YouGamers.com

Reviews

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

More problems

While the initial patch did fix many problems, it also introduced new ones. After the patch, body armor now degrades same way as weapons do, and there is no way to fix your items. With guns, the problem is not that major - there are plenty of extra weapons lying around, and the valuable additional bit - sniper scope - is detachable and does not degrade over time. You can't remove the silencers, but they are currently far less critical due to the fact that they don't really help you that much to begin with. You do have to juggle around with different types of ammo as you just can't carry around everything, but strategically positioned item stashes can help with that. This also has a side-effect; with the release version of the game money was essentially worthless, but after patch you have to save every bit you can find to fund your new protective suits, as your old one gets all torn up on the field.

There are also still some problems with the way enemies see the player. In the user interface, you can see your stance and the amount of noise you make, and these work like you'd expect them to - if you run, you make more noise and enemies can hear you further away even if you are out of sight.

Illogically, the third indicator does not actually show how visible you are if someone would be looking directly at you. Instead, it shows how well current enemies actually see you, and in reality it either shows nothing, indicating nobody sees you, or it's fully lit up and you are being aimed at by a bad guy, and a bullet with your name on it is on the way - which you can probably guess from the gunfire and the Russian-language shouts. So the only way to know if you are going to be hidden from that patrol walking towards you is to wait and see. Your visibility indicator can max out in an instant just because the enemy happened to turn around, so at best this indicator gives you an extra second to run away.

There also seems to be no difference if you are hiding in shadows at night, or if you are using bushes as cover - only hard cover blocks enemy line of sight with any reliability, and even then it appears you can be fully spotted even if just a teeny bit of your character is visible. While there is night vision equipment in the game, this is true even for enemies not using them.

So, even after patch, the message of "save early, save often" is the only hint that I can give for survival - and make sure you have a history of saves you can return to, as you may find out about an early misstep much later, and without several previous saves, you can end up in an unrecoverable position.

All this reeks of last-minute efforts to quickly try to patch up the game to something playable, and in many spots it's hard to say if, for example, some obstacle is designed to be this hard to beat, or some item is designed to be this rare or expensive, or if you are dealing with yet another game balancing bug awaiting for a fix in a future patch. I can only hope that the future patches will not break the save compatibility again.

Page 1Page 2Page 3Page 4Page 5

Related Stuff

Tags