Occasionally you'll come upon a useful artifact, and that's when exploring is most worthwhile. Engaging in non-essential combat is handy for picking up bandages and first aid kits, maintaining ammunition levels, and accumulating random items like bottles of precious vodka. starts out this way, as you rapidly discover more and more powerful weapons, some of which are even "+1" variations of base weapon models, but flatlines far too early. In a full-fledged RPG, you'd be rewarded with experience for beating up random baddies, or given skill points, or granted some other way of augmenting your abilities and furthering character development. Aside from satisfying an explorer's curiosity and snatching the occasional artifact or suit of armor, the prizes for peeking around every corner in the Zone turn out to be somewhat lacking. Money is never really an issue in the game, since the artifacts you find lying around The Zone's fields sell for substantial sums. Large quantities of ammunition for each of the game's rifles, shotguns, and pistols are available at any major vendor. Though a few side quests offer valuable rewards (one particular quest in Yantar nets you an excellent armor piece), the majority give you money and bullets, both of which can be easily obtained through other means. Upon your first footsteps in the early areas, it's an undeniably compelling prospect to trek across the dreary fields pocked with anomaly clusters to question the inhabitants and root out secrets. The game's zones, which take a minute or two to sprint across, are separated by load times, meaning you can't pass from one end of The Zone to the other uninterrupted. The more involving ones toss you into battle with A.I. They mostly offer simple tasks such as kill a single target, wipe out a camp, or retrieve an object. Sadly only a handful of them are truly interesting. If you really want to test out how S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s open world elements work, you'll need to embark on the many side quests The Zone's NPCs offer. In a strange twist, several of the main story missions take place underground or indoors, shifting the aspects of gameplay toward that of a traditional corridor shooter. Be sure to get one of the two true endings to fill in all the plot holes.
Though some of the story's twists and turns are interesting, the pacing and storytelling methods could have used some refinement. It turns out the Zone's NPCs aren't the best storytellers, so to more accurately understand what's happening you'll need to regularly check your PDA the Marked One turns out to be quite the diligent note taker. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s main story missions provide the most engaging experience, as completing the challenges sometimes bestows useful rewards, opens up new territory to explore, and advances the mysterious plot. As the journey progresses, you'll move through the game's various self-contained zones that together make up The Zone, from the relatively placid Cordon to the war-wracked Army Warehouses, Pripyat, and finally the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant itself, from which all things sinister seem to emanate. You soon meet up with a man named Sidorovich, who hands out your first tasks and introduces the fiction of the environment. A little while later, you'll likely realize the environment's limitations and yearn for more.Įvents kick off with your character, known only as the Marked One, tumbling off a death truck on the outskirts of The Zone. In your first hours expect to be filled with an intrepid glee as you acclimate to the game world. The gnarled trees, bleak skies, and rumbling thunderstorms of The Zone grab you firmly by the ears and yank you across irradiated wastelands. What remains consistent throughout the experience is the compelling atmosphere. The game offers significantly more content than any other FPS out there, but struggles a little when it come s to the open world.
In GSC Game World's long awaited S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, such an experiment in genre cooking has produced some great results. The idea of fusing first-person shooter mechanics with an open world is a tantalizing one.
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