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

aka: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Cień Czarnobyla, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Oblivion Lost, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chornobyl, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, STALKER: Shadow of Chornobyl, Stalker
Moby ID: 27172
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

The Ukrainian town of Chernobyl was the site of a severe nuclear accident in 1986. In an alternate timeline, following attempts to repopulate the area, another unexpected accident occurred twenty years later. By the year 2012 the area, which was dubbed "Zone", has become hazardous with mutated animals, bandits, and mysterious anomalies. These anomalies differ in their effects, but they all have one thing in common - they are deadly. Despite that, the Zone attracts scientists, explorers and scavengers (known as "stalkers") hunting for valuable artifacts. Military organizations have been formed, fighting for dominance in the Zone.

The player controls a stalker who has lost his memory in an accident. After being rescued by another stalker, he discovers himself in a village located on the outskirts of the Zone, with only a single clue: he has a note in his PDA telling him to kill an unknown person with the nickname "Strelok".

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is inspired by the science fiction novel Picnic on the Roadside (1977) by the Soviet Russian authors, the brothers Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky. The game is an open-ended first-person shooter featuring a thirty square kilometer playing area which the player is free to explore. There are also many characters the protagonist can communicate with; in this sense the game has similarities to RPGs, although there are no attributes or skills to improve. The protagonist may also develop relations with NPCs. Helping a faction will boost his reputation with it, which may result in better items for purchase or information, while attacking a member of said faction will ruin his reputation and prompt other members to attack him. Along with the main quest, the player can also complete side quests, some of which have time limits.

The player has to carefully manage the protagonist's inventory, not only because there is a carrying capacity, but also because weapons and armor degrade as they are used. The player can also use artifacts, which can be usually found near anomalies, to his benefit. Artifacts offer different kinds of bonuses, but often have negative side effects: for instance, an artifact could improve the hero's bullet resistance but also increase his radiation level.

The game features ragdoll physics, destructible surroundings, HDR lightning, dynamic weather, day and night cycles, and multiplayer for up to 32 players.

Spellings

  • 迷失地带 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

237 People (193 developers, 44 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 81% (based on 57 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 117 ratings with 6 reviews)

Flawed as a genre hybrid; great as an experience

The Good
The recent releases of Pathologic and The Witcher proved that some developers from Eastern Europe had enough creative power to be able to compete with their colleagues from the West. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is yet another proof of this rise from beyond the former Iron Curtain.

There is really a lot to like about S.T.A.L.K.E.R.; the moment you fire up the game you feel that you are invited to something special. The "Fallout meets Oblivion" idea is certainly one that can make a dedicated gamer drool. Even though S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is far from being a true hybrid of those two games, it certainly takes steps in the right direction.

The first thing you notice when you being to play the game is the exceptionally strong personality of its world. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is particularly atmospheric and has great graphics; but the unique effect is achieved mostly by following a certain style in the world design, which is instantly recognizable and is one of the game's most valuable assets.

The game's world immediately betrays the post-Soviet origin of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.; in fact, it is one of the few games I've ever played that uses absolutely authentic Soviet style. The rusty vehicles, the architecture of the buildings, many objects, even the nature itself - everything reminded me of Soviet Union, where I was born and spent the first ten years of my life. Certain things evoked a strange kind of nostalgia in me. I remember an abandoned train in the Garbage area. It looks exactly like the trains that were used for suburban railways in Soviet Union (and are still used in ex-Soviet countries, at least in some of them). This nearly photorealistic representation of a rarely used style is attractive in a bizarre way.

Those Soviet reminiscences are mixed with sci-fi elements: radioactivity everywhere, weird "anomalies", mutants, etc., resulting in a decidedly original and quite unforgettable style. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is therefore one of those games you'd want to play just in order to feel its unique vibe.

