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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl

Harsh World

The Zone is a ruthless place, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. tries to anchor many facets of the gameplay to harsh reality. The player character is not an army of one. Unlike in many first person shooters, you won't be carrying around a dozen different guns and a truckload of ammo for them. Instead, every bullet, bandage and food tin does count, and you have to manage your supplies carefully. While you can liberate supplies from caches in the area and the corpses that you will unavoidably leave behind, supplies are still very tight; the rest have to be purchased using money you earn by selling artifacts and doing small jobs for the locals. Artifacts can also be worn on your belt for small bonuses, but these don't really affect the gameplay that much.

Your carrying capacity is heavily limited, and in many situations you have to spend time moving supplies around to stashes you can find around the play area, or you will find yourself out of ammo at the gates of a well-guarded building complex. This does add realism as you have to weight your loadout carefully to ensure you have capacity for any valuable loot, but the need to haul supplies around can get annoying in the long run.

There is an active day/night cycle and, in addition to gangs and military patrols, packs of mutant animals roam the wilderness. The character AI is fairly advanced - enemies can and will flank you, coordinate their fire, duck for cover to reload and even flee if badly injured. Mutant dogs also exhibit nice pack tactics - if you wound one, don't be surprised if it runs away just to return with a full pack to rip you to shreds. The AI is not absolutely perfect but it works far better than I expected it too; in many cases it can outsmart you due to the constant numerical advantage you face. NPC characters and animals also move around when the player is not present, and you commonly end up witnessing random battles between different factions and the mutated wildlife.

While the play area is fairly large, early hype-filled stories about huge unrestricted areas to explore should be taken with a large pinch of salt. You will rapidly find that there is plenty of impassable barbed wire in the Zone, and some otherwise passable areas keep you out by being overly radioactive or filled with "anomalies" - odd rips in space-time that are hazardous to approach. The play area is also split into much smaller chunks with a loading screens interrupting play between sections. While there is a lot more room to roam than in your average on-rails shooter title, your progress is nudged towards a loose but predefined path by the main quest line and quest-triggered events that open new areas to you.

In many ways S.T.A.L.K.E.R. reminds me of games like System Shock 2 and Deus Ex, and to a lesser degree the Jagged Alliance series. For example, in Jagged Alliance 2 you could, in theory, roam the countryside freely from zone to zone, but in practice you had to tackle the towns and military bases in a story-driven order, mostly due to lack of proper equipment early on, and the level of the enemies you encounter in different areas. The same applies here as well.

The final polishing is once again MIA

My first draft for this review was starkly different than the one you see now - it concentrated on nuking S.T.A.L.K.E.R. to small bits for being a ridiculously hard save-reload-reload-fest without a shred of game balancing. However, the v1.0001 patch fixes far more than the version numbering would indicate, and required me to re-play the game and start over with the review. You see, the patch actually patched in the fun. Originally, pistol bullets would just tickle your enemies unless applied to the center of the forehead and sawed-off shotguns had an effective range measured in inches. At the same time, these same enemies would happily plug you full of holes from the edge of the visual range - and you only needed two or three of those holes before ending up all dead and stuff. So, before the first patch, the only way to proceed was to save after every killed enemy. Also, until you found extra firepower, the primary tactic was to rush the hostiles and pray for a lucky headshot with a pistol. And all this was at the "Novice" difficulty level, which was anything but novice.

All this has changed dramatically. Now I'd consider "Novice" to be a bit too easy and the default "Stalker" level to be a fair challenge. You still need headshots to kill anything with a single shot and they are also needed against armored opponents unless you have AP rounds. Sticking that shotgun to the bad guy's mouth before pulling the trigger also does ensure that you only need one shell, but now you can do damage from 10-20 feet away. Most importantly, it's possible to actually kill people and advance in the game without saving after every kill as the gun modeling is far closer to reality. You can also take many more scratches yourself before dropping dead, and the enemies tend to miss more.

So, it appears that the developers considers such minor things as "gameplay balancing" to be something that can be patched in later. And while the initial patch does fix a huge array of problems and makes the game playable, you can still clearly see the lack of final QA and polish rising its ugly head occasionally.

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