It's initial concept is more successful than the long awaited outcome.
The year is 2012, six years after a second meltdown occurred within a Chernobyl nuclear reactor. The land of has been deformed and left with many abnormalities, deformed wildlife and men known as STALKERS who scavenge the area of Chernobyl, looking for valuable artifacts. Awaking from a road accident, you are left with amnesia, a tattoo on your arm that says STALKER and a PDA with an instruction to kill a man named Strelok. With little choice you must complete jobs for the men who saved your life, find out who Strelok is and discover your true identity.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl was in development by GSC Game World since 2001 and the game was met with many delays and setbacks over the course of its production. The final result is certainly ambitious, with a mix of First Person Shooting and horror elements. Yet it is quite clear from the opening stages of the game that this was an overly ambitious project, lacking the definitive polish of so many other shooters.
The world of Chernobyl is a rich setting and one that we have not seen too often in other shooters before. Certainly from a Ukrainian developer there is a quite a personal story to be told here and you can really appreciate the efforts that GSC have gone into trying to model the environments on its real life counterpart. They have stated in their development diaries that their "newly-created X-ray engine allowed near-photo realism." Yet sadly the game suffers from some poor visuals, with a horribly drab and grey colour palette and some very flat textures, lacking in normal mapping. Character models too, while often well detailed, seem slightly blocky and stiff, particularly in the animation and physics. The latter is particularly noticeable as bodies lay on the ground with limbs in various comical yoga positions.
Yet given the quality of the smaller indoor areas, with strong lighting and shadow effects, one could attribute the poor outdoor visuals to the size of the game world. While the developers originally wanted a world without load screens the higher graphical quality of the planes of Chernobyl had to be cut down in size. Thus there are 18 different zones to travel through around the Zone, broken up between load screens. You will visit many of these as you take on various tasks from your saviors at the beginning of the game and also when you meet others along the way who will offer optional missions too. While some have tagged STALKER as an RPG, these do not feel as though they contain any moral choices but whether you would just want a job or not. If you do you will have to endure much backtracking and travel.
Some of these missions range from killing a rookie S.T.A.L.K.E.R, to collecting data files, or defending a base from opposing factions. In what is supposed to be such an advanced open world these missions feel quite simple, with basic fetch tasks. The finale in particular feels overly drawn out and feels as though it belongs in another game, away from the scavenging missions of the beginning of the game.
It can also be confusing as to what the missions have to do with the main plot, which leads to STALKER's more significant issues. There is a such a fascinating world in Chernobyl and yet the plot of the game is surprisingly poor. Much of the story is conveyed through text and allows many details to feel unengaging and uninteresting. It is a strange design decision given that some characters have verbal dialogue but many others do not and also because of the amount of the time the game was in production. Surely they could recorded some more lines of dialogue. For a story so personal to the developers it feels as though they have missed a opportunity to tell something moving and poignant. We never see the real victims of Chernobyl, the humans that survived and had to live on, only monsters and killers, searching for riches. The factions you encounter along the way also feel undetailed and lacking in any memorable characters. You may never remember what their motives or ideologies are, as you may have in other games like Deus Ex.
Where STALKER does excel however is in its chilling atmosphere and fierce gunplay. This is a relentless and dangerous world, and the gushing winds that soar around you and the barks of the mutated wildlife you encounter, accentuate this. The underground areas are even more frightening with some terrific ambient noises. You will find yourself turning around, checking to make sure that there is nothing behind you. This is easily one of the scariest games on the PC. Perhaps the developers could have pushed this even further by not showing you anything at all, leaving the monsters to your imagination. More scripted moments would have added some spontaneity rather than just relying on the erratic nature of the AI patterns.
There are a variety of different foes you will encounter such as mutated boars, savaged dogs and various other bloodsuckers. These are more gross than scary, perhaps resembling something from a low budget Peter Jackson horror movie. There are human opponents too as you would expect and these come in the form of other S.T.A.L.K.E.R's and heavily armored soldiers. The AI is very uneven and quite bizarre at times. Soldiers will quite often take cover in gunfights and try to flank you by circling around your position. At other times though they will seem oblivious to the fact that you are shooting them in the back or that you have gunned down their friends. On one humorous occasion there were half a dozen soldiers trying to all get through the one door at the same time: they failed. When you see NPC's spawning right in front of your eyes you just know that the game sadly does not have the polish and slickness of other FPS like FEAR and Half-Life 2.
Luckily the gunplay is kept quite tense due to the assortment of weapons you will have at your disposal. By completing missions you will receive money that will allow you to buy or trade weapons off other STALKER's. Eventually you will have access to many highly powered assault rifles throughout the game and All of the guns sound terrific, loud and efficient. The way in which you can hear bullets ricochet off cover, and the very unpredictable AI, keeps the gunplay fun and exciting. The only downside is that the hit detection on some weapons feels quite off at times. You will often empty a clip into an enemy and it will look as though they have been left unscathed. It is meant to depend on the range of the weapon and its condition too (they will weaken and jam overtime) but it sometimes seems as though there either aren't enough hit animations for enemies when you strike them or the weapons are just a bit underpowered.
Much of the tension is also derived from how vulnerable you are in the game. Only on the second difficulty, of which there are four, I found this to be a very, very tough game. It only takes a few shots for you to meet your end. You have a health bar that will regenerate slowly over time but this isn't Call of Duty 4. If your health gets too low you could die of blood loss, with little indicators appearing on screen to warn you of your fate. You have an RPG-like inventory so that you can carry an assortment of goods like artifacts, guns and bandages to help you.
Sometimes though it would seem as if the game is stuck between realism and its game mechanics. While you can die of blood loss you can also carry health packs that will instantly revitalise your health, or you can eat tins of pudding to do the same. One of the more annoying things to accommodate for is radiation. If you step into a radiated area, of which there are many, you will have to use an antidote and race away from the area. You also have a stamina meter and if you carry too much junk in your inventory this will run out very quickly. This can be extremely annoying when you are running away from gunfire only to see the words appear on the screen "you're too exhausted to walk" and be stopped dead in your tracks.
It can also be a chore to have to balance out your inventory and stamina realistic or not. The stamina is perhaps at its worst when you must travel great distances of Chernobyl on foot. You have a limited ability to sprint and there is no fast travel in this game as say in Oblivion. The developers were originally hoping to implement vehicles into the game and this would have greatly changed the nature of the gameplay and obviously cut down on some very boring and tedious travel time. For those eager enough there are many modifications out there can add vehicles and other goodies to the game.
There are some interesting twists to the FPS genre in STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, but perhaps not all of these are particularly welcome. The game is too difficult to be enjoyed as a pure shooter and the story is too convoluted to become memorable. The atmosphere and setting however are still worthy of mention and the soon to be released prequel should address many of the issues here. This is an ambitious title but it's initial concept is more successful than the long awaited outcome.