Even if S.T.A.L.K.E.R. were an ordinary FPS, it would be interesting to play because of this setting. But the game tries to expand the boundaries of the genre - not always in a convincing way, but still with plenty of efficient results.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is in a certain sense the antipodes of Half-Life: the latter is linear and scripted, while the former doesn't have any setpieces at all and is also remarkably open-ended for a shooter. In this sense, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. surpasses Deus Ex, the ultimate FPS-RPG hybrid. Deus Ex had more role-playing elements than the Ukrainian work, and they were more coherent and better implemented; but its story progression was linear, just like in any other FPS. The fact you could switch sides and find different ways within a level didn't change the overall necessity to do the levels in a pre-established succession.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R., on the other hand, allows you to do whatever you want and generally go wherever you want. Its game world is seamless, not level-based, just like in an open-ended RPG. You can just walk around and explore the game world for hours, without undertaking any missions. You can do main storyline missions in different order. You can ignore them and do some side missions first. In fact, even the story missions are structured in such a way that some of them are not required to finish the game. Even though the "Kill Strelok" mission is your "main quest", it can be easily disintegrated during the gameplay; you can even ignore it entirely and still be able to complete the game! Of course, the "true" ending can be reached only if you pursue this mission, and without doing it, the story of the game won't make much sense; but it's up to the player to decide how to handle this.

This freedom, coupled with an interesting, unusual world to explore, is easily the game's chief appeal. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a game in which exploration is more important than following a story. Of course, this story does exist, and is in fact quite good if you bother to uncover it: there is even a very cool plot twist in the middle, and the final confrontation is fittingly majestic and is very heavy on story development. But, much like Elder Scrolls games, the meaning of gameplay here is "bathing" in the atmosphere, walking around, doing stuff on your own, being drawn into the game world and forgetting the reality around you.

There are plenty of other cool things in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. There is a full day and night cycle, just like in RPGs. The many NPCs who populate the Zone belong to different groups that constantly fight each other. It is possible for the player to join two of those groups, the ones that have a distinct ethical idea behind their actions. It is theoretically possible just to kill everyone, except the very few givers of pivotal missions that will allow the player to access new areas. There is a huge amount of missions - I could only wish their quality would match their quantity. There are real hunger and stamina parameters; you can't run forever, like in most other games, and you'll also need to eat from time to time. There are artifacts you can hunt for, scattered around the game world, usually near dangerous places called "anomalies", some of which can instantly kill you if you are not careful. Those artifacts increase some of your parameters and decrease others; by cleverly combining them, you'll be able to customize your character to a certain degree. There is also weapon degradation, which is much more realistic and by far less frustrating than the one used in System Shock 2.

The combat system is surprisingly realistic, coming close to simulation-style shooters. The AI is highly advanced; I never saw enemies do stupid things that are typically exploited in most other FPSs. Killing enemies require real skill. Even on the easiest difficulty level, you can get yourself killed in a matter of seconds. I was never interested in realistic shooters, and I found S.T.A.L.K.E.R. very hard; but whenever I wasn't frustrated, I had great moments with this realism. There always seem to be different ways out of tough situations. The sneaking system works quite well, and if you are patient enough, you can eliminate enemies without being noticed. Also, since the game world is so large, in many parts you can just run away if you feel the battle is too hard. I remember how I managed to infiltrate a military base and steal important documents, only to find soldiers guarding every possible exit. All attempts to confront them resulted in quick death. I already decided to reload a previously saved game and ran up to the roof in order to commit spectacular suicide. But then I discovered a ladder leading down from the roof; overjoyed, I ran over to it, and before the soldiers could realize what was happening, I was running like mad to cover, and from there to the gate and into freedom, with deafening gunshots echoing in my head.

That's how S.T.A.L.K.E.R. works: you experience it in different ways. It is highly probable that the story I just shared here never happened to you; you might have tackled this mission in a totally different way, or maybe not tackled it at all. Needless to say how much replay value this design philosophy adds to the game. Many shooters are good for one playthrough and are quickly forgotten afterwards; but S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was destined for a long life.

The Bad
The more ambitious a game is, the easier it is to notice its flaws. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is no exception: it is a title that promises a lot, therefore all its flaws become more visible, as if they were viewed with a magnifying lens. Unfortunately, there are quite a few of them. Even though the game still manages to draw the player in thanks to its exciting premise and its unique vibe, it is not exactly the ultimate FPS-RPG hybrid it was supposed to be.

It's not that the two genres don't work well together. The examples of System Shock 2 and especially Deus Ex show that such games can be done, and can be done really well. But while S.T.A.L.K.E.R. goes even further in certain aspects (side missions and large world), it neglects some key elements of both genres.

