'd have zero issue with the game if you were forced to go in the tech direction but I chose to play as a Soldier my first time through and it was an absolutely awful gaming experience. It's not balanced around that class. A first time player playing as a Soldier is not a fun gaming experience. Challenging/difficult doesn't have to equal unfair and unbalanced, which is what that playthrough creates.

Soldier is probably the easiest class to start, unless you know enough to metagame in which case it hardly matters what is chosen.

SS2 is not a particularly difficult game- if you're careful and recognise that it isn't just a shooter and isn't just an RPG, it is also a survival game where you need to take care because there are a lot of things out to get you. Having played Thief helps a lot too, though Stalker: SOC is probably the closest to the experience.

Really though, you may have spent time on your critique but it amounted to a complaint that you weren't very good at the game. That happens to everyone every once in a while, and it ain't always the game's fault.

Seconded. Playing a gun-slinging knuckle-dragger is flat out the easiest (and most boring) approach to SS2. Just put all your points into guns and physical upgrades, and breeze your way through.

Too many games these days let you finish them without developing your character, either by having very low requirements where every vital door has minimal skill requirements or leaving so many options for progressing that there is no point in becoming a lockpick or explosives expert when every damn house in the universe has at least one open window to climb through. Lazy formulaeic game design where "play it any way you want" actually means "Skip 90% of the content and you can still finish the game because we're not going to hold you down"

You can be a grunt in SS2, but that does not mean you can be a soldier who only spends time on the shooting range with no interest in maintaining his gear or physique. Well, you can, but it makes about as much sense in the game as it sounds when you word it like this. The SS2 adventure kind of assumes you're playing a skilled and resourceful soldier, which in that universe where hacking and psionic mastery is every day stuff means you're more than just a meat head with a gun sticking out of his mouth.

In addition to the above, a gun-slinging soldier would still be expected to get to the objective, deal with it, and get out again as efficiently as possible - not spend time trying to kill every last moving thing in the area when doing so doesn't actually further the objective.

Now ya tell me! Just kidding of course, but I just got to that part. Shotgun hybrids respawn constantly, and those stupid robots explode when you kill them.. I've run completely out of shells. I'm thinking of starting using one of my earlier saves and moving through that part as quickly as I can.

Not entirely true - there are waves of respawning enemies that come if you set off an alarm. But that's why you take out the cameras as quickly as possible.

It wouldn't entirely surprise me if a lot of people missed this point. The guys from Two Best Friends Play did a video of SS2 and couldn't figure out why, when they got to the medical bay, hybrids kept attacking them, even though there's a timer in the lower left and an alarm going off and Xerxes saying "Intruder Alert" or whatever.

I'd also expect that quite a few people miss that the alarms can be turned off at the security consoles. In a modern game (if it even bothered with such a mechanic in the first place) there'd be big pop up text andor quest compass telling you where to go to turn it off, SS2 relies on things like reading the manual or the help text consoles for instructions about it- and I'd bet a lot of people don't do that. Polito only mentions that you can hack the consoles to turn off the cameras.