A look at the much anticipated S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Game.

User Rating: 8.1 | S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl PC
By Puckswack12 | Review Date:
Stalker has been coming out for the last few years, and now that it's finally out. It's getting all sorts of different reactions. Some people say it's the next best thing while some people said they could have made better crap sitting on the toilet. Whatever your reaction to the game is, I'm not going to get personal about it. I'm going to tell you what the game has, lacks, and is. You start off as a man who is clinging to life by the fingers. You are brought in by a Stalker who finds you on the side of the road. without any kind of reasoning or cinamatics at all, you set out to find and kill this man. I don't get it, and you shouldn't either. If there is a story line, then it's told in confusing unrendered cut scenes that do little more than waste time. The game is a lot like an rpg, where you take on quests, explore an open world, battle creatures and loot their bodies. Only there really isn't any RPG elements in this game. You don't go up in levels, gain XP or anything like that. The only upgradable thing is this game is the weapons, which you will just find on dead bodies or you could buy and a series of items called artifacts that have diferent effects on you. You wear these artifacts like clothing, but they don't really add much to the games depth at all.

The shooting elements are solid. The guns sound amazing. In fact, the best part about this game is it's sound effects and quality. You can hear the battle going on a mile away, and it will sound muffled and echoed just like you'd expect it to. If you don't play this game with a loud, loud volume setting then honestly; Don't play it. It's not worth it.

Other than the sound, another noticably good part of this game is in it's AI. You'll witness a pack of dogs dragging a corpse down the road, a corpse that you put there just minutes before. The human enemies have decent AI, nothing special. Really, it's just fun to watch the packs of dogs running around in the wilderness. Once you go indoors, however, the AI suddenly crashes and they don't know what the hell they are doing.

Graphics for this game were considered outdated years ago. Imagine Half-life 2 on low. Thats Stalker. Even the scenery reminds me of HL2, the gloomy sky, dead trees and marshes. It's nothing to see really. Value is a bit hard to describe. There's really not a lot to this game when you think about it. Theres a handfull of different objects and items that do the exact same thing. Example: You need to eat every day or so in this game, theres a numbe of items to help you out here; canned food, bread, sausage etc... The only different part of them is what they look like and their name. They all do the same exact thing, weight the same, and I bet they even taste the same. Imagine that with pretty much every group of items in the game.

Gameplay. It's fun. Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed playing it. But trust me when I say you will get bored of playing it way before you beat it. Theres around 10-20 hours of gameplay here, but the story will take around 30 to complete. Understand. It loses it's pizzaz after a short while and you'll either put it away or start from the beginning.

All and all it's a decent game, it's fun and interesting. I can't help but imagine how much better this game could have been, though. It reminds me of Morrowind: good ideas and awsome game really, what morrowind lacks, oblivion picks up. Does that make sense? I can only hope stalker 2 does the same. Thanks for your time!

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