As a first-person shooter, it lacks focus, variety, and scripting. Of course, it is extremely hard to keep suspense when your goal is to have an open-ended world and non-obligatory missions. Maybe the developers were a tad too ambitious to think of both those objectives. But the fact is that the FPS gameplay in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., with all its realism, doesn't quite have the necessary urgency. I'm not demanding a Half-Life 2-kind of ride here, but running around and having to shoot annoying enemies who all look and act alike no matter what faction they belong to gets repetitive more quickly than you would imagine. The problem is that the enemies in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. were most probably conceived as experience-giving random RPG foes; but since there is no experience system of any sort, it is just pointless to wander around and shoot without being treated to cleverly designed levels with interesting setpieces and suspenseful progression.

Unfortunately, most of the game is dedicated to just that. The dialogues with the NPCs are uninteresting and repetitive; the NPCs themselves have little personality and are for the most part simply useless. At least in Morrowind, which had perhaps equally uninteresting NPCs, there was much more background information and more things to find (for example books). In S.T.A.L.K.E.R., everything you can find is somehow combat-related, which makes the already shallow RPG angle even shallower. The necessity of traversing huge areas in order to advance the story somehow, talk to dull characters, and fight hordes of tough enemies without being properly rewarded puts the player's motivation in question.

The side missions are boring to the extreme; after the initial joy of having them I quickly understood that they were all going to be of the same: kill some guys, bring some items, come back for the reward. I'm not sure it's entirely fair to criticize S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for that - after all, other FPSs don't have any side missions at all; but that just brings me back to what I said above - the higher the expectations, the bigger the disappointment. It's great to have side missions, but why make them so dull? Even the side quests of Morrowind were more interesting! In fact, the two games have a lot of common. They are great to play, but you won't always be compelled to complete them.

The Bottom Line
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a very ambitious game. It delivered less than it had initially promised, leading to unnecessary disappointment. Perhaps it can be summed up with "it could have been so more"; but that wouldn't do justice to what the game has achieved even without going all the way. It is flawed, and it's not always fun to play; but it is a commendable effort, and a landmark experiment. Its personality and its many creative touches make it a one of a kind experience - certainly one you wouldn't want to miss.

Windows · by Unicorn Lynx (181780) · 2015

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a great game, which unfortunately falls short of the mark for attaining “classic” status.

The Good
Several years ago, I remember reading an article in a magazine about this game when it was in early development.

The details at the time were sketchy, but it described something about the game being focussed on individuals called Stalker’s, who were all in competition to recover rare artifacts from the most dangerous areas in a post nuclear holocaust Chernobyl, and that you would trade these valuable artifacts with merchants for better equipment, food, and so on.

The most chiefly important characteristics of the game at this point seemed to be realism - eating, drinking, sleeping, fatigue and other such factors that present themselves in day to day life. The fact you were competing with other Stalker’s in “real-time”, so to speak, built an impression in my mind of a game which would actually have a genuine kind of immediacy, unlike every other conventional shooter where a bunch of scripts simply pop up at pre defined moments, where the game doesn’t move unless you do. Moreover, it certainly left me intrigued, and the name “Stalker” would rattle around in the back of my mind for the subsequent years that would pass.

It seemed for a time that the game had become vapourware, and would remain in obscurity, and ultimately would have the same fate as the paradox which is ‘Duke Nukem Forever’. History of course dictated, the game would come to fruition, and a big part of this was due to THQ’s intervention, becoming the games’ eventual publisher.

Granted this was a mammoth project, very ambitious in terms of scale and complexity, and the developer - GSC Game World, would get a huge leg up. Of course, compromises were to be made in certain areas of the game-play which would dramatically impact the end product.

Much of the original concepts and ideas that were initially conceived have been retained, and hold true in some capacity for the most part here.

When the game actually begins, you find yourself (the protagonist) with no memory of past events, and your most significant distinguishing quality is the initials S.T.A.L.K.E.R. branded on your forearm. You are only known as the marked one, and are in essence a blank canvas, so that YOU, the player, may develop and mould the character, by the decisions, actions and choices made throughout the course of the game. Well, this is the intention at least, and here I will talk about some of the positive aspects of this.

The way in which you interact with other characters here for me was in a way reminiscent of graphic adventure games from long ago, an acceptable broad example might be, Lucas Arts’ title ‘Monkey Island’, where you carry on conversations with others by reading dialogue, (except here much of it can also be heard through voice-over actors), and subsequently you are given a multiple-choice selection of phrases to respond with.

