A great way to explore Chornobyl and Pripyat virtually!
It seems it’s almost obligatory to start a review of Chernobylite by saying how this is a completely different game to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. While this is true, people fail to mention how the studio, The Farm 51, since the beginning of their Kickstarter right until the final release compared their project to “nuclear horror games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” (this phrase was also used in emails when sending review codes to some YouTubers).

I’m one of the early backers on Kickstarter and this is exactly what caught my intention. I’m glad Chernobylite is nothing like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. If I was to say “Chernobylite is like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” then I wouldn’t give justice to the project and the team behind it.

The main gameplay loop of Chernobylite is simple – you build a base, manage resources, shoot soldiers and nuclear ghosts, and recruit and manage different characters who help you find your wife. The base building and NPC management are very integral to what the game is about. However, It seems like The Farm 51 didn’t have a clear vision. There are a lot of mechanics added and all of them are quite basic, middling at best. After playing for 3-4 hours I started to feel like I’d seen all there is to see and do. The combat is laughable. On higher difficulty, enemies are bullet sponges while being aimbots and see you through walls, trees etc. The game never truly pushes you to collect more resources. You can easily beat the game without ever exploring even on higher difficulty which is a missed opportunity.

You are exploring devastated land by one of the greatest disasters in human history yet It’s a pretty forgiving landscape. All there is really to worry about is pockets of radiation which can easily be cured and the gas clouds… for which you have a gas mask. There are no mutated wild animals or anomalies to worry about. The survival elements of Chernobylite are missing.

The story of the Chornobyl site is persistent. When you die, you don’t get back to a checkpoint (although the game allows it, again – why?). Instead, you get captured and the story continues. Your failure becomes another part of the story and you even get the chance to meet new characters and finish side quests. The strength of Chernobylite lies not exactly with the story itself but more so with how flexible it is. There are a lot of decisions you have to take and your decisions have consequences. From time to time, you get the chance to change your decisions if you have enough “Chernobylite” resources.

Another great mechanic on paper but ruined because of the lack of clear vision is the mental state of you and your team. You play as a nuclear physicist so all the shooting and stabbing is too much for your psyche. But that simply makes the edges of the screen dark and has almost zero influence on the gameplay or story. How do you fix your psyche? By eating a bowl of soup or swilling down some alcohol which is quite clearly supposed to be vodka. A clear spirit in Ukraine – it’s not going to be a Beefeater gin or Bacardi rum. What about the psyche of your team? Just build more comfortable accommodation, clear the air and give them more bread.

“The Zone” is gorgeous and dreadful, and Chernobylite squeezes an impressive amount of variety out of each __cpLocation. This is truly a photorealistic game. Honestly, this might be one of the best-looking indie games I have ever seen. The environments are made with 3D scans of Chernobyl and Pripyat and this is for most people the closest you’re ever going to get to exploring the area. The ambient soundtrack complements the visuals perfectly. Radiation pools expand. NAR soldiers arrive better equipped. Tempestuous "Chenobylite storms" grow more intense.

Despite being a very middling experience, at the end of the day, I recommend Chernobylite because of the weight it gives player choices and the flexibility of the narrative makes it compelling and the atmosphere is truly well done. Congrats to the team for all the hard work and I’m glad I backed the project on Kickstarter.

This game is an odd experience for me, because it sometimes borders on being a pure walking simulator, which is something I usually don't have patience for, but I ended up kind of loving this game and cherishing the experience. It's moody, atmospheric, looks incredible, the writing is interesting and the game design is sort of a combination of all of your favorite post-apocalyptic franchises in a more lightweight and easily digestable package.

What you do in the game is prepare for and make runs into the exclusion zone, which is divided into a few quite small but open worlds. You can either go on story missions or scavenging missions, and you can choose to go yourself or send one of the companions you end up recruiting along the way. Inbetween missions, you can work on solving the mysteries while also expanding and improving your base facilities for combat preparation, health and companion comfort. You will build little plantations for food and healing salves, craft ammo, dismantle weapons and set up beds, couches, air purifiers and TVs for your companions so they don't go stir crazy in your rotting, irradiated warehouse overlooking Pripyat. Once you're done preparing, you tell Mikhail to go scavenging for ammo while Olivier goes to kill a "shadow" for chernobylite, while you go on a story mission to try to find out what happened to your wife and the power plant since, of course, the story ties into the disaster.

