The apocalypse in the world of computer games is good news for bread and sausage manufacturers but bad news for pretty much everyone else, and it seems odd at first glance that the setting is so popular in modern entertainment as the colour palette is relentlessly monochrome and the occupants either want you to do something for them or want to feast on your organs/sweet swag you’ve gained from looting hapless travellers.
Stalker, or should I say S.T.A.L.K.E.R, subscribes to all of the above unreservedly, but instead of resulting in the definitive apocalyptic experience, the world is bland and rather empty. It certainly feels big, divided into three maps between which you can travel, and the sense of size is enhanced by a complete lack of fast-travel option which is tedious because NPCs and quest targets are invariably on opposite sides of the map and after traversing the same irradiated swamp for the fifth time you pick up quite a conga-line of mutants believe me. Lack of loading screens does keep you immersed in the world, however, and immersion is one of S.T.A.L.K.E.R’s stronger suits. Gameplay does not pause while you are checking your map or playing inventory-Tetris which should become standard in action-RPGs in my opinion, and there are mechanics in place that give the game a survival element, though the implementation seems cursory and rather throwaway: your character will get hungry if you do not eat regularly, but food is so plentiful that I had more baguettes than a Parisian boulangerie by the end of the game.
I mention Action-RPG because I think that this is how the game was pitched, what with its expansive world and factions and upgrade system, but neither is done particularly well and everything ends up as a kind of brown mush, which I suppose is fitting. I couldn’t tell whether the guns were supposed to be rubbish or if it was just the shooting, but have now decided that it’s the former. When I was dumped unceremoniously from the introduction cut-scene into gameplay I couldn’t hit a barn door with my shoddy AK-47u, but by the game’s climactic levels I could snipe a gnat off of a shambling zombie’s shoulder from half a mile away, which is great if that’s what the developers intended and makes dumping all of your in-game money into upgrading your weapons worthwhile and gives money an actual purpose. The shooting is less satisfying when you face down the mutant enemies though, who fall into two broad camps; those who rush you, and those who attack from afar with their Jedi mind powers. The former are best dealt with by some buckshot to the mush, the latter with the ever-elegant sniper round to the forehead but these encounters are just less satisfying than an intense fire-fight with old-fashioned humans.
The RPG elements are similarly mishandled; there is a choice element to the narrative and S.T.A.L.K.E.R doesn’t commit the cardinal sin of making the binary nature of its choice system obvious. You can choose to side with one faction, or the other, let a character live, or die, but I think this fact is less down to the developer’s design than to the rather clunky way it organises your objectives. Some have waypoints marked on your map automatically, while some don’t, and not being able to place your own markers means you will spend a lot of time making sure you are walking in the right direction. The objectives tab itself obscures a third of the screen, so you will have to turn it off in order to see whereabouts your objectives actually are, which is obtuse and means more time clicking and less time playing.
There is also the limpest of gestures to offering the player different ways of approaching situations, whether that be the trusty gun in the face or the sneaky knife to the back. Almost all of the missions require redecorating the surrounding environments with someone’s vital organs, and if you do fancy sneaking up on your enemies you’d better put the kettle on because moving while crouched is slower and more ponderous than the dialogue (which is saying something for a game that includes the line ‘get to the chopper!’ with no sense of irony whatsoever.) There is a visibility/sound meter (which is never explained or tutorialised) and while I’m not saying that I need every single mechanic explained to me, I am going to be confused by a bar in my HUD that lights up occasionally, but seemingly has no impact on gameplay. My theory is that it was implemented to augment the stealth mechanics but at some point in the development got forgotten.
It might seem that so far I have done nothing but criticise S.T.A.L.K.E.R and that analysis is largely correct, but allow me to provide some balance; the sound design is well done and goes a long way in immersing the player in the world.
Balance now provided, the narrative is if anything more slapdash than the stealth mechanics. You are Major… someone who arrives from… somewhere investigating helicopters that have been crashed by… something. I do know that they are in some way connected to the plot of Clear Sky (the preceding S.T.A.L.K.E.R game) thanks to Wikipedia, not competent story-telling, but beyond that I didn’t care, nor was I given a reason to care, for either my character nor any of the other characters in the game. A key character from Shadow of Chernobyl shows up, (thanks again, Wikipedia) but unless you are a big fan of the series (innocent) or a big fan of slightly wonky Rusky accents (guilty), their appearance will leave you non-plussed.
My powers of clairvoyance beam me the sounds of echoing keyboards from the future: “it’s not the game’s fault you are too lazy to have played the two preceeding games! S.TA.L.K.E.R has always been about atmosphere and shooting anyway, this is only a computer game, accept it for what it is!”
If I may, I shall respond to your hypothetical fan rage in two statements. To the first, I don’t expect a ‘previously on S.T.A.L.K.E.R’ cut-scene a la Alan Wake, but at the same time I expect the game to stand up as a stand-alone story, and the only way Call of Pripyat is standing up is if it is being worn as a suit by a Bloodsucker. To the second, I haven’t accepted the ‘it’s only a computer game’ argument since Bioshock, and if that story can be told with a few audio logs and some wall-scribbles then I think it is reasonable to apply the same to every game I review.
What Call of Pripyat does best is atmosphere; trudging through the wasteland has a feel which is an incredibly vague term and an incredibly subjective one. I suppose after my rather more objective criticisms I have saved these till last because despite its problems I enjoyed Call of Pripyat and recommend it to fans the apocalypse, who really ought to turn off their computers and go outside because there is bread to bake and standing around waiting to give out fetch-quests to player-characters to do.