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

"An Utterly Unpleasant Experience"

Playing with unpleasant and bleak atmospheres is a double edged sword which I have experienced in many mediums of entertainment and art. It can be a very powerful tool in immersing the audience into your media, making the act of playing the game, or listening to the music, or watching to the film, seem more powerful and more of a journey; But at the same time you need to find a way of making these bleak and miserable experiences remain accessible for the audience to still enjoy. Or else despite the amazing ability to bring the world alive in their eyes, they won't want to come back to them. I have experienced this with some drone music, soulless depressive films, well written but aimless books, and now, finally I can say that I have experienced this on a game, with S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl.

This is the first, and to this point only time where I have found myself so affected by the thematics and settings of a game that you could actually say that I felt something not dissimilar to fear. Admittedly, only when things aren't on the screen, or during the day, soon as the monsters show up things get noticeably less nerve-wracking, same with bright locations, but the world of the Zone is truly a creepy and intimidating place.

This is achieved through, firstly, the incredibly dynamic lighting that this game is coated in, the post apocalyptic world of Chernobyl is generally a very dark place, but unlike say, Doom 3 which was dark, dark and more dark, there's a large amount of moving light sources around, making the whole place look very aggressive, creepy and almost living. Objects will be visible for a moment and not the next, as you fumble for your flashlight key; waiting to discover whether what you saw was a chair, or a creature that can jump 15 feet staring you in the face. The graphics render all of the moving shadows caused by moving light sources smoothly, and generally the lighting glows in a very natural and realistic manner. Most of the set pieces that fill this game are also quite natural looking, the textures are a little low on the detail side, so in full light they seem a little outdated, but soon as the lights go off all these things lead to some pretty unpleasant and haunting environments. Secondly, the sound is very well done. The sound is taking from the "more is more" school of ambience, and what can I say, it's effective. Where most games in the survival horror genre tend to use sound sparingly, S.T.A.L.K.E.R has opted for a different route of making everything around create a huge wall of noise. Animals and mutants can be heard on the wind, As with the clanking of any mechanical elements of the structures that scatter the country side, anomalies crack and explode around the fields and junkyards, add in occasional sounds of distant warfare, and the fact the buildings themselves appear to growl at you, and you've got quite a large amount of sound coming from a game with basically zero music.

Finally, the world is made up of pure misery and grot. This is a bitter world, and it's quite an exhausting place to inhabit. The trees are bendy and rotten, with barely a leaf to be seen, human groupings are not in comfortable housing, and instead they hang out in old garbage dumps and dilapidated barns. Along with this everything is spread out with miles of barren dead land and pieces of wreckage between your few areas of refuge, with ever hopeless trudges to underground facilities scattered in between. The zone successfully feels cold, damp and generally dank for most of the time, and again, it's truly revolutionary in its ability to make the player feel emotions attached to the game; just generally they're all really bleak, grim emotions. Not that there's anything wrong with grim and bleak environments and emotions, Sometimes I don't want my killing of hordes of people to feel as jovial as it does in Grand Theft Auto, where S.T.A.L.K.E.R runs into problems is that there's no enjoyment to go along with the depressive and unpleasant side of stuff. You see, as I was mentioning with the music and film references, there's a way to do joyless entertainment right, and there's a way to do it wrong. Where a good funeral doom band has slow, dreary, depressive music, it also has huge crushing riffs, and where a film may be purely negative, it may have some moments of stunning acting, this game however does not have anything like that. Everything supporting this barren landscape isn't very good. The gameplay is poor, the acting inconsistent, as are the character models, the mission design is terrible, as is the storyline development, and the AI is intelligent in a rudimentary way, but still lacks any real challenge. There's nothing to make me want to go through the hell that is this game. They've achieved making the gamer feel uneasy, but without a good game to back it up, why the hell would anyone just want to feel uneasy? It's like a rollercoaster consisting of nothing but sharp turns that make you feel sick in the stomach at a monotonous speed, without any of the exciting drops.

The most annoying thing about disliking this game is that it doesn't fail from glitches or slack coding, since the patching anyway, or from a lack of ideas or scope. In a sense, this game has been produced perfectly to what GSC Gameworld wanted to create. And the ideas aren't bad ideas; just the specific implementation of their ideas is terrible.

