Lost Promises...

User Rating: 5.1 | S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl PC
By ebcdic | Review Date:
The game play just rots of missed promises. This is the most linear open world (and that is what most Reviewers are calling it) ever conceived. I also find it funny that traveling from point to point mostly consists of walking down roads, which would make sense since they scrapped vehicles at the last minute. You may refer to this game as an open field fps, but not open world. The Oblivion references I read throughout the web are plain silly. This world in tiny....The NPCs have absolutely no personality. This is probably a big reason why I feel absolutely no connection with the story line, the NPCs are just so boring and robotic...They just stand there staring off into space, as if I do not even exist. The AI is just silly, and it appears we have been scammed into believing randomness equates to life like. This is not a living breathing world, and again is nothing near the Radiant AI seen in Oblivion, as many posters like to refer to. Your comrades seem to like rushing blindly into gunfire, or standing out is the open while bandits pick em off. It is nice that they move around the world, but again that is just random pathing....And I wish I could take that damn guitar and crack it over their heads, give it a rest already. And how am I supposed to find the Russian chatter interesting? Is this supposed to add to the atmosphere?? The clownish PDA makes me want to throw my monitor out the window. The awkward inventory makes my eyes bleed.

Graphically the game looks below-average at best. The character models are laughable. Maybe I am spoiled because I also happen to be playing through Half-Life 2 AGAIN, but this game cannot hold a candle to HL2. It is funny too because I hear people making this comparison, which is a great disservice to the boys over at Valve. Oh, and by the way HL2 came out in 2004. What we have here is a game with textures, character models, and rendering techniques that are quite antiquated. They then took this and threw in some new exciting things (oh no, Crysis is on the way) like AA, HDR, EAX, and created a very uneven mess in the process. This time would have been much better served actually polishing the game. There had to be very little optimization done in the final stages, and it shows. Frame rate stutters very regularly which is perplexing, cause the thing don't exactly look like Gears of War... My final point, and biggest deal breaker is the BUGS. What a mess. There are graphical glitches everywhere ( I am still trying to figure out if the grass spazzing out is a glitch or a design decision). I experienced numerous CTD while saving. The controls seem to be buggy as hell, especially changing weapons. Why does there seem to be controller lag in my single player game? Why does lightning make the sky look like a spider web? Why did the opening cinematic have horizontal lines running through it?

Even at the reduced price, which is probably due to the fact they realized they had a turd on their hands, I regret the purchase. I even preordered the thing...What a kick to the groin…

Game Ranking Scores:
Stalker: 84.4%
Dark Messiah: 75 %
Neverwinter Nights 2: 82.2%

3 highly anticipated, buggy piles of doo doo. All received good scores. Till reviewers start grading these games fairly, we are gonna continue to receive this kind of crap. It is a disservice to PC gamers everywhere.

And finally some rebuttals:
Nerd Voice "Yeah well maybe you should run it on a machine newer than 1994, your setup SUXORZ NoOB!"
My Specs:
Dual Core 6600
4GB Ram
Nvidia 8800 GTS (640)
Raid 0, Raptor Drives
Vista 32 bit
Nerd Voice "Uh huh, Vista! You early adopters get what you deserve...I ain't putting dat crap on my PC"
I recently got a new PC for running Supreme Commander, and it seemed like as good a time as any to take the Vista leap. Do you realize how many Vista machines are out there? Do you realize how it outsold sales of WII and PS3 combined? Is it OK to release a buggy as hell PS3 game because there are only a couple million units around? Do you still believe this is a small enough demographic to not put any effort into Vista Bug squashing? HL2, Supreme Commander, Company of Heroes, and Titan Quest all run flawlessly on my machine.

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