Following years of delays and more than six years in development, THQ and GSC Game World are finally ready to release S.T.A.L.K.E.R. to the public. At the cost of blood, sweat and tears, and a few game elements, the game is finally ready for release this March, which also means that the game isn’t quite as the developer originally told us. That’s not necessarily bad, though, as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. offers a fresh post-apocalyptic experience, with a mix of the best from Fallout and Oblivion. Got your hazmat suit on? Good, then read on.
In S.T.A.L.K.E.R. you take on the role of a cliché-struck fellow who wakes up in the wilderness with no recollection of who you are. Unfortunately, the wilderness you picked to wake up in turns out to be the Zone, an area close to the Chernobyl reactor which, following another accident in 2006, is full of criminals and military folks looking for food, power and adventure. After the leakage in 2006, the military closed off access to the area, but some managed to sneak past the guards and came out with strange objects that puzzled scientists. The objects possess a lot of different characteristics, both positive and negative, which puts them in great demand.
Your goal in the game is to survive in the Zone and follow the leads to discover who you are and what you are really doing in the darkest part of Eastern Europe.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a First Person Shooter with big open areas divided into a range of zones. Take Oblivion and change the background and you have a pretty good idea of how it works. You are free to go anywhere you please, but certain areas are closed until you are ready to get closer. Each zone consists of rather large areas inhabited by humans and animals, all living their own life. You often bump into people moving from zone to zone, and armed conflict between the different factions is not uncommon.
Also in regards to missions the game works quite like the system in Oblivion. There’s a main story that you can follow through the game, but you are free to take on other missions and explore the world on your own. The game feels quite alive too. As you make your way through the different areas you will meet other Stalkers – survivors, travelling around and selling stuff they find in the wilderness – and soldiers along with mutated wildlife. The side-missions are pretty generic, though, and something close to unending. Often you will be asked to find an object, clear an area for mutants or criminals or kill a stalker. There’s no real story in it and the only reason to do the missions is to earn money.
But here the comparisons stop. In contrast to Oblivion there’s not much role play in the game. You decide whether you want to be on good or bad terms with people or not, but there’s no real development of the character. Instead you develop though the things that you find. In the beginning you only have access to low calibre weapons, but as you make your way though the game you gain access to more potent equipment and artefacts found in the ruins throughout the zones.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has a complete day and night cycle, meaning that you will often have to seek shelter when darkness falls – unless, of course, you can see in the dark. You are equipped with a flashlight, but its usefulness is quite limited in total darkness. Once I went on a mission to clear an area for wild boars just when it had turned dark. I decided to go to the area only equipped with a machinegun, a leather jacket and a small flashlight. As I got closer to the area, I got more and more convinced that we weren’t talking about regular harmless pigs, but pissed off radioactive bacon, and with the dim light from my discount flashlight, I decided that life’s too short to hunt mutated pigs at night, and made my way to the guarded camp close by, where I sad shaking till daylight broke.
The atmosphere of the game is so thick that you can cut it. At no point are you in doubt that a big catastrophe took place here. Everything is ravaged – only a few buildings are left standing, and even there everything is chaos. The blind mutated dogs, hunting in packs for food, causes both pity and disgust. Especially when they crazed with hunger attack you only run off scared when you fire a shot at them, or you find them eating one of the corpses you at an earlier point left behind in the zone.
Despite S.T.A.L.K.E.R.S.’ lengthy development, the game is both visually pleasing and full of atmosphere, and the lighting effects in particular are made well use of. Even though the graphics can appear a bit barren and boring, it’s exactly that visual expression, along with the sounds, that gives you a chill down the spine. There’s almost a melancholic feel to running though the ruins and going though dark cellars deep under ground, listening to strange voices and sounds from the many anomalies caused by the accident – its downright terrifying, especially if you play in a dark room.
Not quite, but almost
All in all, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has been a good experience all the way through, but I can’t help the feeling that something is missing. I have played through the game and seen one of the endings (supposedly there is a few) and I don’t really feel that any of my questions were answered.The ending I reached wasn’t very “ending”, and it’s like something is missing. At the same time, I have no idea what to do next time to see one of the other endings. There are many signs that THQ has cut through and made GSC finish the game before time. And that is really sad, as towards the end you are given new weapons and objects that you will never really get to use. For example I only got to fire one shot with the rocket launcher, even though I carried it around for four to five hours, simply because of lack of ammunition.
Other elements only appear for a short time, and don’t have the significance they are hinted to have – like you can move around bodies, but not once in the game is it necessary or useful – or the amount of money you collect has no connection to the amount you will actually need to spend. The game could have been bigger too without making the game too long or boring.
Even though it all ends kind of sudden, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is still one of the best First Person Shooters I’ve played in a long time, especially if you like the post-apocalyptic atmosphere from games like Fallout. It’s beautiful, it has a nice feel and is so well built that it deserves a 9, even though the version I played only contained the finished single-player part. Multiplayer offers Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Artifact Hunt for up to 32 players.
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