Desolate land of Chernobyl brought to life in amazing detail for a game that runs off a graphic engine several years old
STALKER is not your normal FPS. Most FPS are very lineal and they don't leave you much room for making your own path. Now, granted STALKER does not have the open-ended quality of, say, Oblivion....but it is a start.
STALKER starts you out in a small settlement of other "newbie" STALKERs and mixed in are a couple of senior STALKERs and your main goal is to try and figure out who you are, along with the fact that your job is to track down and kill an NPC.
Your starting weapon is a pistol and a few extra clips of ammo; you'll soon come to learn that beginner pistols are pretty pathetic. The range and accuracy on them won't do you justice. After your first raid on a near by farm with a few other NPCs that you join to help, you can get your hands on a shotgun (very useful at close range) and you might come across a sub-machine gun (SMG). You'll also come to find that most weapons early in the game lack good accuracy and damage, so it is in your best interest to load up on armor piercing ammo whenever you can find it. You are allowed to carry one pistol and one large gun at any given time in your weapon slots. You can however, keep other weapons in your inventory, but to use those weapons you need to access your inventory and equip them into a weapon slot.
STALKER uses a trade and barter system, and you can access this with any NPC that you are able to talk with. Some NPCs carry next to nothing to barter for and then there are a few NPCs that run shops that have loads of guns, ammo, armor and other misc. items you can make use of.
To keep track of your progress and to check your journal entries, you have access to a PDA that shows the map of any area you are in when you're out in the world; the PDA does not give any maps of underground areas that you travel through. Your PDA also will show you were your current objective lies.
STALKER has its issues that do cause some headaches. Take for example that if you do not at least download patch 1.0001, you will run into bugs with the main storyline and you won't be able to finish the game. So it is HIGHLY SUGGESTED that you download this patch. Also, any saved games prior to patch 1.0001, you cannot use those and you'll have to start from scratch. Even after installing patches 1.0001 and 1.0003, there are still bugs you'll encounter with some side missions and graphic support for ATI cards is still on the poor side. STALKER runs best with Nvidia cards. If you're not running a half-decent rig, then don't expect to be able to turn on HDR lighting and to be able to have the graphics set on high. Even though this game runs on a game engine that doesn't quite look as good as Half-Life 2, STALKER is still very taxing on many machines.
Gameplay on STALKER is rather refreshing. It's a mild mix of DeusEx and a moderate mix of FPS. You have the option of joining several different factions during your game play; if you befriend one faction, NPCs from other factions may not take your presences well and open-fire upon you. So there is a bit of re-playability, especially with the 7 different endings. There are lots of areas to explore, but you will come to notice the annoying invisible barriers of radiation that will quickly kill you if you try to venture out too far. Also, the anomolies caused from the nuclear explosion from Chernobyl are interesting. Some are more deadly then others and if you get good at it, you can use them to your advantage when fighting monsters or NPCs.
Some of the AI still needs work because there is nothing more annoying then having a group of armed men all of a sudden stop looking for you and turn around to start walking away....and even when you open fire on them after they turned around, they keep walking and won't fight back.
Also, the ability for armed men to NOT be able to spot you when you're ducking down behind certain bushes and even when you're hiding under a pine tree helps take from the atmosphere - so, either use these things to your advantage or do your best to ignore them. In other words, don't let something like this hinder your appreciation of STALKER.
Lastly, if you feel that the original version of STALKER is a cake walk, even on the most difficult setting, then check out a couple of mods that people have put together. They do a wonderful job of adjusting weapons and armor and touching up on the difficulty of gameplay, not to mention that they also have tweaked settings to allow STALKER to run smoother and to be less taxing on your PC.