Is S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl worth playing today?

Stalker is one of those franchises that occasionally remains in the back of my mind after months or years of absence. Never a bestseller and not as big as other nuclear disaster-based games like Fallout or Metro, but it was extraordinarily unique, the three-game series from Ukrainian developer gsc gameworld spanned its consecutive releases from 2007 to 2009 before disappear completely until recently, when stalker 2 was announced. It's interesting because the people I talk to about the franchise tend to have nothing but love for OR I've never heard of the series. I got into the games back in 2010 and I remember them being a set of pretty exciting and horror first-person shooters with a variety of unique enemies and environmental hazards at the same time.

Remember they had a lot of problems too, still the positive aspects of the series have outweighed the negatives to the point that the Stalker franchise has etched itself in my mind as something

worth

revisiting and re-evaluating, and I think with the recent news about Stalker 2. It's about time I revisit the first entry in the series to try and figure out if it's

worth

revisiting in 2020 if you haven't heard of the series and don't mind spoilers for the first game. I encourage you to stay. and figure out what motivates him, so before we get into this I need to go over the structure of this video.

Anyone who has seen my content before knows that I tend to stick to a very simple and straightforward evaluation method. I play and get My feedback on whatever interesting thing is happening while the stalker suffers from a lack of focus in many different categories, making it painfully boring to describe at times. This is not a grand expedition filled with history and focused on collecting records and learning about the world. When talking to side npcs it's largely a hey here's the main story and here's side stuff to distract you so for this video I'm going to break the game down into different categories and expand them from there.

It's a brave new format for me. and a pretty regular format for literally almost anyone who talks about video games on youtube stalker is naturally pretty dark for most of the game. I know what it's like for someone trying to view dark images in direct light, so I increase the brightness. a bit to try to combat that, but much of the stalker's environment is deliberately bleak and boring, which, oddly enough, enhances immersion more than you'd think and immersion is the stalker's bread and butter. There's something about this 13-year-old game that makes you almost have to do it.

Mentally prepare yourself to leave a safe place and breathe a sigh of relief when you return after an expedition. Several stalkers gather around a campfire in this rainy, bitter wasteland, mumbling phrases in Russian and

playing

guitars. When you take it at face value, this seems like a pretty standard hub of drifting soldier types. Hell, a lot of them tend to tell you the same thing, but after facing what the outside world has to offer, these little sources of security have a warm blanket effect that makes me want to sit back and relax. a brief respite, but for this effect to remotely exist there has to be something in the game that makes me waste my time relaxing around a campfire and that would be good for the rest of the map.

I mentioned its surface-level bleakness before, but there's a reason for Stalker to be categorized as a horror game and it becomes overwhelmingly clear when you start heading out into the world - of course, there are enemies and various dangers in the environment, which you'll encounter. I'll get there in a moment, but there's something unsettling just about the feeling of heading into the unknown in this wasteland to give an overview without too much story. The area you are in is set in an alternate reality in which a second explosion occurs at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, but this time with many strange events. accompany the consequences, this means that this desolate landscape is full of unknown horrors that you can encounter to such a great degree that not even radiation is the biggest problem and it makes every step you take very tense as you focus your camera towards Every little noise you hear in many of the ambient noises in the game is designed to make you look around and make sure nothing is following you as you explore the underground and the laboratory sections are even worse with this tension as they don't actually there are many places. run and hide, hysteria tends to set in quickly as the game almost constantly makes these low monster noises even when nothing is around.

Stalker does horror pretty well, especially for a game that loads you with tons of weapons to defend yourself. