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

[M_B]

So, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., a game delayed as well as anticipated nearly as much as Duke Nukem Forever, was released just last week. I have said game in my possession and must say: Wow. I may not be close to all the way through it, but I've played enough to know it's worth the time spent playing and the money spent paying. It's designed to be fairly open ended, much like Oblivion. Now, it's not as wide of a land scape as Oblivion, there are boundaries which, if you just do the main task, make it seem like another linear game. I'll say this: It may seem small and such, but it's all on foot as vehicles aren't supposed to work in 'The Zone,' which I'll explain next.

You see, this First Person Shooter RPG is based upon the tragedy of Chernobyl. Only in this game's version of the story of Chernobyl, that incident occurred twice. This takes place after the second melt down of the Nuclear Power Plant. For the most part it's set in the Ukrainian Woodlands that surround the particular area. This is called 'The Zone.' Why is it called The Zone? Because of all of the radioactivity from the simultaneous disaster. Said radioactivity creates suck ass little things called Anomalies. If you don't know what an anomaly is, [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] In between groups of these hazardous little anomalies are things called Artifacts. Artifacts are created by anomalies, I'm not sure how, but my guess is that they are created from the "contents" that they "collect." Artifacts can be used to increase a few stats like armor, sprint distance, etc., but be warned, every artifact has a con. They'll give you something special and take something special in return. Not to mention the risks you take retrieving them. Long story short, try not to walk into one, toss a bolt to get rid of it - for two seconds. In The Zone you will find many many creatures. Some of them orthodox, untainted creatures like ravenous mangy wild dogs, boars, and humans, and some mutant dogs, boars, humans, and the such.

Now, you're probably thinking "Oh great, Russians, what, do you get drunk?" Yes. In order to live after going near a bio-hazardous area is either by gulping down a whole bottle of Vodka or by curing yourself with anti-radiation medicine(not so easy to come across, nor cheap). You're better off going with the Vodka since it's every where and cheap seeing as it is the Ukraine(at least I imagine that's why it's cheap and everywhere, because of the mother land). After defending yourself with Vodka, your vision starts to blur and it's apparent that your character is swaying around, meaning you're drunk and have to eat something to stable yourself.

That's another thing that makes this game's RPG aspect an actual RPG aspect. You carry items, and you have a limit that goes with your back pack. This means you can only carry so much Russian crap before you get weighed down by what seems like an anchor on your back. You'll also notice that the more you have, the slower you run and sprint. This is very similar to what's seen in most character development titles such as Oblivion.

Yet another RPG aspect, NPC respect status. You make Allies in The Zone. By saving Yurik's or Tchaikovsky's or whoever's ass, you gain respect with them, they become your friend, and typically will save your ass and spread good word about you. You can either be a good guy, or a bad guy. If you're good, the fellow Stalkers will be your friend rather than an enemy. If you're bad and try and kill everyone, they'll wind up hating you.

What's a Stalker? Stalkers are, well, criminals. In this game there are Stalkers, Bandits, The Army, and, of course, the mutants. Stalkers are illegally in the Zone. It's against the law to be doing what you're doing, which is passing the blockades into this area the government doesn't want you to pass, and is heavily guarded. With the exception of a few allies here and there(where you seriously need them), you're on your own, so you alone with crummy gear against 30 soldiers with great gear isn't easy. So, the army basically is out to kill anyone they see, because no one is supposed to be in The Zone without permission. Bandits try and steal from Stalkers. The Stalkers do all of the risking of their lives to go and retrieve Artifacts, just so they can sell them and make enough money to leave the place - yet the Bandits just steal from the Stalkers and sell for their own profit, they have no yearning for the departure of the Zone. Lastly, mutants. Some are experiments. Others are just plain old 'in the wrong place at the wrong time' humans and creatures who got mutated.

There's also a ranking system which brings your rank higher and higher among the Stalkers based on how many kills you have, how many artifacts you've retrieved, how loyal you are, so on and so forth. There's not much on that so I'll just move on.

What's your goal? Figure out who you are. Make allies to cover yourself and money to pay for your equipment and in some cases escape. This isn't like Half-Life or Quake where you just have this myriad of invincible weaponry. Your weapons slowly lose quality and accuracy, at some point you have to dump the weapon as it'll be useless to you.