In some instances which call for a conscious response, you select the one you feel best suits your own characteristics, or whatever you want. Much unlike the aforementioned game, there are no wrong or right answers, but you see my meaning. I suppose more apt and juxtapose examples of this particular game facet would be found in Monolith’s role-playing shooter ‘No One Lives Forever’.

As a usual conventional trait for a game with role-playing elements, you can receive important tasks or even little side jobs from characters in the game, the latter of which includes things like recovering a lost item, protecting a camp, gathering intelligence, and so on.

These jobs usually have a time limit to complete, and you are rewarded in some way if you are successful - whether it is paid in ammunition, medical supplies, artifacts, or whatever, depending on whom you are dealing with.

There is no limit to the amount of jobs you accept to take upon yourself, and a PDA is utilised to organise all of the information you take in during the game. Keeping track of everything going on can be quite daunting at first, but familiarity with the games’ interface settles this.

You will generally discover that there are two basic types of NPC in this game, the first being loners, which are neutral to all others. The second, are members of factions, which all have quite uniform beliefs, and attitudes towards other factions and groups.

The most interesting part of this side of things is, that if you decide to lean towards one faction in particular. That is, do a lot more than just one passing gesture, you will become an adopted member to that collective, and their friends, whether it is in the immediate area, or found scattered all over the game world, suddenly become your allies, and their enemies conversely become aggravated by your presence.

In truth, this proves to be a double-edged sword, on one hand, your new friends will alleviate certain parts of the game which would normally be more testing, because you will have a tactical advantage, with strength in numbers. While other instances will see you in increasingly hostile territories without assistance, which will make your life increasingly difficult.

This is one of the games’ strongest assets. That is, the ability to give all players’ a uniquely different experience. So moreover, if you were to talk to some others who had played the game, you would come to find each person would have a separate and unique tale to tell about their own Stalker exploits. Of course, this isn’t to say there are strong plot development constants in the game, because there are, but the little things make this game so enduring.

How you organise you inventory in this game is very similar to how it is handled in Ion Storm’s classic Deus Ex. Though the chief difference here is that instead of being limited by space, which is for the aforementioned game, you are instead limited by weight. How you attain all the different items is just like in the aforementioned game, you can steal, loot dead bodies, buy and trade with others, and so on.

So here, again you can carry many different weapons and items -, e.g. pistols, machine guns, foods and drink, armour vests, artifacts, and so on. But, if you carry too many things you will get completely weighed down, and will not be able to move anywhere.

You have the ability to run, which is complimented by an endurance gauge which depletes while partaking in this physically demanding pastime. The heavier loaded you are with inventory, the quicker it will exhaust your stamina, resulting in puffing and panting, and eventually take all the spring from your step.

Another facet of the game I’ll touch on is how artifacts can be utilised, other than trading them. All artifacts have special properties which will affect the wearer in a multitude of ways. You use artifacts by attaching them to your belt, and this is done in the inventory, and you have a handful of slots to put them in. While artifacts have positive and negative reactions, you can try to strike a good balance to suit every situation, e.g. some will provide protection from puncture wounds, but subsequently make you more vulnerable to anomalies.

For those long treks across the zone expanse, you could use all artifacts that have endurance enhancing properties, which will allow you to run indefinitely, provided you are travelling light.

Alternatively, you can also drink soda will give you a burst of energy which will top up your endurance gauge, which is particularly handy when you are fleeing a battle which was a bit hot to handle.

Stalker has the most advanced combat I have experienced in a shooter which isn’t strictly a veritable sim. Enemy AI is fairly advanced, where your opposition will make most of their surroundings, taking cover from fire, employing tactics such as flanking, ambushes, and so on.

The weapons in the game are very authentic in look and feel, and up the stakes in terms of realism. Guns of certain build quality can be directly affected by environmental conditions, such as dusty winds, and this will cause frequent jamming in certain firearms, which will as a result requires you to constantly reload the weapon. This is certainly something which hasn’t been touched on very often in this genre, and adds some new and interesting dynamics to the proceedings.

