Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl

[Seasanctuary]

This is the PC game I've been playing lately. It's been out a while and is only $20 on Steam by now.

It is a first person shooter set in a sci-fi version of the Chernobyl 'Zone' filled with a handful of militant human factions, mutants, dangerous spatial anomalies, and magical 'artifacts'. Gameplay is similar to Half-Life 2 with its focus on military weapons and the mix of human and monster opponents. However, it is much less strictly linear than Half-life games. It borrows from MMOs such conventions as quest givers, zones of varied difficulty, and a focus on equipment.

However, it is definitely a skill-based FPS first. Your character does not gain 'levels'. You may improve your gear but all gear (slowly, thankfully) deteriorates which leads to things like a higher chance of a gun jam. Human opponents will drop a weapon each, a stack of ammo for it, and usually 2-3 other common consumables like bandages or medkits. Occasionally something more valuable. Early on I was meticulous about lugging all that crap back to sell for cash, but it gets to the point pretty quickly where you have to pick what is most valuable per kilogram or has the most personal utility.

In addition to better weapons and body armor, you can collect artifacts and attach them to your belt to gain a variety of buffs. At first, most of the artifacts will come with downsides which outweigh their benefits. Right now the only one I'm wearing increases Endurance -- which means I tire less quickly for a certain level of burden -- in exchange for me being especially vulnerable to electric shocks. I don't tend to get shocked out of the blue. Artifacts are also light and tend to sell for a lot of cash.

Stalker is a hard game. I'm playing at normal difficulty which is the second of either 4 or 5 difficulty levels. Still, I initially died a ton to two human opponents at once. Then I found out that I have to hold the right mouse button to sight along the barrel for my shots to be more than 'from the hip'. The balance is that you can't move very quickly when sighting down the barrel. Barrel sighting plus 'lean around the corner' buttons at Q and E make for a lot of fun shoot and pull back movie style shootouts around our respective corners. Cover is very important because human enemies can see almost as far as you can and don't mind wasting ammo all day taking pot shots from too far to be accurate.

If you're thinking of a certain Russian movie named Stalker, yes this game is loosely based on the movie. The nut-tossing in the movie even comes into play, except bolts are used instead. Around the zone are a number of different types of anomalies which can either injure or kill you if you wander into them. Some are stationary, some shift around like dust devils. Also, they vary in how obvious they are. At first there is no need for bolt tossing, but a wonderful scene yesterday involved tossing bolts along a dark underpass. When they hit flame anomalies, a gout of fire spewed out of the ground lighting up the underpass. This game also captures the human-ruins beautiful-nature atmosphere of the movie's Zone. The weather system is particularly memorable.

I keep being surprised by great new elements from time to time. If you play it, you won't forget your first stroll into the Yantar area.

Anyway, I wanted to make sure no post-apocalyptic or survival horror fan on this forum misses out. By far the best single player game I've played since Half-Life 2.

[Seasanctuary]

Rumor has it a new, American adaptation of 'Roadside Picnic' was scheduled to come out this year involving John Travolta.

Everyone's favorite sci-fi actor.

[Number Six]

Interesting, I was following this game for a while but sort of forgot about it after they delayed it again and again.

[Alien]

I really enjoyed Half Life 2 (I like the mix of straight shoot 'em up and puzzle solving, and isn't Alyx cute?) and bought Stalker 'cos it looked good. So far I've played the introductory sequence (rescuing the guy from the bandits) about 50 times and got killed every time. Well, I did finish it once and was just wandering around picking up stuff from dead people when some mutated pig-like critters came and killed me again and there I was back at the beginning again. Yeah, yeah, I should have saved.

The stupid little pistol you get to start with doesn't seem to be able to kill anyone without hitting them about 90 times, and the enemies get you with a couple of shots.

Anyway I got tired of it and haven't played it since. Maybe I'll go back to it when I finish some other games I have (notably Call of Duty 3 on my newly acquired Xbox 360).

As a general comment, I would love it if games gave me the option to just skip to the next episode. I know it's supposed to be challenging and all that, but I buy these games to enjoy them, not to keep having to retry the same thing over and over and over to get to something new.

[Seasanctuary]

They do start you out with a relatively tough mission considering your gear, armor, and lack of familiarity. It wasn't until I got out of the first two zones and was comfortable with gameplay that I started to really get the 'wow this is nice' vibe. Some possible tips:

* Did you follow the prompts to get the 4-5 npc allies to attack the bandit compound with you? I tried the "No thanks, I'm too cool for help" (not verbatim) option once and was summarily squashed.

