Despite following the development of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl ever since GSC set out to create “our own Ukrainian Fallout”, I wasn’t really into it when it came out. I admired the game for what it was, but I didn’t have fun. Yet, I still bought Clear Sky as soon as it got released and… never finished it. When Call of Pripyat was announced, I originally took it as a joke and then simply ignored the game altogether.
For years I wanted to give the series another go. And I finally got in the mood to do that. No mods, no enhancements, no fan patches, just the final versions of each game as they are. Let’s see how they feel in 2019.
For a quick overview, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are Soviet sci-fi horror themed open world titles, mixing the mechanics from FPS, survival (before it became a genre it is now), RPG and the “immersive sim” into a unique blend. Very loosely based on the ideas from Tarkovsky’s movie Stalker (in itself loosely based on Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic), it’s focused on The Zone – a place full of anomalies, mutants and mysterious artifacts. The territory of The Zone vaguely corresponds to the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone and the 1986 nuclear disaster still has lingering influence on The Zone with pockets of dangerously high radiation levels. Yet, The Zone is a much newer phenomena with origins you get to learn about in the games. Curious about the place, and excited to make money on selling the artifacts, many people try to get into The Zone and explore it. Those, who do it constantly, and often live inside The Zone are called stalkers…
Launching Shadow of Chernobyl immediately reminded me of how long that game was in development. Despite being launched in 2007, right when the transition to 16:9 resolutions as a standard was happening, all of the 2D/UI elements in this game are designed only for 4:3/5:4 and get stretched and slightly broken (some 3D render things require a quick settings file edit too). You can feel that it was development since 2001, as a lot of its visual elements feel quite dated for the release year. That said, the game opens with a fantastic cutscene, one of several, that sets up the mood of the game. And that mood manages to shine through many of the game’s issues, including the outdated looks.
Running around the first areas of The Zone, doing quests for NPCs, trying not to die to anomalies, hostile stalkers or mutants feels really nice. The sound is great, the atmosphere this world has really captures you and the fact that some of the events in the game just happen, just because hidden systems and mechanics, the AI driving the game’s creatures felt like it, is unlike anything most games tried before or since. This “immersive sim” design approach, despite being immensely cut down from the original idea (where the NPCs could complete the game storyline before you do and whole areas could change), still feels amazing. And buggy as hell.
While it is cool that the game tries to drive a lot of itself solely on those simulated systems, it also often causes issues, where characters just die in dumb ways. And when the developers try to fix it via scripted events, that’s even worse, since you can have enemies just pop into existence right in front of you. It might be better than having some more critical quests just instantly fail as you get them because AI was too dumb and died or too smart or and completed the quest before you could get there, but it’s infuriating nonetheless. At least you indeed can fail most, if not all of the events, and still complete the game.
What feels like the biggest issue Shadow of Chernobyl had during development is the abundance of ideas, but lack of direction. The Zone is surprisingly crowded, for example, and feels more lived in than Gothic or Fallout worlds, despite the concept of The Zone being very hostile to humans. Lots of cut features and ideas also leads to all kinds of annoyances. The player PDA is overwhelming with lots of completely meaningless things that don’t matter in the released version of the game. One of the optional main story quest lines requires to backtrack to the exact same locations you explored before for a new cutscene, simply because the area that whole section was planned to be in was cut. Artifacts often feel completely useless. Hunger exists, but barely matters. The entirety of the second half of the game feels extremely FPS heavy and the true ending path is horribly tedious due to constant action. And even the story elements that sound nice and appropriately Soviet sci-fi inspired, feel cheesy, often boring and don’t have the same impact that they seem to want to have. Oh and who the hell thought that headbob was okay, sheesh…
A lot of this was addressed in the sequels, though each coming with their own drawbacks. But despite the problems, despite the terrible second half of the game, despite a lot of The Zone ending up feeling more like your normal RPG country than some scary place to be in, Shadow of Chernobyl still has its charm. And given the abundance of mods, each fixing different elements of the game or outright changing everything about it, I’m sure there’s a way to make this incredibly rough gem shine much brighter. But if you are planning to play the game without mods, well… I’d say, you might want to look into getting Call of Pripyat instead.
Just a year after the first game, GSC released Clear Sky and I remember my first experience with that game. I remember launching it, looking at all the new shiny visual features the game had that made it look years better than the SoC… A beautiful sun was shining through the trees and the grass. It was amazing. Then I turned around and saw NPCs walk in thin air. Then my game crashed. Turns out, despite being less buggy by now, the game is still a huge mess, a mixed bag of good and terrible.
As I’ve hinted, visually the game was amazing, and it still looks really nice to this day. More importantly, it changed how The Zone looked and felt, especially during the nighttime, where you basically can’t see anything without a light source or night vision, unlike the first game. Far more focus was given to the systems driving the creatures in the Zone as well, so there’s always something going on around you, yet due to good improvements to the player PDA and UI, it’s far easier to understand what’s important and what can be ignored. The Zone itself is more dangerous too, with more focus on anomalies, addition of detectors to help navigating the anomalies (and changing the way artifacts are found) and return of the originally cut concept of emissions. When one happens, the player (and, actually, all visible NPCs in the map) are given some time to hide in a closed area since if you’re out in the open when the emission hits, you’re instantly dead.
With all these amazing ideas it seems like the developers made the wrong call to give even more focus to the warring “factions” of stalkers in The Zone. “Faction Wars” is a dedicated system that allows you to, essentially, join a clan and fight the opposing clan on the same or nearby map location to win territories and such. Which is even more removed from the idea of The Zone not being a place a lot of people might want to live in, but that’s not even the main issue. The main issue is that that whole system is a complete mess, as it’s designed to just happen in perpetuity. Aka, as soon as you “win” the last territory and walk 5 steps away from it, all enemies in it instantly respawn and you have to do it all over again. Making these diversions feel as pointless as capturing guard posts in Far Cry 2. All that, while you’re constantly bombarded with messages from the factions asking you to help them.
Though, even without the focus on action and Faction Wars Clear Sky feels pretty unfun to play. It’s more tedious in general than SoC, the pacing for the story bits is constantly off, the story feels pointless as despite being a prequel it doesn’t really tell anything important or interesting that’s not learnt in the first game. The music is terrible and often breaks if you turn on the option to make it dynamic for the action bits. A lot of things aren’t properly explained so without playing the first game you might have a hard time understanding concepts. And the addition of quick travel options feels more like a crutch to the boring exploration, than an improvement. Oh and the scripted events can be even buggier than the ones in SoC.
Even if you’re in the mood for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and played other games in the series before, I would not recommend playing Clear Sky. Despite a lot of the initial issues being fixed without the need for mods or fanpatches, it’s still a really tedious and messy game that doesn’t really do anything that the other two titles did much better. Unless there’s a mod that requires this game or changes it into something that it isn’t as is, stay away. Oh and, did I mention it also had boss fights, with boss health bar and all? Yeah…
Despite me ignoring Call of Pripyat when it was released and mostly not noticing what people were saying about it, I did catch some of the opinions on it. And all of them were incredibly positive. But, being not a huge fan of the first game and feeling burned on Clear Sky, I didn’t wish to give the series another chance until now. Boy, am I glad I did. Echoing those opinions I’ve heard, this game is pretty much everything I expected S.T.A.L.K.E.R. to be in the first place. Though, it’s not without faults as well.
It was originally released almost 10 years ago (with the international release being delayed a few months), which is just 2 years after the first game was out, yet it seems like during those 2 years there was enough feedback to finally shape the original idea into something that it really wanted to be. Visually, it’s not that different from Clear Sky, but much cleaner (and still years better than the original) and more… cohesive, I suppose. Audio is wonderful again, featuring new tunes and using sound to create a really cool atmosphere for The Zone. And The Zone itself finally feels like what it was supposed to be – a danger on its own, with far less stalkers around, no pointless focus on “faction wars” and a lot of weird and cool looking anomalies and artifacts. Instead of having a bunch of maps you constantly run between, there are just 3 main areas you occasionally transition between, all mostly self-contained, all interesting, all full of actually fun quests and characters.
Things feel so much more thought out, so much easier to understand and just focus on exploring The Zone and completing the missions. I suppose, occasionally to the point of being far easier than the original game, since it’s much less likely to get into money or resource troubles in this game. Some things feel a bit too nice, like radiation being not particularly important this time around or endurance regenerating much quicker, some, like healing taking longer and some changes to how armor, weapons and upgrades work feeling just right. Sleeping to skip time is finally a thing too, since the night time is almost pitch black otherwise.
Out of three games, this was the only one where I actually went out of my way to try and do all events/quests because I was having fun while exploring. There was a perfect amount of streamlined ideas, closer to what you’d find in modern open world titles, and the tension during the exploration since a lot of things could go wrong anyway and a sudden emission could catch you in the open with horrible mutants nearby. And although the story was simpler, although occasionally I was missing the cool locations from SoC or some cool events that were bigger and louder, the simple joy of the exploration of The Zone was enough to keep me engaged throughout the game. That said, I still got annoyed in the end with some terrible smaller story locations being frustrating and the fact that I couldn’t finish the game with the “best” outcome because the friendly AI script just decided to not work anymore and the only way to continue the game would’ve been to let some of them die, so the rest gets unstuck…
If you would want just one S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game to play for the first time and don’t want to mess with the mods at all, Call of Pripyat is a great choice. It’s a fun exploration game, with plenty of interesting locations, really cool world concepts, good music and not that many annoying issues. It’d still be great to see this game remastered in some form, to fix the spawn bugs, the AI and the rest of occasional issues, but out of all of the original 3 S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, this is the only one that I could easily recommend playing.