After my initial try at this back in 2016, today I have beaten STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. Well, actually, I made it almost to the end, but was backed into a corner with no way to beat the game. The last save being a few hours from there, I didn't want to replay it all, so I watched the canon ending on YT.
I both liked and disliked this game. I both am very excited for the upcoming STALKER 2 release, and also unsure if that game will be for me.
After hearing so much praise about the STALKER series, I have to say, I ended up being quite disappointed in this one. In case you want to know if this is for you, tell me how this description of STALKER sounds to you, courtesy of me.
A sandbox, open world first-person shooter with mostly unscripted shootouts, in a postapocalyptic setting, with a ton of bugs and the constant need to F6 (quicksave), because otherwise you will lose your progress or die thousand deaths due to a variety of reasons, often BS ones.
Now there is a ton of good and bad in that description. If the good parts sound really awesome to you, check it out. If the bad parts make you apprehensive about all this, then probably stay away.
First, the game is from 2007. I personally thought graphically this game looked more than fine, but it IS a game from 2007, so you might feel more sensitive there. However, graphics are definitely not an issue here.
The game does not hold your hand in this one. After you emerge from the intro, you are given a mission and make your way to a building, where you have to fight 8 bad guys. Immediately, you will realize that the game requires you to approach gun fights tactically, and that running in guns blazing will more often than not end poorly for you. Especially in this first mission, your weapon is terrible, which just worsens all the negative factors of running into a fight without taking cover.
From there, you are given main missions and a ton of side missions as well, as well as being told of dozens of secret stashes across the map. You can learn of these by talking to people or simply by looting bodies. How looting bodies gives you this info, who knows, but it does. These optional side missions and stashes are always the same. You go to a spot and have to either shoot enemies, or simply look around and try to find a stash that is usually well-hidden somewhere in the area. Both of these are important to do at the start, because they supply you with cash and loot.
Unfortunately, the game has a 50 kg weight limit, which you will hit very fast. And if my experience is anything to go by, you will never go far below it anymore. Even though I only carried a pistol, shotgun, AK and one more weapon with me, I never could go below 45 kg, which meant that whenever I wanted to loot something, the likelihood was very high that I would have to leave something behind as well. Since traders in this game are very few and are often very far away from your location at any given time, this meant inventory management was a constant worry.
This is the first part of the game that really wasn't fun to me. Why can't I increase my inventory space? Why can I carry almost nothing? What's the point of finding stashes all the time if they either give me almost nothing of value or are items that I can only carry if I leave something else behind? What's the point in exploration, when all I can stumble upon are enemies that I have to fight myself, or random gun fights between two AI factions? While the latter is always fun to see in an open world game, I just never understood what my incentive was supposed to be.
In this game, you can collect "artifacts", which are stone-like things that are in this game world and offer you boosts to some stats whilst reducing some of your others. One stone for example gives you a 200% health boost, if equipped, but reduces your defenses. Some stones reduce the amount of radiation you take in, but make you more susceptible to bleeding. You can equip five at a time by putting them on your belt, but they disappear after a while, presumable because they ... ran out of their powers?
These artifacts, I found, almost all suck, and those that don't are very hard to find. So you will likely sell almost all of them. Even if you don't, as I said, they disappear after using them for a bit, so you will constantly be needing to find more. There is durability on your weapons and armor as well, and while I don't mind these elements in a video game, the game likes to put you in dead-end situations, if you don't manage your inventory right, especially before a main mission. That's actually how I failed to beat the final mission.
When the penultimate mission ends, you don't get to visit a trader like in many other games pre-final mission/boss. If you want to do that, you have to backtrack for 10-15 minutes in order to trade. I decided to carry on to the final mission with my 10 medkits, 15 antirad items and 25 bandages, thinking I'd be alright.
Instead, after a very lengthy mission with hundreds of enemies coming at you all told, I had to use all my items (and all the ones I found off corpses), and to make matters worse, my armor was slowly but surely breaking, which means the effectiveness of it is reduced. My radiation resistance wasn't 89% anymore, but rather 10%. In an environment that was filled with radioactivity, this meant that I was fucked. If you are exposed to too much radiation, your health starts dropping. You can use antirad items, which get rid of all the radiation you currently have, but the meter immediately starts going up again, which makes me question what the point of these items is. Why isn't there something like Rad-X like in Fallout?
Or, of course, I could just keep using a suit that has high radiation resistance, but as I said, my armor is almost completely broken. I can't carry backup armor because my fucking carry weight is almost maxed out at all times without it, and I can't swap it in the battlefield because there almost never is any armor available. You can't just strip the clothing from your fallen enemies and put it on, but have to hope that you find some armor just lying somewhere. It wasn't, anywhere, on the final mission, so I just found myself dying endlessly.
This is precisely the reason why I wouldn't recommend this game to you, if you are not a hardcore gamer. This is truly a miserable experience, and per design. I don't find this particularly fun. It's not what I'm looking for in a video game. Or let me say it differently. If what this game strives for is realism, then why am I, one man, being sent out alone to fight 100s of enemies? Why don't you give me a fucking backpack so I can carry more health items, ammo and a backup piece of armor?