Other ways in which the rather unpredictable and erratic conditions of the zone, present some very interesting twists in play, for instance, you may be in a firefight with some bandits, and suddenly they could be swept into an up draught of a cyclone anomaly, which operates in a real-world fashion, and isn’t discriminating about picking up any and all movable things which get in its way, and this includes you.

This game has perhaps the most expansive world ever seen in a shooter, and the freedom of movement could be considered something akin to Crytek’s ‘Far Cry’, though to an even larger scale. In stark contrast to that lush and somewhat beautiful game world however, this is somewhat sombre, with a dominating bleak and desolate atmosphere. Though this, is most certainly the intent, however. The world is full of danger in many forms, is inherently mysterious, and draws forth different instinctive and emotional responses from the player.

Visuals are a definite high point for Stalker. The ‘X-Ray’ game engine is a technical marvel, which brings forth a genuinely astounding level of depth. Everything from dilapidated stone housing structures, gigantic industrial expanses, acres upon acres of foliage, dank and ominous marshes, - are all visually striking and suitably well realised. Environmental conditions like day turning to night, and other real-world factors convey an aura of authenticity not previously touched on in a game of this type.

The audio side of things is well catered for also, with some very atmospheric effects. Ambient sounds include hauntingly eery samples of distant screams of perils and unsettling roars of howling beasts. Other sounds like the pitter-patter of rain, thunder and lighting, gusting winds and all other incidental effects are convincing, and go to great lengths in bringing the world to life.

The Bad
Your relationships with other individuals in the game world are rather black and white, and are essentially reduced to their statuses towards you being any of the three states I mentioned earlier - neutral, friends of foes. Sadly, you cannot ask friends for assistance, or command them in any rudimentary way whatsoever. They will always simply adhere to their own individual scripts. The illusion that the NPC’s freely go about their business does in fact convince to an extent, but limiting factors’ slip through the cracks, and you can’t be oblivious to the fact that there are in fact “scripts” being utilised, and reactions to your presence are simply to take no action, assist or attack you.

When you are hungry, a fork and knife icon is shown in the bottom right corner of the display, and if you don’t succumb to your hunger pangs, it very slowly depletes your vitality gauge. So in essence eating is just reduced to a little bit of tedious micro management. I’m not quite sure where I am going with this, but, um, a pork and bean’s noshing-simulator may have been interesting.

As this game’s presents a free roaming approach to accessing the game world, this presents its own problems. The thirty so kilometres of level scape has been broken into several sections, which means how you have directly affected the different individuals, environment and so on, has to be kept track of, and while the game succeeds in accomplishing this for the most part, there are some holes which can detract from your feeling of virtual reality, as it was.

The missions that appeared when you entered a new area for the first time, would suspiciously reappear every time you revisited the same area. The same could be said for jobs available that you had accepted, and whether or not you succeeded or failed, the task would be presented again regardless. On the same note, this goes for enemies you defeated, which will magically be back again to repeat the process every subsequent time you reenter the section. Some of this tediousness was however, in the games’ defence, rectified to some degree in a later patch.

Some times in this game you may hit stumps which leave you wondering as what to do next, and moreover wandering around aimlessly. For the most part this is perhaps attributable to some of the character dialogue requiring more persistence on your part than is suggested by the lax form of the conversations.

There is absolutely no transport or any kind of usable vehicle. This is sort of a cheat in itself, for if the game were so inclined, the main objectives presented could be finished in an unacceptably short time. I would have liked to see, even if only in a very minimal capacity, some kind of centralised transportation, to save you some tedium on those really long treks which can be a bit boring. For example, employing the railway trains which are apparent in the game, but are instead strictly decorative.

In terms of acceptable system requirements, Stalker is really quite demanding. I tried playing the game with my then existing Pentium 4 system with 512 meg of ram, and an AGP Geforce 6200 card, and the experience was just gruelling. Incessant pre caching of the virtual memory halts the game at every turn, which completely took the sting out of the play, and drove me to insanity. A thousand dollars later, with a dual-core system with one gigabyte of ram, and a decent PCI express video card, I managed to derive a pleasant experience.

Admittedly many elements of the game which were to bring new levels of immersion and realism forward has been substantially reduced in importance, and the game is ultimately more in the favour of shooting at things. Whether or not you will find this to be ultimately - resounding plus, off-putting, or just simply generates a feeling of indifference, depends entirely on your own viewpoint.

