Stalker's terrain is, of course, ripped directly from the real-world decay of the Chernobyl exclusion zone. If you thought Half-Life 2's derelict environments were evocative then this is like a Ukrainian mind-bomb.
This particular experience is practically unparalleled in gaming. It's a world that constantly exudes feelings of gloom and dread. The game takes place in a kind of radiation-warped ramshackle apocalypse. If you're a PC using gamer and you don't buy Stalker then you'll be missing out on something unique: this cheery fellow. It's almost as if the most important aspect of it is not combat, or interaction, or story-telling, but survival.īut perhaps the precise position of this oddity on the proverbial Venn diagram of overlapping genre conventions isn't really important. There's something different about Stalker. And it's not really an RPG, despite the amount of time spent poking about on your inventory screen, map, and mission log, and the amount of time dealing with different factions. It's not a bad FPS, despite the wobbly Counter-Strike-variant feel to the combat. It's all very shooty: killing comes first, other stuff second. You gain the trust of some folks, and the ire of others. The Stalker lives a simpler existence: you fight the locals, and the local fauna, completing missions given to you by the various characters you encounter along the journey. Could this, you wonder, be some kind of Oblivion With Kalashnikovs? Or are we just talking Boiling Point with no vehicles? All the baggage that games like Oblivion bring with them simply doesn't appear here, and it's far leaner, and more Spartan than Boiling Point. The wide levels soon expand into huge interconnected spaces, each one randomly populated by interacting and competing factions. Occasional scripted events are dropped into your path, keeping the tension high and the narrative blooming. Instead of being an on-rails FPS where everything takes place in one carefully scripted corridor, Stalker allows plenty of scope for exploration. But the further you play, the more the game opens up. Initially this appears to be something like 'Half-Life with added wideness' - a series of objectives, linear enough, lots of violence, some nice physics, and with plenty of retracing your steps. It's like X meets Y meets Z meets oh I wish you were playing it too.
More importantly, perhaps, I've been trying to explain to them just what Stalker is. All day long I've been opening MSN windows to annoyed friends and trying to explain the really awesome thing that just happened in Stalker.
and yet in spite of all this I simply cannot stop talking about it. Worse still, it's going to run like a tired old alcoholic on lower-spec PCs. It's really hard in places, and half the text is gibberish. It's a grim beast, with rough animation and that laggy, about-to-explode feeling you get from some less polished PC games. I feel like I should warn people off Stalker.
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