As an aside, I loved just starting a mission since you do so from an overlook far above Pripyat, where you can see the famous ferris wheel and the Duga radar array looming in the distance. You also, quite cleverly, use this view to obtain hints about what your run will be like. If an area on the map looks heavily irradiated from the overlook, it will be once you spawn in. The game straight-up tells you this in a dialog box, which is nice, because I never would've noticed that the overlook serves a purpose other than looking very striking.

When you've made your choices and spawned into the zone, you will explore the area by following markers while also being free to explore however you want. The exploration and the missions objectives are usually quite simple and, most of the time, you go on little 5-minute missions where your only objective is to sneak past a squad of guards to for example a radio and then you interact with the radio and the mission is over. The markers are for the mission objective, but also little scenarios that you come across and play out in front of you. Sometimes it's soldiers feeding you exposition about what's going on, and sometimes you're presented with a little moral choice scenario, which the game is absolutely packed with. This might sound dull, but the short and simple mission structure was perhaps the game's greatest strength for me, and this is what I meant earlier by saying that the game is a borderline walking sim. Missions are generally very short, and it's not rare to spend more time in your base than in your next mission, and I see that other reviews don't like this at all, but I found it refreshing to head into a fairly tiny open world, admire some incredibly atmospheric graphics, pick up some herbs and metals for crafting, and see cool and interesting scenes play out. The missions do also get more intense towards the end of the game, and you do have very solid progression from being helpless in the beginning to being a stealth/murder machine that can easily sneak past or murder a squad, depending on what you feel like doing and what's the shortest route. I started out by being afraid of every guard and just sneaking past everything, which made missions feel tense but perhaps low on action, but by the end I was blasting everybody but the kind of pain in the ass heavily armored guards because it was faster and easier.

And, really, the choices must be given their own paragraph, because this is Make Decisions: The Game. You're presented with some kind of choice that has some kind of consequence literally all the time, and it's presented as both dialogue boxes and scenarios playing out in real time in front of you. The first interactive and dynamic choice I ran into was spotting some guards doing something in the distance, so I crept closer and noticed that they were about to execute some stalker. This would also be my first time going guns blazing, so I hesitated until they killed him, but decided I didn't like that outcome, so I reloaded save and struggled through my first fight - since this is the kind of game where recoil is heavy, iron sights are bad and aiming is difficult because you also shake heavily when getting shot, so it's not a "murder 100 dudes a minute" type game at all - and saved the guy. That meant that he would now be alive and could be find in future missions, even though that guy in particular didn't end up being a major choice and I don't think that character ended up serving a purpose. Other choices, however, change how the whole story plays out and you can even end up making choices so wrong that you don't get to play all missions. The twist there is that there is a feature that allows you to turn back time and change your choices, with works with the story since chernobylite, the material, has the ability to let you travel through time and space. You can also be locked out of missions because your ultimate goal is not from the regular missions board, but a big heist that has its own mission board and that you're supposed to spend the whole game preparing for, and the game does allow you to attempt the heist from the first day if you'd like. You will fail miserably since you haven't collected all the clues and figured everything out, you don't have any ammo or healing and you don't have any companions, but the game will let you do it, which is really cool.

The clue system deserves a mention too! I really liked it. The way it works is that your base has a typical movie conspiracy theorist board with pictures of culprits with strings between them and everything, and you collect major clues by completing story missions while finding minor clues in the little open worlds (which are not marked in any way and you have to actually just find them). Once you've gathered enough for a case, you can use the chernobylite tech to "relive" the situations you've gathered information about, so the game both presents the pieces of evidence to you, fully readable so you can form your own theories and conclusions, and then when you're done with a case, you walk through a 3D "presentation" of the events you uncovered. Oh, and the function for changing choices is also a 3D space where you walk between little dioramas that represent the choice scenario, which is just more impactful than picking from a menu of dialogue boxes.