I personally had expectations of a more deep experience, and this is where those compromises I mentioned earlier on hurt the most. The things that were to define this game uniquely have been downplayed to what is generally accepted, rather than taking the risk of creating something that may have been truly innovative and original, and perhaps even genre defining.

The Bottom Line
Biased reflections aside, my bottom line is that I enjoyed Stalker. It makes for very compulsive gaming, and can easily consume any and all of your free time. The game world is very distinctive, with a great deal to explore and take in, and proves very easy to get lost in.

You can get as far side tracked as you like, and dodge the games’ grand scheme in favour of side missions and general exploration for absolutely ages. And I think this is the biggest part of Stalker - the freedom and expansiveness it brings forward, and not the often somewhat plodding and obvious plot developments dispersed throughout.

The role-playing side of Stalker is rather basic, and never reaches the level of complexity brought forward by earlier first-person perspective outing - Deus Ex, which I still feel to this day is the most complete package in this regard.

Stalker is an entertaining game, which has a unique atmosphere, and some original touches, but I don’t think can be considered a classic in my opinion, because it just isn’t consistently strong enough in all areas.

This is GSC Game World’s biggest title to date, and certainly shows a lot of promise, so I think future entries expanding on this universe should go from strength to strength, and Stalker will remain a title to keep an eye on for the years to come.

Windows · by Nick Drew (397) · 2007

This one creates history!

The Good
Nobody would really expect S.T.A.L.K.E.R. to be such good as it really is! Everyone, including myself, was charmed by the post apocalyptic element it boasted, but S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is much much more in reality! At a first glance it looks like a shooter and in its heart it is. But it's a different kind of shooter from what we've been mostly playing so far. GSC Game World is known to have produced a couple of, let's say, mediocre shooter games, along their Cossacks strategy series. Nobody was really expecting S.T.A.L.K.E.R. to have such an impact, and most importantly such depth!

Following an imaginary scenario which is based and well bonded on real historical facts, namely the 1985 catastrophe caused by the nuclear fusion in one of the reactors located at Chernobyl in the (then) Soviet Union, the game lets you wander around the area of Chernobyl, looking for precious artifacts and various other items which could be sold at the local dealers in order to make profit. And that is just one of the tasks you have to achieve in order to survive. Why? Making profit will allow you to purchase more powerful weapons and protective equipment, more ammo, etc. Actually you begin the game from such a dealer where you've been brought in to his quarters totally unconscious. After the intro story you're getting out to the real world of the Zone, which is the name for the area around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor where radiation has created an anomalous world, almost alien. Now, the Zone is what gives this game a heart and blood to live. According to the imaginary scenario, the Zone is the perimeter around the fused reactor, in which radiation has caused mutation by the years to the remaining local inhabitants (human and animal) and turned them hostile to the rest of the world. This perimeter is known to be expanding day by day and of course the Ukrainian government has sealed the Zone to outsiders and the matter is regarded as top secret... sort of... Since Stalkers are those people who are ready to gamble their lives and enter the Zone in search for precious artifacts. Some others are simply looking for answers and the Zone will offer you quite too many mysteries and secrets to reveal.

As I mentioned in the beginning Stalker is a first-person shooter game, it actually involves some tactical elements, a bit of strategic thinking and some trading as well. Think of it as Elite, or X: Beyond the Frontier set on earth as an FPS. For one the actual terrain off the game is quite huge. The game is not played in a linear form but the player has the freedom to go where ever he desires to and complete missions whenever he desires to. Of course you need to take missions and accept some assignments in order to gain money and most importantly to unveil the story and the secrets of the Zone. All this freedom and non-linearity flavor the game to be more a survival simulator rather than a cold shooter. You have to learn and adapt to the Zone's rules if you want to survive.

Aside from the lively elements of the game's environment that have codes of survival that you have to follow, there are the living entities which you come across and interact with... either with your weapons, or in more friendly manners. As I said above, the Zone has it's rules, so do the various inhabitants that populate it. And quite logically, since this place although being on earth, it is alien to the majority of people, those living on the inside have formed clans, in order to help themselves in surviving the wild environment. Each clan has it's own rules and they all differ from each other in many ways, but they all try to make it through the next day alive. People on the zone are all kinds of things: military, mafia, para-military, freelance stalkers, even mutants and zombies, you name it! Make sure you know what everybody is up to and don't cross their path on the wrong hour, otherwise you're dead meat. Simple as that. The strongest and smartest survives also in the Zone.

