The larger areas are filled with a kind of strangeness that the previous games didn't seem to dare to deliver. It's in the same X-Ray engine, which still looks fantastic, but seems even less optimised than before, and stutters and locks up in a way that previous games do not, on exactly the same PC.įortunately that does not seem to matter, because there's enough essentially new Stalker game here to keep me transfixed for hours. In many ways this is the zone as so many veterans of the original wanted it to be: wide-open, filled with more weird corners and creaking ruins, ripe for exploration and horror. The maps in this new game are only three in number, but each one is around three times larger than the original levels from Shadow Of Chernobyl.
Call Of Pripyat is again the same engine, models, textures, and fiction (it's set after the events of SoC) but this time it's an entirely new game. Clear Sky was a flawed remix of the original game with some new areas and an ill-fated faction system. It's a singularity that could only have come about thanks to both its ideological ancestors and real world events.Ĭall Of Pripyat is the third game in the series, each one being built incrementally on the achievements of the former. This ambitious hybridisation of ideas - and the limiting factors a budget and an inexperienced team - created an open-ended survival shooter that is brutal, glitchy, clumsy, weird, and ultimately brilliant. Stalker: Shadow Of Chernobyl therefore takes its environmental templates from the abandoned Chernobyl zone, its science fiction setting from Roadside Picnic's tale of supernatural artifacts and anomalies, and its videogame mechanisms from Western shooters and RPGs. it's a ready-made inspiration for a Ukrainian team, who wanted to make an ambitious shooter in which everything as good as it could be. Skip forward to 2007 and we get to see this mythologisation of the Chernbobyl incident used as the backdrop for a videogame. People even became real-life "stalkers", going into the zone around Pripyat to live, scavenge, or to give tours to visitors. By the time the 1986 nuclear plant incident at Chernobyl created a huge exclusion zone within the Ukrainian countryside, many people were familiar enough with Roadside Picnic to point out that mankind had once again managed to make its own zone, thanks to our own high technologies going haywire. When the book was was made into a film by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1979 it wasn't hard to find appropriately polluted settings in Estonia. It didn't take long for people to associate this fiction with the zones of contamination and pollution that existed all across the Soviet bloc. It was about contaminated zones on the Earth - places which had been radically warped by a brief alien visitation. There was once a book called Roadside Picnic, written by the Strugatsky brothers in Soviet Russia, and published in 1977. In case you've been trapped under a radioactive concrete slab for the past few years, I should explain a bit about what Stalker is.
As I said, Call Of Pripyat is on the whole less frightening than the original, but it is nevertheless and experience that engulfs you with atmosphere. Having mopped up the mess, I took my stalker back to base and got a good night's sleep before trying again. Unbeknownst to me, my cat had silently entered the room behind me, and chose that moment to leap up onto the desk. There was definitely something there, but HOLYFUCK! I blasted my now-cold tea across the desk. I swept my flashlight about, leaned around corners, peered into the gloom. Through the rain and thunder I could hear something lurking in the ruins, and the fear rose the longer I couldn't see it. I could have skipped forward and gone to this hostile venue in daylight, but instead I thought it might be a good idea to creep around a biohazardous post-Soviet military facility in the middle of the night, during a lightning storm. Stalker has a 24-hour day-night cycle, and CoP finally features sleep as one of the basic features of the game. I expected trouble, but I figured I'd wing it. Nevertheless I found myself rigid with adrenaline as I entered one of the tougher complexes in the game, at night, low on ammunition. It doesn't quite muster the extreme tension of the underground "dungeon" sequences, even though it returns to them on occasion. I've recently completed that edition of the game and my account of that experience follows.Ĭall Of Pripyat is almost certainly less frightening than the original, much-lauded game, Shadow Of Chernobyl.
The third Stalker game, Call Of Pripyat, has been out in Europe and Russia for quite some time, but it has only just made the leap to English-language release.
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