* Let the NPCs engage first while you hide behind a tree or truck. They'll do a pretty good job of grabbing bandit attention, but won't make it through the whole compound if you aren't also taking shots at their targets. Flanking the bandit involved in a shootout can help.

* Cover is a really big deal in this game. Bushes and tall grass unfortunately seem invisible to enemies but block your view, but hard objects stop bullets very effectively. Often you can get in a position so that tapping Q or E to lean around the corner will jump you in and back out of enemy line of sight. NPCs have unlimited ammo but they do stop and require a second to start shooting again.

* Make sure you know where the flashlight key and crouch1 and crouch2 keys are. Flashlight works like in HL Episode One (lots of dark areas there too) but can be left on all the time. It just makes it easier for enemies to pick you out in the dark. Crouch 1 is almost always good enough to reduce your noise generation from walking around to nil. Crouch 2 I mostly use to physically get lower below hip level cover if I can't find a corner.

* And of course the one thing I didn't understand for a while was that holding down the right mouse button to sight down the barrel also greatly increases how accurate your shots can be. Unlike Halflife, from the hip shooting is not at all guaranteed to hit the middle of your screen.

* One or more of the bandits will drop a shotgun. Upgrading halfway through the raid isn't a bad idea.

And yes, the initial handgun is pretty weak against enemies with body armor. Doesn't have much of a kick, though, so you can rapid click 3-4 shots and still be hitting most of the time.

[Alien]

OK, thanks for the tips. I'll try all these things when I get back to it.

Yes, I did take the allies with me.

It does seem to be a great game (I like the way you can pretty much wander anywhere rather than having only one or two routes that work), so it's probably worth the effort to get into it.

Incidentally, I got the Xbox because I found that my computer (and particularly the graphics card), though fairly new, wasn't up to running many games with all the features enabled. I didn't buy it originally with gaming in mind. I was thinking of upgrading it, but decided that $350 for an Xbox was not only less money, but gave me a far superior experience.

[Sir-Think-A-Lot]

I just got it on the computer. It's kinda fun. Though I'v only made it through hte first story mission and a couple of side stories.

[Seasanctuary]

Sequel coming out this weekend. I'm so pumped!

I played through the original game again over Labor Day weekend and was reminded just how amazing it is.

[Seasanctuary]

Been playing the sequel (er, prequel) game this week. There is some early stuff that is _insanely_ unfair and difficult. Ug. I hope some of this is just the result of bugs which will be patched soon. Pretty sure an entire faction that's hostile is intended to be neutral.

[Jnthn]

Stalker is really, really good...so good I even put up with poor framerates on my aging laptop to play it. I've got a ninja desktop now so I plan to enjoy it and the prequel "Clear Skies" in directX10 glory!

J

[Seasanctuary]

The DirectX 10 part made my computer go slideshow. Happily, putting it back on DX9 with the other settings on High delivers the same smooth and good looking play as the first game.

Just no 'god rays', volumetric smoke, etc. Oh well.

[MooseOnTheLoose]

Glad you mentioned "Roadside Picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. A stunner of a book, and inspiration for Tarkovsky's "Stalker" movie. Read it, everybody (can be downloaded free from the web)!

[Adrift]

Dang, I missed this thread somehow. I love the game, and I love the film. Was amazed at how well the game was able to capture the sort of eerie quiet feel of the film. Tieing everything into Chernobyl was sensible. Haven't read the book or played the sequel...

[Jnthn]

The DirectX 10 part made my computer go slideshow. Happily, putting it back on DX9 with the other settings on High delivers the same smooth and good looking play as the first game.

Just no 'god rays', volumetric smoke, etc. Oh well.

I've got a nVidia 9800GT which seems to eat DX10 for brekkie.

J

[Adrift]

I've got a nVidia 9800GT which seems to eat DX10 for brekkie.

J

You know what I find a bit funny is that I remember reading an article in some popular computer gaming magazine, and them saying that the graphics of Stalker were dated at its release... they surmised that the reason for this was because the release was pushed back over and over again. I remember when I first launched the game and thinking that the graphics were tremendous. It still rock some games I've seen since. I don't know if the guy was smokin crack that when he wrote that piece or if he just didn't want to admit that the wait was worth it, . Definitely one of the better games I've ever played, though I have to admit it was really really hard to make myself to finish it. I'd go like months between periods of play. Towards the end I was skipping all the side-quests to just get to the end. Still, I look forward to playing the prequel when I get some cash together.