Now granted, this is mainly an issue if you plan on following the main story. If you want to simply enjoy the open world, sandbox nature of this game, you can easily do that without ever running into these problems. But as someone who likes to play the main story of games, Stalker's main story was really poorly designed. And as a sandbox, this game just doesn't offer enough for me. As I said, variety is very low in this game.
There are humans, dogs, and about half a dozen varities of mutants in this game as enemies. There are "anomalies" in the environment, which are basically fields that release different kinds of elements if you get near them, all giving you significant damage, whether it's lightning, fire or some sort of whirlwind. And there is radiation.
As I mentioned before, side missions always look the same. Go some place, have a shootout with a bunch of enemies. Win, go to mission-giver, get a few thousand rubles and maybe an item, and repeat this. Once you have seen all the dangers in this world, that's it. There is nothing more.
Having ranted a bit though, there are a bunch of positives here as well of course. First, the game is obviously very unique, even if not in a positive way all the time, and it's very ambitious. Take what this game has, fix the bugs, increase variety of the tasks in this game, how you can approach them and increase the amount of dangers in the world as well, and I could see myself enjoying STALKER 2 quite a lot. But as it stands, I think the game is ambitious but not really successful, in my eyes.
What the game does really well though is create a scary and depressing atmosphere. You can really feel that the Zone is a place that can just destroy you from one second to the next. While the variety of dangers is not awfully large, dangers are omnipresent and there are few people in this world who don't want to kill you and get to your loot. Plus, there is one particular mission in a sort of bunker in this game that was just scary as hell. In that regard, the game does a great job. Plus, enemy AI is pretty smart and gunfights do have plenty of tactical elements to them, though I would have enjoyed the ability to bring teammates with me and to have my teammates have more than 1 braincell during those fights themselves. I can't tell you how many times main quest-givers died because they simply refused to take cover like the enemies did. Bizarre.
But that said, these things the game did do well. The rest, I can't say I enjoyed. The story for the most part is go find A, so he can tell you more about this Strelok person you are trying to find. You go to A, he either is dead or sends you to someone else, until you get to person G, who tells you to go to a place and find documents. You find documents, which lead to knowledge about a different location, where you need even more documents, and you do that until you pretty much get to the final mission and learn the truth. Can't say I particularly liked 'the truth' and the story about the Zone, about you and your target and all that. But I guess the main story wasn't the point of this game anyway. A game that, overall, I appreciated for its ideas and for what it can spawn in STALKER 2, but one I didn't necessarily enjoy itself.
I both liked and disliked this game. I both am very excited for the upcoming STALKER 2 release, and also unsure if that game will be for me.
After hearing so much praise about the STALKER series, I have to say, I ended up being quite disappointed in this one. In case you want to know if this is for you, tell me how this description of STALKER sounds to you, courtesy of me.
A sandbox, open world first-person shooter with mostly unscripted shootouts, in a postapocalyptic setting, with a ton of bugs and the constant need to F6 (quicksave), because otherwise you will lose your progress or die thousand deaths due to a variety of reasons, often BS ones.
Now there is a ton of good and bad in that description. If the good parts sound really awesome to you, check it out. If the bad parts make you apprehensive about all this, then probably stay away.
First, the game is from 2007. I personally thought graphically this game looked more than fine, but it IS a game from 2007, so you might feel more sensitive there. However, graphics are definitely not an issue here.
The game does not hold your hand in this one. After you emerge from the intro, you are given a mission and make your way to a building, where you have to fight 8 bad guys. Immediately, you will realize that the game requires you to approach gun fights tactically, and that running in guns blazing will more often than not end poorly for you. Especially in this first mission, your weapon is terrible, which just worsens all the negative factors of running into a fight without taking cover.
From there, you are given main missions and a ton of side missions as well, as well as being told of dozens of secret stashes across the map. You can learn of these by talking to people or simply by looting bodies. How looting bodies gives you this info, who knows, but it does. These optional side missions and stashes are always the same. You go to a spot and have to either shoot enemies, or simply look around and try to find a stash that is usually well-hidden somewhere in the area. Both of these are important to do at the start, because they supply you with cash and loot.
Unfortunately, the game has a 50 kg weight limit, which you will hit very fast. And if my experience is anything to go by, you will never go far below it anymore. Even though I only carried a pistol, shotgun, AK and one more weapon with me, I never could go below 45 kg, which meant that whenever I wanted to loot something, the likelihood was very high that I would have to leave something behind as well. Since traders in this game are very few and are often very far away from your location at any given time, this meant inventory management was a constant worry.
This is the first part of the game that really wasn't fun to me. Why can't I increase my inventory space? Why can I carry almost nothing? What's the point of finding stashes all the time if they either give me almost nothing of value or are items that I can only carry if I leave something else behind? What's the point in exploration, when all I can stumble upon are enemies that I have to fight myself, or random gun fights between two AI factions? While the latter is always fun to see in an open world game, I just never understood what my incentive was supposed to be.
