S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

A year, an upgrade and a few patches later was all it took for me to dive into STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl and work my way through this excellent game that suffers from being rushed out of the door too soon.

When I first gave the game a spin on my old computer, I had to turn of the lighting and turn down some of the quality of the graphics and let me tell you, this is a game you don't want to experience like this. Doing this to STALKER is like watching The Godfather on a 15" black and white TV.

After the upgrade I was able to Max out all the settings and enjoy Shadow of Chernobyl in all its glorious waste and gloominess. The game environment is a beauty to behold and truly gives one the feelings of loneliness and despair. As for the character models, well they could have used a little more work for the humans, the creatures however, are just as frightening and eerie in scope as the landscape.

While the landscapes are great all by themselves, you throw in some of the best atmospheric weather and lighting conditions and it improves the experience a hundred fold. STALKER is simply an immersive game with a wonderfully depressing world.

STALKER was billed by some as an FPS with RPG elements but the only things RPGish about this game seem to be the inventory, the vulnerability stats and the way NPC's can give you missions to do for them.

The inventory has a harsh limit put upon of only 50 kg's which has to hold armor, artifacts, ammo, guns, food, medicine and things of that nature. You can go over this limit by a little bit but the downside to this is that your stamina quickly decreases and you could find yourself immobilized and in a bad position during a fire fight.

Artifacts that you find or acquire through the course of the game, effect the stats that dictate how much damage you take from hazards such as bullets, claws, radiation and explosions. Unfortunately the majority of the artifacts found in the early part of the game are only good for making a little bit of money, as their disadvantages far outweigh their advantages. There are some quality artifacts that can be found but most of those are awards from quests.

The general quests themselves are pretty repetitive and usually require that you assassinate someone, you find a certain artifact or item from a creature or you rid a small area of enemies. The rewards are usually money, ammo and artifacts and these rewards are sometimes not worth the trouble. So if you do happen upon a mission and you're sent out to find a weapon of artifact that you really like, you can always welsh on the deal and keep the item at no disadvantage to yourself.

The gunplay takes some getting used to seeing as this game is far from a run and gun game; something that took me a few reloads to figure out. When starting off, it's possible that the very first gunfight is the hardest because I was inexperienced, had a puny pistol and wasn't expecting a realistic shooter. Simply put, a single gunshot to the head or a shotgun blast at close range is a quick way to be introduced to the reload screen early on. As the game progressed, I got a bit more accustomed to the weapon limitations, the computer AI and the physics in the game which enabled me to pull off those lovely headshots and collect the loot on the corpses of my foes.

The AI is another delight of this game that is only hindered by bad path-finding. Enemies will seek cover, flank and surround you and when you toss in some mutated creatures that don't care if you're friend or foe in the mix, combat gets a little scary at times. There's numerous times where I'd try to retreat from a firefight only to run into a pack of mutant dogs which made survival a little bit difficult. Good thing is that the AI sometimes runs amok in the same situation and finds themselves absorbing claws and gunfire. Oh and I almost forgot about the anomalies. These little destructive, semi-invisible traps can also make a big difference in the game.

This review has been gushing so far so I'll have to start hitting on some of the things I felt were lacking. The anomalies themselves are too frequent to actually stick to the definition of the word. You can literally see dozens of them littered across the landscape.

Artifacts aren't very beneficial until much later in the game when certain quests start dishing out effective little items. In all I'd say that about 95% of the artifacts are totally useless or make little difference in the grand scheme of things. There only benefit comes in the form of money that you get when you sell them.

Not until the game was about 75% done was I actually allowed to join a faction and get into the politics in STALKER. With gangs of loners, stalkers, mercs, military, Freedom and Duty factions and lastly, bandits; time spent working the field between these factions is really under represented.

Okay, enough of the bad parts and back to the good stuff. The music in STALKER is great especially the tunes played on the guitar by stalkers around the campfire or the music on the radio. Voice acting was generally good and the sound effects from weather, guns and creatures were terrific. My only complaint in this category is that the NPC's in the game spoke a different dialect until you talked to them and then all of a sudden they either spoke English or the dialogue was English when you click on them. Some subtitles would have been nice so I wasn't made to feel like a foreigner in the game.

STALKER was a delight to play through and was a breath of fresh air amidst all of the "me too" FPS's out there. There are some bugs to the game and some ideas aren't fleshed out all the way but it's easy to see this game does far more right than wrong. The best part is the prequel, Clear Skies, is right around the corner.

Review by Smerlus

Nometet.com says: 90%