Okay, what about the graphics? Well, it looks great, and runs great on most systems. It's heavily optimized, trust me. It also feels like the models aren't relatively high poly, just really good textures, somewhat like the deal with Half-Life 2 but with much better textures. It has excellent lighting. Everything does seem to be specular(shiny) to the teeth, but the reason for this is simple - it rains once a day in the game, sometimes twice. The dynamic lighting is great. Not too much, and it's actually noticeable. They say you need a fast system to run it on max settings, but I'm running nearly max(anisotropy isn't on all the way, lighting distance is 3/4, lighting set to full dynamic, the only thing not on is antialiasing as it won't work with any card lower than a Radeon X1k series or lower than a GeForce 8 series card), and it's only a mid range system. I have an AMD Athlon 64 3500+, 1 GB RAM, and a GeForce 7600GT 256, and it runs fine for me. I might have screenshots up in a bit.

Anyways, I highly recommend the game. The story is a bet plain but the game itself is great.




Oh, and, the multiplayer is nothing outstanding, just your generic online FPS games.

[M_B]

Something I forgot to mention is how when I said a day in the game, I literally meant day. The game goes through every time section of the day, from Dawn, Morning, Mid-day, Noon, After noon, Evening, Sun set, Dusk, and a pitch black night, which really makes for an uneasy feeling if I do say so myself.

And, here are the screenshots. I didn't really show all of it, I just wanted to show what the lighting effects look like for the most part. They're all taken in the immediate area of where I currently am, which is set in a junkyard of sorts.



Here is me walking near an anomaly(couldn't capture it in the screenshot, apparently), it gets fuzzy like as if you were to start feeling effects of radiation, and the geiger counter starts pinging:




Here's an example of an artifact, not sure if you can see it, but it's surrounded with anomalies:



And comment for Christ sake.

[M_B]

Here's another screen shot for you guys. Since no one's posting a comment nor does anyone seem to care, here's a 2.2 MB image for you guys.

[Dan]

Wow.

I read the whole post. Very nice little feature here. I barely knew anything about this game until now. Nice job!

This is going on the main page.

[Dan]

Link to article. Feel free to comment in either place.

[M_B]

Thanks, Dan!


Some more shots headed your way:

A "normal" wild dog, only slightly deformed(must be hard to see, but they have a few spots of exposed muscle here and there, also note the lack of ears).

A skeleton hung by the neck out of a broken building.

This is just to show the great heat and fire effects.

A mutant/zombie dog. This thing has more than just spots of exposed muscle and no ears, it barely has any skin to begin with, or eyes.

A boar.

Same boar, but at a different view and with the light on. That's grass, not green innards and blood, the blood, as you can see, is...blood colored.

I just think this has pretty cool lighting.

[Scrib]

I may check this game out.

[M_B]

I have some more shots for you guys(I take shots of cool things I see, as well as creatures)!

Some wolf...thing.

Another view of the same wolf thing.

Here's another boar, but this time it died in a position which made it easier to see it's head. This thing looks as if it has 4 ears, 2 on each side.

Inventory shot(VODKA AHOY!!)

Aaand I'm drunk. The only way to subdue the radiation in the area.

This mutant is called a "Flesh." From what I can tell, it has 3 eyes...

And here's another view of the ugly thing, showing it's odd stick like legs and fat boulder like body. I have no idea as to what it used to be, I'm caught between boar, human, and a hamster.

Russian to English grammar. Not bad for a Ukrainian dev team.

I just thought that was plain cool looking.

I've hit the image post limit, so I'll make another post, I still have 6 shots or so.

[M_B]

Yes, the game's atmosphere gets this dark at night, and usually darker.

Showing not only darkness, here, but also showing the hunger symbol in the bottom right corner. It blinks until you eat something like a sausage, bread, or tourist food or something.

Just plain purdy.


Just showing these last two because I've only posted shots of foggy or dark weather, and I don't want you to get the idea that there are no blue skies in this game. They're there.

[Dan]

Woah. Very cool.