Following that model, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a real life simulator. Whatever you do on others creates a logical and true reaction. I'll give you a short example to see how deep the guys at GSC has gone with it: It's about dusk and I wander around the village I've started off the game. I spot a military patrol walking on the southern road of the village. I also spot their assault rifles, AK47s and I'm thinking that it will be nice if I had one of those instead of my pistol. After I ambush them and a short battle I get their stuff from the dead bodies and quickly rush back to the village to sell the 2 extra AK47s I got from them. When I get out of the local merchant's cellar I hear gun shots and everybody in the village is in panic, shooting! What happened? There's a military camp nearby and as soon as they realized that their patrol was eliminated they sent an assault force to take out the village as punishment! For that, some of the local Stalkers begun shooting at me, as they acknowledged that I was the cause for the military raid on the village! Truly an authentic reaction! Amazing! Added to that is the fact that, as a human being you have limitations as well. You simply cannot carry around everything you find lying on the ground, with the hope to get all your findings back to the trade guy and summon a huge amount of profit. Whatever you carry on your back pack increases your weight, therefore lessens your stamina and makes you get tired more easily. So think twice before picking up something, cause if you're already over the limit margin chances are that you won't be able to move... and that is lethal in combat. Grab things according to your survival needs and not for profit making.

The scenery is beautifully modeled and textured with many details added and a certain amount of realism is achieved by real-time HDRI rendering. Thanks to the game's X-Ray engine the visuals will produce some major jaw-drops, only if you have a high end spec machine, but still without the full settings the game looks appealing as well. The graphics of stalker are so amazing that they truly beat any other shooter that I have seen lately. A day - night cycle is being followed and the game runs on time as well, meaning that some missions require you to complete them in a set amount of days or hours. Of course the time passes a lot quicker than real time, for example a game-time minute is 3-4 real time seconds long. Also time should be a factor to your mission approach. For example if you prefer more stealthy approaches, then the night must be your friend, but beware of the mutants as they become more active in dark.

Regarding the enemy AI, this is equally good, as the enemy takes aim and uses the surrounding scenery to hide and react differently to your actions as well as the surroundings and the climate! Hostile elements do come in many forms; they are either human, animal, mutant or the weird physical phenomena found in the Zone, widely known as 'anomalies'. You really have to be alerted at all times if you want to survive in Stalker.

Acquiring stuff for your survival and for profit, is quite logical and very realistic in STALKER. You can either steal from the bodies of your dead enemies or friendly characters, or find stuff hidden in boxes, crates and other containers. You can also find stuff based on information you acquire while scavenging dead bodies: for example if some bandit has hidden his loot on a box somewhere the coordinates of he box are uploaded to your PDA at the time you scavenge his carcass, so you can go and grab it for yourself. Finders keepers!

Talking of your PDA, everybody in the Zone carries a PDA with him at all times. PDA stores information on your missions, marks locations on your mini-map, displays an arrow as to where you must head in order to complete a mission, has info about your status and other useful things such as your diary of your Zone living days experience.

Finally on the sound front, everything is excellently sampled and done. The environment sounds are superb, it is as if you really being there. Whether you're on the open country you can hear the winds, the rain, the birds and other animals. An excellent job there! But the best comes when you get inside the X18 and X16 underground labs! I really don't want to spoil it for you, but make sure you avoid playing these levels without having a light on inside your room! You will definitely freak out from the sound effects and the thousands of other cool implementations the guys at GSC came out with to enliven our gaming experience!

Finally the voice acting is simply amazing! The characters you interact with speak English with a heavy Russian accent and flavor. Also they act excellently, for example I always laugh hearing the pissed-off commander of the military camp nearby the starting village. He really sounds like he's pissed-off with his miserable life. The rest of the world speaks in Russian. Although you might not understand a thing from what they say, it certainly immerses you to the atmosphere the game wants to portray.

The Bad
I can't really think of anything that annoyed me so much in this title, other than the fact that a very few times it gets a bit confusing as to what exactly you have to do in order to proceed, this will have you wandering around a bit.