In this game, you can collect "artifacts", which are stone-like things that are in this game world and offer you boosts to some stats whilst reducing some of your others. One stone for example gives you a 200% health boost, if equipped, but reduces your defenses. Some stones reduce the amount of radiation you take in, but make you more susceptible to bleeding. You can equip five at a time by putting them on your belt, but they disappear after a while, presumable because they ... ran out of their powers?
These artifacts, I found, almost all suck, and those that don't are very hard to find. So you will likely sell almost all of them. Even if you don't, as I said, they disappear after using them for a bit, so you will constantly be needing to find more. There is durability on your weapons and armor as well, and while I don't mind these elements in a video game, the game likes to put you in dead-end situations, if you don't manage your inventory right, especially before a main mission. That's actually how I failed to beat the final mission.
When the penultimate mission ends, you don't get to visit a trader like in many other games pre-final mission/boss. If you want to do that, you have to backtrack for 10-15 minutes in order to trade. I decided to carry on to the final mission with my 10 medkits, 15 antirad items and 25 bandages, thinking I'd be alright.
Instead, after a very lengthy mission with hundreds of enemies coming at you all told, I had to use all my items (and all the ones I found off corpses), and to make matters worse, my armor was slowly but surely breaking, which means the effectiveness of it is reduced. My radiation resistance wasn't 89% anymore, but rather 10%. In an environment that was filled with radioactivity, this meant that I was fucked. If you are exposed to too much radiation, your health starts dropping. You can use antirad items, which get rid of all the radiation you currently have, but the meter immediately starts going up again, which makes me question what the point of these items is. Why isn't there something like Rad-X like in Fallout?
Or, of course, I could just keep using a suit that has high radiation resistance, but as I said, my armor is almost completely broken. I can't carry backup armor because my fucking carry weight is almost maxed out at all times without it, and I can't swap it in the battlefield because there almost never is any armor available. You can't just strip the clothing from your fallen enemies and put it on, but have to hope that you find some armor just lying somewhere. It wasn't, anywhere, on the final mission, so I just found myself dying endlessly.
This is precisely the reason why I wouldn't recommend this game to you, if you are not a hardcore gamer. This is truly a miserable experience, and per design. I don't find this particularly fun. It's not what I'm looking for in a video game. Or let me say it differently. If what this game strives for is realism, then why am I, one man, being sent out alone to fight 100s of enemies? Why don't you give me a fucking backpack so I can carry more health items, ammo and a backup piece of armor?
Now granted, this is mainly an issue if you plan on following the main story. If you want to simply enjoy the open world, sandbox nature of this game, you can easily do that without ever running into these problems. But as someone who likes to play the main story of games, Stalker's main story was really poorly designed. And as a sandbox, this game just doesn't offer enough for me. As I said, variety is very low in this game.
There are humans, dogs, and about half a dozen varities of mutants in this game as enemies. There are "anomalies" in the environment, which are basically fields that release different kinds of elements if you get near them, all giving you significant damage, whether it's lightning, fire or some sort of whirlwind. And there is radiation.
As I mentioned before, side missions always look the same. Go some place, have a shootout with a bunch of enemies. Win, go to mission-giver, get a few thousand rubles and maybe an item, and repeat this. Once you have seen all the dangers in this world, that's it. There is nothing more.
Having ranted a bit though, there are a bunch of positives here as well of course. First, the game is obviously very unique, even if not in a positive way all the time, and it's very ambitious. Take what this game has, fix the bugs, increase variety of the tasks in this game, how you can approach them and increase the amount of dangers in the world as well, and I could see myself enjoying STALKER 2 quite a lot. But as it stands, I think the game is ambitious but not really successful, in my eyes.
What the game does really well though is create a scary and depressing atmosphere. You can really feel that the Zone is a place that can just destroy you from one second to the next. While the variety of dangers is not awfully large, dangers are omnipresent and there are few people in this world who don't want to kill you and get to your loot. Plus, there is one particular mission in a sort of bunker in this game that was just scary as hell. In that regard, the game does a great job. Plus, enemy AI is pretty smart and gunfights do have plenty of tactical elements to them, though I would have enjoyed the ability to bring teammates with me and to have my teammates have more than 1 braincell during those fights themselves. I can't tell you how many times main quest-givers died because they simply refused to take cover like the enemies did. Bizarre.
But that said, these things the game did do well. The rest, I can't say I enjoyed. The story for the most part is go find A, so he can tell you more about this Strelok person you are trying to find. You go to A, he either is dead or sends you to someone else, until you get to person G, who tells you to go to a place and find documents. You find documents, which lead to knowledge about a different location, where you need even more documents, and you do that until you pretty much get to the final mission and learn the truth. Can't say I particularly liked 'the truth' and the story about the Zone, about you and your target and all that. But I guess the main story wasn't the point of this game anyway. A game that, overall, I appreciated for its ideas and for what it can spawn in STALKER 2, but one I didn't necessarily enjoy itself.