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

I wanted to like this game. For all the frustrations and proof why realistic military shooters were never my thing, I wanted to like this game. But it always was just on the cusp for me… giving me some amazing moments, but placing it between travel and severe design frustrations. If you have the patience I do not to get through that or the will to mod them out of the game, there is a lot of good stuff to be had here. I want to rate it well, because I can see all the good stuff, but at the same time, it broke on me in a pretty serious way (if one Im not sure will happen for everyone else). As such, I kinda have to go halfway on this title.

Got the game because I really liked the classic, super-slow movie, and even read the novel it was based on, Roadside Picnic. Reviews rave about it, but notice that the "most helpful" are from 2014. Atmosphere is great at first, but at one point gets a bit repetitive - every place look like another. You don't quite get the dread of the movie/novel, as killer anomalies can be seen or detected; they are just spots to walk around. You can roam a lot free-style, but the "random quests" you get are all variations of the same - go there kill someone, pick up item, return -- and many are glitchy so you won't get all of them done. Inventory system is "realistic" (you need to place your items in a grid) but halfway through it becomes cumbersome, forcing you to drop a nice gun to be able to fit some ammo (and all the ammo graphics look more or less the same). Don't save to sell stuff, by the way -- I went the whole game without having to buy a single thing, as you can pick anything you need. As to the shooter experience, it is well done, and it is fun when you get factions shooting each other. But the enemies are mostly all the same - armed humans, and two or three monsters -- and the most fun weapons don't have too much ammo lying around, so near the end I got quite bored. The story, I'm afraid to say, I found it kind of lame. It starts mysterious, but when you get to solve the mystery it pretty much falls apart. You get a couple of different endings, none of them is great, so don't play it for the story.

I cannot stand this game. Landing shots is complete RNG. The head bobbing was making me nauseous. Save games and configs did not work. I Also the weight limit is such a pain once you get good weapons as they are heavier. If you do not have lots of ammo for one weapon, then you are easily weighed down. I found only changing the user.ltx file worked. Editing any other ltx file gave me an error, it would look for other files in these directories for some reason. Some of the sounds are almost-ear piercing. Sirens are incredibly annoying and sometimes there are creature sounds out of nowhere, which are very confusing. This is out in the open too. Accuracy of weapons is ridiculous. And the silly thing is when testing they can seem very accurate. Perhaps it's simply a hitbox problem. I found the wild animals very hard to headshot. I would spray into them and not even kill them, even very close up, the bullets would not even hit them. Things like this simply make the game feel frustrating rather than challenging. Once I started finding better weapons, I found 2x and 4x scopes but couldn't attach them to the weapons. And I don't understand the ammo weight. They seem about the same per bullet. I found making money very easy and ammo plentiful early on, when I can lug multiple weapons and lots of artifacts around with me. It wasn't obvious but I thought stashes were radiation sites, they wouldn't appear in the logs. Very weird design. Also, if your character is too close to a marker, then on the map you can't see the description of the marker...

One of the worst stories ever (there isn't even one, actually, it's at the end that you learn what's been going on), crappy shooting mechanics - but the absolute best atmosphere in a video game ever, hands down, and it's really enough to make anyone fall in love with and stick through it. Grim, charming, depressing, broken, and comfy at times, that's how I'd describe the game's world.

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