I'll start on the most noticeable problems, firstly the story. This is one of the major problems which would be faced by people trying to combine RPGs with First Person Shooters, hell, the RPG this holds the most similarities to; the Elder Scrolls series; still can't do this very well at all. As you would know, the ideas behind the storyline in this game are awesome, namely the whole crazy Chernobyl disaster resulting in, instead of mass tumours, a complete breakdown in civil manner and the creation of a world of mutant beasts, and treasure hunters, called S.T.A.L.K.E.Rs. Because who doesn't love ridiculous acronyms, I don't actually think STALKER means anything at all, the writers just thought it sounded cool... In short, the reason why the world is such a vicious pit of vile hatred is really cool, and believable enough (it's a game, games ignore reality remember). But of course, NONE of this is explained in the game, nor does it have any real relevance to your existence, or whatever your purpose in the game is. Things relating to your character are far less interesting. Instead of hugely original and cool ideas, you get the "You've got amnesia, you have something on you telling you to find a mysterious Strelok character who will tell you who you are" stock standard cop out plot. And it never really develops into anything much bigger, you've got a twist that a 7 year old child who has written a 4 page colouring book could scoff at, then another few hours of seemingly meaningless boredom, and then you get a small period of actually interesting plot, but it doesn't really start until the very end of the game. So, to me at least, I quickly lost interest as to what I was doing, and found myself thinking "No, I don't want to go into the underground bunker, I want to leave the zone, and play a game about the bus ride home, I'm sure Paris is beautiful this time of year". The fact that you have absolutely no reasoning to do most of this stuff beyond a basic name on a PDA, there really isn't a whole lot of purpose to what you're doing, and it cheapens the experience. Not to mention that all the characters have basically the same model and are interchangeable, including yourself in fact.

The mutants have a decent enough range of types, but they are little big and cartoonish, and do lose their entire frightening aura when on screen, which is a problem that is pretty much unavoidable in games at the moment. At least they manage to go back to being chilling once you're on the look out for new ones, unlike say Doom 3 monsters, where the first 15 minutes, where there literally weren't any monsters around was the only time the game was intimidating.

The next thing you'll notice, is your PDA, which again, really seems to be created exactly how they wanted it to be created, and again, it's horrible. The PDA is your ingame menu which tells you information about your missions, tasks, diary entries about what your doing and what you've done, that sort of stuff. It's implemented in an interesting manner in the fact the game around you does not stop just because you're looking at your map. If you're being chased by a telekinetic beast, looking at your map isn't magically going to give you a moment of respite; it's still going to destroy the hell out of you. Same goes for the equipment menu too. Where the problem comes in the PDA is the crushing lack of detail given. You missions are explained as very basic single line descriptions of what the final result of your mission is. There is no more information available, as a result, you have no idea as to what you're supposed to be doing for the majority of the time, and you basically have to remember what was said by the guy who gave you the task to have any clue as to what you're doing. So if you skip through some text without reading thoroughly, you'll be forever confused as to what your final goal is. This is where you'd assume the diary notes would help, however they don't, as "The Marked One" seems to be a very lazy writer, and instead of a fairly detailed summary of what has happened, you get horribly unorganised, brief and vague notes which give no more insight than the mission goals of "Pick up the stash". The map is generally effective, however the fact that your mission goals are all named similarly it becomes confusing as to whether you're looking at the correct markers or not.

Soon enough you'll discover just how horribly mangled the mission system is, basically take Oblivion's technique of talking to people to do jobs for them, and hack it apart and remove all functional elements. Firstly, time limits assigned to missions for no reasons, single attempt missions, missions that are assigned simply from scouring through bodies, and you are not informed of more than the sound of a beep, and uncontrollable deaths of characters who offer missions, which all exist for no purpose other than to make your adventure in the zone more convoluted and irritating. If you're like me, you'll stop bothering with non plot related tasks, because they're too much effort and have little gain, and take up huge amounts of time. Much like Elder Scrolls, 90% of the missions are really quite useless and unimportant, but unlike those games, S.T.A.L.K.E.R has the added cost of ammunition, and no ability to regain health at will. Instead you need to scrounge together all the food, Medkits, and ammunition you can to simply survive, and due to the inaccurate guns, dealing with large numbers of soldiers can be quite expensive. So while a useless mission in Elder Scrolls pads out the game a little for no real gain or loss, useless missions here cost you precious health and ammo. Usually you're reward is only a few med kits and some bullets, and in the end of it all, you gain very little, or even lose out a bit. You generally make your ammo back off the soldiers you kill, but more often than not, these missions will cost you more health than you gain at the end. Not to mention missions dealing with large numbers of mutants leave you horribly in the red, since you don't have the bonus of getting ammo from bodies.