There's no quicksave option. Thankfully there's a save option if you press escape during the play and access the save option from the menu that appears.

Another fact that bugs me personally, is whenever I clear out an area from thugs or mercenaries, they keep coming back and re-occupy the place the next time you're around. So every time you pass through these places you have to gunfight your way through again. Some times it's avoidable through stealth approaches, but as soon as you get spotted you're in trouble, especially if you're loaded with goodies for trading. Still, if you're coming home empty and looking to find a few rifles for the local trader, beating these guys down is not a bad idea.

The game has some bugs when you have the inventory screen on and you want to transfer goods to a box or to the trader for selling them, which can be found by scrolling down on your list. For example ammo that always occupies the lowest spots on your list. If you click once only a small amount gets transferred to the other container (it can also be the trader) and your list goes back to it's top, therefore you have to scroll down again and click once again to transfer another small amount and again and again. Now imagine if you have 1000 bullets on your backpack and you want to keep only 300 on you so you don't carry all of them around... In general, the inventory menu needed more work as the scrolling itself is also a bit buggy etc

The Bottom Line
Well if there's one thing that must be said about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. that would be that its release created history in the shooter game genre. It is so beautiful and appealing and much more different than the rest of the pack, that surely other companies will follow this example and evolute the genre. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is certainly a title that we'll be referring to for a long time now.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. offers more than just shooting down bad guys. It offers you the option to shoot down good guys as well, suffer the consequences of your actions and survive if you can. The game offers you more than one ending, according to how you played it and the missions that you have completed. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is the best wild life survival simulator at the moment. Compared to the enjoying gaming experience and it's appealing post apocalyptic theme, this title has a huge withstanding value and a long lasting life cycle. I have the game installed in my hard drive for 3 months now and always keep coming back for some action, even if there are other games that draw my main interest at the moment.

Certainly to play such a game, with such complexity of constraints and graphical novelty, you really need a good machine. And I really recommend an upgrade, if not just for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. more power comes always handy, especially in games. It should run smoothly on machinery with Nvidia 7600 and above and with more than 1GB of RAM.

In all, an all-round excellent production that delivers the goods in such an outstanding and enjoyable way, that you'll certainly keep this installed for a long time. Make sure you're got the power to run this though.

Windows · by SifouNaS (1309) · 2007

[ View all 6 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
SEVA Suit cosplay Angel80 Feb 16, 2015
Kruglov taking radiation measurement bug Angel80 Feb 15, 2015
RPG? Patrick Bregger (298879) Aug 23, 2013
Patch Guide? Zovni (10504) Oct 17, 2011
Essential mods? Late (77) Jul 29, 2010

Trivia

1001 Video Games

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

PDA

At some point of the game, you find one PDA called "Gordon's PDA". Some people say you find it in some scientist's corpse, but it seems to be more random than that. Reading it, the owner tells how he was first in Black Mesa, then in some Russian town and then here in Ukraine. This is clearly a reference to the Half-Life series and the possibility of that series' protagonist Gordon Freeman visiting the zone as an stalker.

The funny thing is how Freeman looks like a total rookie trying to survive in the Zone, to the point that he even has to trade his crowbar for a can of food. The bottom line comes when you realizes that you have just killed Gordon Freeman (which is why you have his PDA), who hasn't been able to survive to the Zone after all.

References to the game

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl was parodied in an episode of "Die Redaktion" (The Editorial Team), a monthly comedy video produced by the German gaming magazine GameStar. It was published on the DVD of issue 08/2007.

Weapons

The survival knife that the player character (the man known as "Marked One") uses for fighting is almost certainly based on an HB-1-01, manufactured by the Russian company Izhmash. Information also contributed by 88 49, and Patrick Bregger.

Analytics

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  • The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. wiki
    The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. wiki (Game page on the .S.T.A.L.K.E.R. wiki, a Wikipedia style database about the .S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series (English))
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    Detailed information about the game on Wikipedia

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  • MobyGames ID: 27172
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Mortimer.

PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series added by Plok. OnLive added by firefang9212.

Additional contributors: Sciere, UV, MichaelPalin, Sicarius, lasttoblame, Cantillon, oct, Plok, FatherJack.

Game added March 28, 2007. Last modified March 23, 2024.