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

[Trolldor]

Currently playing, and my god is it amazing, but you can also see everything the game could have been. Finished it three times now in the past three days, and each time become a little more jaded at how much they could have done.

You have to save every time you complete a quest. If you die, it's either back to your last save, or your last autosave. And when some areas have six or seven quests you've completed and then a misplaced vortex anomaly, you end up shutting off the game to calm down, knowing that you're going to have to either do them all over again or forget they even existed.

The stealth system doesn't work nearly half as well as it should. You can't sneak up close enough to someone to stab them with your knife because the moment you get in range they "hear" you. You have to glitch the game to do it. Light plays no part in how well hidden you are, and even when using weapons with silencers, a single shot is all they need to know exactly where you are.

The faction system is a bit of a token as well. You can join factions but to do so you have to do some rather generic quests, and joining a faction does nothing but turn another one against you. You get access to an extra shop, but nothing they sell is helpful to you by that point, other than ammo which you can buy elsewhere.

The AI is both incredibly smart and incredibly dull. They often take forever to do anything, because they're "taking cover". This includes not shooting you when you're standing out in the middle of an open field spinning around in circles looking for that last guy. Other times you'll bump around a corner you've just cleared out to find another guy with a shotgun ready for your face.
And sometimes they teleport, even though they shouldn't. And sometimes they just run in to corners, or face the wall while you perform an entire symphony behind them.

The "open-ended" world has load screens. It feels less like open ended and more like back-tracking, especially as almost every quest in the start can be finished within twenty minutes. Except one which relies entirely on luck and which you are more likely to fail unless you go out of your way to look for the item. And when you do you have to lug it through five or six load screens and all the respawned enemies.

You can knife teammates in the face and your allies don't raise an eyelid, but shoot them in the leg by accident and suddenly you're public enemy number one.

The weapons system is... retarded. For the most part, in the beginning, you're swearing loudly because you've wasted 271 bullets on a single guy using the most accurate gun available to you. In the end you end up just charging in and hoping that when you shoot the dot is over his head and one of the bullets land. Most of the time you end up running away again as you reload. And then you find a shiny new weapon and suddenly you're taking out soldiers, stalkers, mutants, zombies and attack choppers alike with a single shot. But you still run out of ammo because the only stuff you find happens to be for shitty gun you just threw away.

Despite all of this, the atmosphere alone makes up for it. Walking through twilight as the grass sways in a digitally rendered breeze. Seeing a pair of glowing eyes charging towards you as a cloaked bloodsucker reaches for your throat. Hearing the gunshots in the distance of a pack of bandits coming across the roaming military, or a pack of wild dogs. Seeing a boar dragging along a corpse of a victim before chowing in to dinner. Hearing the different music playing on the radios, amended to the tastes of the characters in the bars. Walking through a dimly lit corridor and jumping at the silhouettes that flash past along with an accompanying growl. Seeing the most hardened stalker pull out a guitar and start strumming some folk around the crackling bin-fire. Having your enemies try to play dead when you wound them enough, or seeing a zombie twitching uncontrollably just before you lay the final blow.

The gameplay is lacking, and yet the atmosphere pulls you in like a trophy wife to a business tycoon. Sometimes you want to relive the epic battles where you and a team of men stormed an enemy base, only to find out it was a once off. Other times you want to revisit the dark, underground corridors of the abandoned laboratories, only to find out that they too are once off environments.

I'd give stalker a solid 7/10... the first five points are for atmosphere, the other two are for gameplay. Just a little more depth and it would have been an immortal classic. As it stands it's just a solid, fun game with a lot of frustration and a good variety of amusing, or terrifying, moments.