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

Note! The base game is terrible in every area. You must use mods to fix it and enhance your playing experience. This review is based on the original game coupled with the community bug fixes patch. The Good: The AI - Best I've seen in a while. They will dodge, hide, retreat and flank you. This AI will make you it's dog-female. The atmosphere - Is grousmly good. Few games can match it. You have the feeling throughout the game that you truly are in the chernobyl. The Combat - It's so tactical and solid. A very satisfying experience. You can't half ass it and run and gun. You need to think and use cover and lean correctly, Choose the right weapons, take a higher ground and retreat when necessary. The Endings - Game have 7 endings! Each unique and shows a cool CGI clip. After finishing the game I advise you to see the others with youtube. The Bad: The AI and Difficulty - Completely broken, retarded and cheap. Often watching the walls like you gonna show from there. Killing you from miles away with perfect headshots with the crappiest gun while you doing no damage to them and always miss using the same weapon as they do. Also they make no NOISE when they walk! You will die so much because of their bullshit flanking because you can't hear their footsteps! This make the cheaply hard because you will die every couple of seconds in a fight. Lack of Weapons and The Use of Attachments - It's really barebones for this sort of game and it feels like a wasted opportunity. The Weight Limit and Stamina System - God help me. This man can barely carry his own wight! You will be micro managing it throughout the whole game because picking stuff above your limit will cause you to stop running and then you cannot even walk. And the main thing you will be doing in this game is WALKING! The Ugly: Getting a quest on the other side of the map and wasting 15 min running back to the quest giver after finishing it only to waste another 15 min to go back to the area you were in before. Grr..

This game is my Deus Ex, I keep coming back to it. I want to warn first-timers: The game has been modded back and forth, but if you have never played a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game before, I recommend you keep to the vanilla game plus a bug-fixing-mod like the "Zone Reclamation Project" or "ZRP". I have played the vanilla game back when I was young (harhar) and then later with various mods that set out to improve graphics and tweak vanilla gameplay, like the Complete mod. My take is: these mods are unnecessary to get into the series and can even take away from the atmosphere. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s main problem is, as someone else stated, that it's an old game based on an even older engine. The graphics, especially the lighting, hold up well IMHO even without any mods (considering their age) but the game sadly came before global illumination and other advanced lighting techniques became feasible and it shows. Animations are awkward. The human AI likes to sneak up behind you (good!) but shows fair amounts of stupidity. Monster AI could be better. The music is mesmerizing and the sound design shows lots of potential but falls technically short every other corner. Everything about the game screams raw and "ambitious but understaffed". It's astounding really just how good the game is despite it's flaws. And this is where mods come in. I recommend you stay away from graphics mods. Exchanging vanilla textures and animations, toggling options in the depths of the engine or rolling post-processing over it aren't improvements, IMHO. They are more lipstick on a pig. The game will look old, feel raw and animate awkwardly no matter what you do. Mods making the AI smarter usually don't. And there is one gameplay tweak in particular that I want to warn people of: the ability of traders to repair things, like in the Complete mod. This absolutely kills the scavenge-for-equipment aspect and a big part of the atmosphere of the game. Avoid it for a first playthrough!

Straight up, S.T.A.L.K.E.R is the single best video game ever developed in human history. It's atmosphere cannot be rated or put into words, you just have to live it and see for yourself. Experiencing Stalker is better compared to undergoing a religious experience than simply 'playing a game'. Once you've entered the zone a part of you never leaves, it wall haunt your dreams and every waking moment until the end of time. This is further elevated with the myriad of mods available, a whole other topic in itself which range from basic bug fixes or graphical or QoL enhancements, to mods with hundreds of hours of extra content and quests, to hardcore mechanics, there is something for everyone. Do it, take the plunge and enter The Zone. Good hunting Stalker.

As a neurotic obsessive of Andrei Tarkovsky's films, particularly the one this trilogy of FPS games was built in homage to, I have spent reticent years combing through endless reviews and 'tubing' the mod sites to only meet my own skepticism from it's immediate dissonance from the film. When I finally allowed myself to just shut up and enjoy something without too much expectation, I was completely enraptured. Taken as it's own piece of interactive art, 'S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl' goes to great lengths to note some of the most subtle aesthetic and subtextual emotional moments Tarkovsky conjured in us almost fourty years ago. It departs entirely from his cinematic masterpiece by becoming an action-oriented story equally drowned in atmosphere. It belies even that by forcing you into a miasmatic and baffling gauntlet of increasing urgency, so briefly relieved by respite. The scripting for the enemy AI is some of the very best I have ever, EVER experienced in my 37 years of gaming to this very day. The graphics and sound for their time and place are equally immersive, pushing the perceivable into the inconceivable. Despite countless bugs and fan-made attempts to bandage those issues, they become entirely forgivable by a haunting and strange ambience rivaled only by the early groundbreaking best like 'Half Life', 'Thief' or other Eastern titles like the 'Witcher' series. Truly loud and terrifying gun play raises the pulse and becomes some of the most rewarding gameplay after it's harrowing, resource exhausting decison making and real-feeling ballistic physics that become reminiscent of other shining celluloid diamonds such as 'Heat', or 'Black Hawk Down'. I broke a nervous sweat more than a few times. While much of the voice acting (English in my playthrough) falls short of the benchmark most of the game sets, it is more than adequate to propel a virtually story-free plot that yet remains engaging. Another echo of the primarily philosphical film. The perfectly reproduced sections of Pripyat itself are breathtaking and yet too frantic to be truly absorbed. Upon Googling images of the ghost city I found near exact replicas of the Eastern block tenemants that were built almost as quickly as they were abandoned. The rust-frozen ferris wheel that was to open the very week of the worst nuclear disaster in history, never once enjoyed by anyone; an iconic symbol of the socio-political decay that has beleaguered Ukranian and Russian people since utilitarian time immemorial. A truly suffering civilization haunted by corrupt and irresponsible leadership and hasty, cavalier decisions. All this while binding you to resource management and conservation of expensive and rarely afforded supplies like food, medical aid, radiation meds, a sleeping bag... Burdensome but welcoming desperate survival on the brink of human disintegration. The psuedo open-world requires points of travel with brief loading times that don't become noticable as you are distracted with increasingly intelligent and difficult enemies. They almost all carry different weapon types, so scavenging their ammo and swapping your hard won weapons with less functional ones will leave you angry but determined, another veritable description of Eastern European culture. I cannot truly praise this game enough. The countless flaws aside, it soars as one of the most satisfying and memorable gaming experiences of my life. Four stars only due to the issues that were never dealt with despite a long time 'baking'. A little polish could very well have made this a perfect game.

Played with the ZRP mode (Zone Reclamation Project) and is a simple drag and drop. The Zone is a fascinating and etheral place, it's captivating to wander, but incredibly dangerous. Everytime I loaded up SoC I was drawn in by the soundscapes and horror that's felt throughout. I was really taken aback by how gorgeous the lighting is and how it establish such a feeling of haunted beauty. It's a PC Classic that absolutely should be experience by those that enjoy their campaigns and modding. Especially for those that can enjoy RP in their games. Had a lot of fun with this one, good luck in the zone Stalker!