Review: Stalker

3 of 5

Why so low?

I'm not sure. I'm not convinced it doesn't deserve a four. Well, obviously I am. I posted the three. The thing is, I still admire a lot of what the game tried to do, what it did. The atmosphere was truly impressive. The wrecked environments were fabulous. Check out this screenshot.



Half-Life 2 (also big on post cold war style decay) wishes it had as many flavors of cracked, crumbled, stained, warped, and rusted.

The outdoor environments are less interesting, but computers suck at plants, so that's to be expected. The occasional rains and winds (made visible with clouds of dust and leaves) helped some.



And what happened in those environments was pure apocalypse. Different factions of bandits would vie for control of structures and territories. Packs of mutated animals would take down lone humans or fight each other. Bizarre anomalies pulse, glow, shimmer, and crackle ominously, catching unaware animals and bandits alike. And when nothing was going on, people would talk or play guitar to pass the time. Various fixers and factions provided missions of dubious morality. And since the guns and armor in the game would constantly degrade and a Stalker has to eat (literally, you have to intake a certain amount of food or starve), these missions held a definite attraction. And your highly limited carrying capacity, meant that if you wanted to sell all the gear that dropped off of enemies, you'd have to make multiple long trips. It also meant that running out of ammo or medical supplies or anti-radiation drugs or food were all risks that had to be managed. I could go on, but if this doesn't establish the setting of the game for you, probably nothing can.

Yet it was undercut with weirdness like magical hiding bushes, enemies never using grenades but frequently dropping them as loot, enemies wearing all kinds of armor but never dropping it as loot, painfully artificial enemy spawning, arbitrarily timed missions, combat that revolves almost entirely around head shots, and enemies that spawn on top of you when you load a saved game. All of these things left me frustrated and disappointed. But at the end of the day, the feeling of being both predator and prey in this harsh world was an experience worth having.