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

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.