Then of course you've got the time limit missions. These are time limited for no reason other than to ruin your day. Some things basically give you a 24 hour period to do a task, which would be alright if it wasn't attached to useless tasks which in all fairness shouldn't need to be rushed, and basically demand you walk for half an hour to get to where your mission ends. Again, if this mission was "On the body of this bandit, you find out that bandits are planning on attacking your friends, go save them, you have one day before they arrive" it'd be absolutely fine, but no, these time limit tasks are tacked onto the ends of missions for no reason other than THQ think that people enjoy walking along roads for an hour every now and then, fighting the enemies who respawn again while you're gone. I'm talking about stuff like "You killed the bandits at the entrance to the tunnel system, 4 world segments in, now return to the very first place you start to pick up your reward. You have to get it in a day, or you fail the mission you completed fairly". This is rubbish, there is no reason for that to be timed, and there is no way in hell I'm making two half hour trips through 25 bandits each way, none of which have any modern ammunition I'm using now, just so I can get a little green mark next to some useless task and four medkits. Of course the result is that you never truly finish a lot of missions, and you never get the rewards you deserve for doing so, and it's cheap and unfair, and makes me feel at true resentment for the game design.

But these problems don't compare to the final problem, the gameplay. S.T.A.L.K.E.R is an extremely clunky and unenjoyable game to play. Everything that occurs in the game happens manually and slowly, all guns are disgracefully inaccurate, most friendly characters eventually die off, and to be honest, the enemy AI being somewhat intelligent actually makes them easier to deal with.

The accuracy issues of weaponry have been brought up and well discussed, the supporters claiming it realistic, and the detractors claiming it to be excessive and horribly irritating to deal with. I firmly put myself in the second camp, although I can see what the developers were trying to create, and I support what they were going for, it's just that they have done it horribly wrong. Up until fairly recently, shooters were far too precise, in fact, playing a game like Star Wars Battlefront is somewhat painful in the way the guns shoot exactly on target, and recoil is basically non-existent, it does get silly and realism suffers, but in the last 5 years or so, there's been a lot of progression in the world of making realistic shooting engines. So now most games have fairly believable recoil, and bullets don't go exactly on target, they all have a minor spread range as with real guns. I don't pretend that real guns fire exactly in a perfectly straight line, but the fact is, they go pretty damn close. Where most spraying happens in amateur shooting is a lack of control over keeping a clear controlled aim when moving or making multiple shots, simply because they lose focus of the sights and holding the weapon properly. This is human error, NOT from the gun shooting out in a 30 degree arc around the barrel. What appears to have happened here is that the guys designing the guns went down to a firing range, and fired some shots, and realised they were going all over the place, and assumed that's what guns do, and have in turn coded in the human error side of things into how the guns work, resulting in the guns spraying in a hectic manner from the most measured and controlled shots. When you have sat and camped at a doorway from 20 feet away for twenty seconds your bullet should go basically where you're aiming, but it usually doesn't, leaving you with a few more wasted rounds before your target drops. And I know pistols aren't precise weapons, but trust me, you can hit a human being from the other side of a 3mx3m room with one fairly consistently, same with shotguns, even sawn off ones. Unfortunately, the people who made this game really dislike all weapons which aren't rifles, and they are completely useless. You can't hit a giant mutant thing from more than 10 feet away, and even then the damage is totally useless. Shotguns improve the damage, but you basically have to be in stabbing range to be of any use, they're basically protection against dogs, which clearly isn't important enough to carry around an extra gun and bullets for. Hell even accurate weapons aren't great, and you still need to creep up to a fairly close range before you can register hits with any sort of efficiency.