I don't know, I could probably keep going with praise as I very much enjoyed everything about this game. It has some of the best, if not the very best, naturalistic lighting I've ever seen. The individual pieces of the graphics, like the polygonal objects and the textutres, might not be the best in the game, but the overall visual direction of this game is incredible. I initially loved how if you get "killed" by the opposing military force (and not the environment), you're not actually killed and are instead sent to a prison you have to escape from. The fact that there's a "black stalker" that will show up sometimes if you take too long is great. The sorrowful theme of everything is touching and wonderful.

Is the game flawless? Definitely not. Getting arrested instead of getting killed was awesome at first, but like the 20th time got old, and there was a mission with unusually heavy guard presence I didn't feel prepared for, so I messed it up several times, and had to escape prison like 7 times in a row. That was frustrating, and it was even more frustrating that these clever bastards made sure to save the checkpoint of you in prison before you even go down, so if you try to dashboard as you're in the dying animation, you'll still spawn back into prison. The game is also just disappointingly easy. At no point was I struggling for food, and the only resource I had trouble with was herbs, and that was probably because I just didn't plan ahead well enough for those and I got lazy with looting in the latter half of the game. The game does have difficulty sliders for both combat and survival, but the problem is that you can't notice that a survival game is too generous with resources until you're filthy rich in materials and I didn't want to start over at that point. Combat could be difficult, but stealth was very easy as you really only have to run around a corner and hide in a bush if someone spots you. It's a very minor point, but it's also unfortunate that they clearly lost the voice actor for Igor, the main character, at some point. A few lines of dialogue are obviously spoken by an entirely different person (in the russian dub anyway, but who plays this game with the english dub?). Finally, I wouldn't have minded if the game had more of a reason to keep playing it, though maybe that would've worked out if I had known to play with survival set to hard, so that I at any point would've needed to stop playing story missions in order to focus on building my base and feeding my companions, because with how easy the survival ended up being, the base became more and more of an afterthought as I played and I didn't end up unlocking all skills because I never had to spend any time doing the generic resource missions instead of just knocking out story mission after story mission.

Even with a few flaws, the lack of difficulty being a major one, I still loved this game and would recommend it to anyone who likes atmospheric, dark and sorrowful games, exploration/extraction games with survival mechanics or are just fascinated by the Chernobyl exclusion zone. This is a well-made, thoughtful, soulful game made with gusto and passion, and if you know that this is the same developer that hit us with the amusingly terrible Deadfall Adventures a decade ago, it's kind of mindblowing how good this game is and how much they've improved. This game is something special. It really reminds me of Spec Ops: The Line in how it's a game from a developer that used to be a bit shit, and that's much more thoughtful and intelligent than you might think. This isn't "rule of cool" Chernobyl, even though you can end up building a railgun and shit. This is fascinating, engaging, contemplative, romantic, sorrowful and beautiful. It doesn't reach the whole way and isn't a slam dunk 5/5, but it's something special that deserves your attention if you're even halfway interested in any of it's themes.

Chernobylite incorporated a few traditional RPG elements while also attempting to hold up as a first-person shooter, but it mastered none and remained in a middle ground. I found early exploration to be pretty great, the decrepit and bleak environments beautiful due to 3D scanning, yet the maps offered very little later on, and the story suffered with pacing. The missions themselves, which usually consisted of going from point A to B, got repetitive.

The most ambitious thing about it had to be the ability to change every decision, of which there were many, resulting in the timeline being altered. I'd never before encountered such a mechanic.

Chernobylite is a fun romp across the Chornobyl exclusion zone that you can easily 100% in 16 hours. It does become quite stale towards the tail end when you figure everything out already, but thanks to its design missions can be rushed through easily. The last mission is quite a fun 'suicide mission' where companions you gathered throughout the game can die, Mass Effect 2 style. The combat is very 'ehhhh', the story is fun with a last-second twist that might not land depending on what you expected from it, and the atmosphere and exploration aspects are second to none. Although, you cannot shake the feeling that this game could have been so much more. I pray for a Chernobylite 2 with an open world, expanded building, and more enemy variety. I am not crazy about open-world games, but this would be perfect for that, or a STALKER-like open areas.