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

The Good
While most first-person shooter games always make promises of realism and immersion, none of them -- not even Half-Life and Deus Ex -- even come close to accurately simulating real life. Of course, this is largely because developers are afraid that making a game "too realistic" will suck the fun out of it. But if developers like GSC Game World can take the time to make it as realistic and fun as possible, squeezing in the details that you'll find in real life, they'll actually end up with an unbelievably great game like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is an open-ended game, which means that instead of a linear gameworld where you follow the same path every time, you can freely roam around the gameworld and accept missions from other people that you find. Most of these missions are completely optional. This freedom, coupled with the fact that everything happens in real-time, ensures unparalleled replay value. Further adding to the immersion is the really intense nature of the combat. Since your weapons are inaccurate to start out with, and you don't take much damage before dying, you need to use tactics and stealth to survive against your extremely cunning AI opponents. Whether you're fighting mutant or human enemies, these guys use cover and tactics more efficiently than anyone can ever dream of. They also act differently depending on various attributes, like how hungry they are or even the weather outside! You really feel like you're in an actual gunfight. Heck, you could avoid combat altogether by using stealth tactics to sneak past your enemies...it's all up to you.

Attention to detail is very characteristic of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. A first in the shooter genre is the inclusion of food and sleep. Just like in real life, you'll need to eat food to stay alive, and get sleep in a safe resting spot. Dynamic weather and real-time alternation between day and night settings also help to fool you into thinking that you're truly in the game's alternate reality. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. also corrects the cliché of having to walk over items to pick them up. You press the Use key on items to add them to your inventory, and when you loot a corpse, you're presented with a menu so you can choose which items you want to loot. You're also limited to how much you can carry, and heavier items take up more space in your inventory. While this has been attempted in previous games, players would be frustrated when they had to pick up items in the heat of battle. This isn't an issue here, as you only have to pick up items when you're not in combat.

Just when you thought that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. couldn't get any more immersive, it presents you with photo-realistic graphics using GSC's own X-Ray engine. While the engine doesn't really have any graphical features that we haven't seen before, it more than makes up for this by having the best detail and lighting that you will ever see in any game. As expected, the great graphics come at a cost: even on my high-end PC, the game ran pretty slow unless I toned it down to minimum settings. If you have the rig to play it with the settings turned up, though, you'll constantly be amazed at how lifelike these graphics are. The audio is also spot-on. The weapons sound almost exactly like in real life, adding even more flavor to the combat. Since most of the characters are Ukrainian, they speak in actual Ukrainian accents, which adds to the authenticity of the game. Some characters just speak Ukrainian, so you'll see subtitles to be able to understand what they're saying.

The Bad
You're kidding me, right? This game rocks!

The Bottom Line
Mixing the best elements from games like Half-Life and Deus Ex with brand-new innovations, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sets a new standard for future games to follow. Forget all those games that guide you along the same path each time. Forget all those games with rough level transitions. Forget all those games where you can snipe with a chaingun. Forget all those games where you don't eat or sleep. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. will become the new obsession of gamers everywhere, and will do to the gaming world what The Wizard of Oz did to movies. My suggestion is to finish every game that you haven't beaten yet, as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. will truly make all your other games lose their luster...

The Good
The Graphics: Not spectacular, but the art design stands out and they work hand in hand with other elements to create a visually appealing and surreal setting in the zone.

Sound: The sound will immerse you into the bizarre surroundings of the zone, and will even sometimes go farther than any of the horrific mutants in creating a genuine atmosphere and feel of terror. The strange sounds emanating throughout the zone along with the stark uninviting and harsh wind is guaranteed to keep you on your toes.

Combat: The combat is great, realistic and very involving. It can be tough, but it only helps immerse you further due to the realism and genuine feeling that you have to take care of yourself and survive, using any method possible be it a bigger gun or patching yourself up before the battle.

The Game World: The game world is easily the best part, The Zone is a well defined and scary place, and is wide open for exploration... at your own risk. The game sucked me in more than any other "sandbox" type game, as the complex system of the zone is so well balanced and unique. You will have the desire to explore, but the dangers of the Zone will keep you on edge too.

"Hybrid" gameplay:

Is it a first person shooter with RPG elements? Is it an RPG with guns? It's hard to say. To me, it feels like a cross between a lite-RPG, a military simulator, a horror game, an adventure game, and of course a shooter. This hybrid of gameplay blends seamlessly with the equally unique system of the zone, you will make a name for yourself, affect the world, and truly feel like you are trying to survive from crazed militants and frightening mutants and the deadly "anomalies" that are strewn across the zone.

The Bad
Mediocre Voice Acting: No one really seems to put any effort into their roles, and just grunts out lines. It's also inconsistent, important characters will speak English but others will speak Russian, and sometimes a glitch will cause them to just revert to Russian which can be confusing for someone like me who doesn't speak Russian.

Bugs, Bugs, and More Bugs: The engine needs some serious retooling. There are too many glitches to note, the list I attempted to compile consisted of over 300 giant bugs... and this is after several patches. It also has a strangely steep system requirement due to poor threading of the engine. It's also a bummer to have an intense fight crash on you.

Difficulty: STALKER's difficulty can be daunting at first. I almost wanted to hate the game because I had to do the first mission 20 times on the "Rookie" setting. There is almost no tutorial and you are thrust into the game rather jarringly, so you have to learn the game through lots and LOTS of trial. If you have patience, you will soon adapt to the difficulty and you will adapt to the zone, but the initial difficulty can make the game have a slow and sometimes frustrating start.

Disappointing story: The story had lots of ideas going for it, but it never really went anywhere. It doesn't help that the character you play as has no characteristics at all. The endings are also a disappointment. There are moments that the story is interesting, but usually those moments relate more to new areas of the zone and events in the zone, and less about the characters story. I also felt let down as, while I know this is not a direct adaptation of "The Roadside Picnic" or the film "Stalker," I feel like it could have used the more philosophical elements of those stories to greater effect.

Graphics are as bad as they are good: Like I said, STALKER looks good from the artistic standpoint, and looks very surreal and neat, but when you look at the game from the technical standpoint, its not impressive at all. Animations are stiff, facial expressions sort of jerk around unblinkingly, lighting is slightly off, and some textures are just very low resolution and sometimes jaggy.

The Bottom Line
Stalker is a game that is impossible to describe. The best way to describe it is if you have played the game "Deus Ex;" Imagine Deus Ex, but with a more realistic weapons system, a sandbox world, and mutants. It's similar to that, but even then, it defies categorization. Stalker is one of the most unique games in years, if not ever. It's hard to explain, it's hard to even understand, but it will suck you in and compel you to play through many times over.

If you are open minded, and want a change of pace from other shooters, STALKER will bring you that change and despite its problems, the amazing and memorizing game world will win you over and make up for almost all of the flaws (Except maybe the constant crashes, which usually happen during the best parts). Check out this game if you have not already!

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.