Set in an alternate history, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. takes place around the site of the Soviet Union’s 1986 disaster area. In the game's world, rather than simply leave a legacy of horror and a series of deformities, disabilities and scarred memories, Chernobyl became a place where bizarre things occur and bands of scavengers calling themselves stalkers roam the radioactive exclusion area, also known as the Zone, eager to pick up and make a buck, or Ruble, off of the many items left behind and newly created anomalous artifacts which they can sell either amongst themselves and/or to the outside world. You play as ‘the marked one’ who is the faceless and silent type, in the vain of Half-Life’s Gordon Freeman. Found on the back of a truck close to death, with a major case of amnesia, you wake up with naught but a two word note linking you to your past, “Kill Strelok”.
As you play through the early stages of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. the initial reaction is to be relatively unimpressed. Yes, it’s a largish world, yes, it’s a different environment to what we've seen before, but what's so stunning about it? Its veneer is one of a game made when Vista was still being called Longhorn. Not until you spend some time in the game's desolate, yet complex, world do you notice just how fleshed out and original its contents are.
The details of the oppressive Chernobyl environment are painstakingly rendered in elaborate detail.
Many FPS’s encourage a 'storm the bridge approach' to offence, with enemies reduced simply to moving targets, relatively eager to run into the projectiles your weapon is spewing out at them. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s minions on the other hand act in an extremely organic fashion with battle tactics that provide both challenge and a healthy dose of frustration. Acutely aware of the comprehensively constructed environments in which they’re placed, adversaries flank, coordinate group attacks, and retreat for cover – often for uncomfortably long times, tempting the trigger happy to run headlong into enemy fire only to be brutally punished by the throng of enemies acting as a finely tuned machine.
Much of the game's convoluted story is delivered via messages saved on your in game PDA. It’s an incredibly outdated story telling mechanism but allows you the freedom getting more involved in the gameplay. On the same device you can check your map and get more info on the Lore of the Zone.
The inventory system is an area where RPG elements bleed into FPS conventions. Unlike many FPS's in which your character appears to have some seriously deep pockets, or an invisible Sherpa, to carry his or her small arsenal, in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. you'll find yourself having to make careful decisions regarding what it is you'll be hauling around the wastelands of the Zone. A weight restriction means that carrying too much will either slow you down or prevent you from moving completely. This adds an interesting level of complexity to gameplay which at its best challenges but, at worst seems slightly farcical when one has to munch down a bread roll from your backpack in order to maintain the ability to propel themselves forward.
There's some interesting folk that make the exclusion zone their home.
The game’s complexity is carried over to its weapons system. From the very beginning of the game, when armed solely with a pistol which seems to have about as much strength behind it as a BB gun, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s arms react in an incredibly realistic manner. Whilst running, bullets spray erratically, slow down and aim, things become much easier. This is not a feature exclusive to the game, or even a recent idea. However it is definitely well implemented amongst the array of weapons offered be S.T.A.L.K.E.R., each of which can have their accuracy and rate of fire viewed in your inventory and allow for a relatively visceral experience when in combat.
As you progress not only does the gameplay get incredibly exciting but so to does the world. One of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s bullet point features is its ALife engine, driving the behaviour of all those, other than yourself, inhabiting the Zone. Different factions of stalkers have banded together and each has a vested interest in annihilating the other. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. allows for you to ally with each dependant on which missions you take and complete. Members of the various groups will know when you’ve betrayed them and will shoot on site as you roam the lands. This is a neat feature however it all ends up boiling down to if they’re shooting back at you either return fire or run.
Where the AI is better implemented and adds more to the gameplay, is around the nonhuman inhabitants of the Zone. Packs of radiation ravaged dogs scavenge for food and mutants gather together to defend themselves and territory. As you wander through S.T.A.L.K.E.R. you’ll witness these groups deep in combat or retreating from one another. Allies within proximity of these groups will also come to your aid when in trouble causing the whole gameworld to feel more vibrant and alive.
Whilst the game's visuals appear slightly dated when pictured next to the lush HD worlds of titles beginning production in more recent times, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s art direction and attention to detail is incredible, almost to the point of obsessive compulsion. The Zone's faded olive greens muddle with the greys and browns of dilapidated structures and broken down vehicles in a way that conveys the wasteland-ish nature of one of Eastern Europe's nightmarish geographical ghosts. Anomalies born of nuclear fallout create visual and physical disturbances marking territories that are unreachable and obstacles that require careful traversing. The countryside, whilst nowhere near as big as that of Oblivion, still holds a vastness that allows a myriad of possible directions for the player to explore in. You can certainly see where some of the ‘extra’ development time has gone. Buildings are fully fleshed out structures with areas within that most will never even lay eyes upon. Unlike the bulk of titles in the genre there are no distinct pathways to take, few signs to guide you, and plenty of exploration to be done within the artificial fences formed by, the Geiger counter exciting, radioactive borders.
The benefit of such an incredibly complex environment is that tasks can be solved in vastly different ways, as apposed to the bottleneck style gameplay that most titles in the genre go for. From skirting your way around a building to find one of the many ways in or choosing whether to evade a group of soldiers or engage them in a heated fire fight, the solutions to the barriers that the game places in way are up to each individual. The one downside of having such a vast landscape to explore is the time it takes traipsing toward that pathway into the next area without being offered an alternative form of transport to your feet and legs. This is the least of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s flaws though.
Light and dark, along with a juxtaposition between cramped spaces and open fields, is put to great use in creating tension and atmosphere.
These issues extend beyond the broken verbal, and at times written, English. There are periods when trigger points seem to require an oiling to remove the creaks in the coding. There are more strange things to see than simply the radiation affected mutants and ghostly apparitions. NPC's occasionally exhibit odd behaviours which reach beyond simple erratic eccentricity, such as simply stopping whilst being escorted, causing the need to reload the game or a simple execution to continue to the next objective with a failure chalked up on your record. There was one occasion where upon the game loading us into the next area of the gameworld we found ourselves falling from the sky and losing half our health instead of appearing on the road where we had entered - presumably we failed to notice the large step. Somehow though, the extensive list of errata does not cause a hatred of the game but rather S.T.A.L.K.E.R. manages to rise above it problems, manipulating those around it to simply ignore or overlook its quirks born of what appears to be a game salvaged from deep within the exclusion zone of vapourware.
Thankfully the hype surrounding S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in its early life had some substance to it. And whilst the game has some annoying quirks, and its complexity will most likely not appeal to everyone, for the most part GSC's radioactive wasteland dishes up some of the more compelling and exciting gameplay available today, even though we were supposed to see it years ago.
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