On the plus side, the AI makes dealing with this really, really easy. The AI of this game has been talked up quite a bit, and in a sense, it should be. Much like FEAR (Another game with an irritating forced acronym title) your opponents have thoughts beyond shoot and run at you. Instead they creep about, hide, and generally try to keep themselves alive. However, unlike FEAR, they lack that aggressive, somewhat suicidal streak to their character, and they do seem to have a little bit more trouble navigating around the obstacles of the zone. Basically meaning they will only ever move at you slowly, creeping around all elements of cover they can find. With the fact that your guns are disgracefully inaccurate, this is Godsend, because if 20 guys charged you, you would be absolutely boned, you could take maybe three or four of them down, but you would most certainly die, because you simply couldn't get enough accurate fire on that quickly. Thanks to their intelligent planning, the game pretty much involves you finding out where a bunch of guys are, backing yourself into a corner where they can't hit you from behind, and then making noise. Sure, those 20 people will know where you are, but they will slowly stream in one at a time, letting you cull them in a simple and controlled manner as they're a little slow on the trigger when coming through doors or popping out from around things. This makes dealing with the military forces of the game manageable, but also horribly boring. I mean disgustingly boring. You simply can't be the aggressor in conflicts, it almost always results in you dieing, so you have to utilize the camp and execute technique, and what can I say, it's slow and it's dull. Mutants on the other hand are horribly difficult to kill, they charge moronically, cause huge amounts of damage, and can take a beating. Fighting multiple mutants at a time usually means death simply because they're far too difficult to dispatch.

You allies function more or less like your opponents, just a little bit on the mentally slow side, they'll slowly advance on your opponents, who will promptly slaughter them all due to them having cover and using the waiting technique I mentioned earlier, leaving you on your own. And as you'll notice, being left on your own is a common occurrence, because almost all of your safe areas get overrun. Why? Because bad guys respawn when you leave maps for extended periods of time, allies do not. It's not complex maths to realise that eventually, any of your allies that are not in huge groupings (duty checkpoints, the Bar, and the initial town) will die. No joke, EVERY SINGLE ONE. By the time I returned from doing a fairly brief mission in a military compound in the third map you travel on, I had lost a grand total of 5 safe areas populated by a few neutrals. Never to return. And as you have to keep travelling back through these places if you ever want to finish any missions, you'll quickly become bored of having to kill the same lot of enemies over and over, all in the same slow and cumbersome style. Thus making to already painful having to walk huge distances from level to level that much more annoying. Hell, even some partiaally-important people aren't safe, quite a few of the neutral stalkers that hang about in the wilderness and offer extremely minor missions about killing things will die, without you being able to do a damn thing about it...

The RPG side of things is implemented in quite a noticeable and really quite smooth manner. You get a backpack and get to carry a certain amount of weight, and can wear different suits, or collect artifacts which you can wear for stat bonuses. But this is not a friendly or kind RPG by any means. You'll struggle to manage the weights of more than two large scale weapons, Which really harms the large range of weapons on offer, it's hard to carry more than a rifle and an assault rifle, rendering SMG's and Shotgun type weapons unfeasible, and ammunition is terribly heavy, which makes the fact you waste so many bullets managing the out of control spraying even harder to deal with. Most artifacts offer as many stat penalties as they do gains, with very few outright positive ones, meaning your suit will be your main form of protection. But overall, the RPG side is pretty good, sitting in nicely with the style of Survival Horror this game tries to go for every now and then.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl really is quite a revolutionary game, it's been known of for over half a decade, and still no one has been able to replicate the moods this game creates, or combine the elements of RPG and FPS like this, during the time that it's been letting other people steal it's publicly announced ideas. And it's not glitchy or buggy in any way. This is why I'm still scoring this as high as it is, because if you put this gameplay in a generic WWII shooter, we'd have a 2/10 on our hands, but even with all this brilliant setting and originality, it still seems horribly lacking and poor. There's just nothing enjoyable to do in the game. Hell, even though it's quite capable of being quite gripping by being so creepy and at times even scary, it doesn't do it often enough, and instead just feels disturbingly unpleasant for the main part, while nothing is really going on, and frankly it's boring, just an awkward and sort of creepy boring. S.T.A.L.K.E.R is terribly slow placed and unexciting game, set in an environment that begs to be utilized, using ideas that could with some minor tweaking be brilliant, but it just isn't. Maybe the prequel will pick up the tempo and plotting, and maybe actually make it less cumbersome and irritating to play, but for now, this is a just creepy game with nothing to bring you back to it.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 09/03/08

Game Release: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (AU, 03/22/07)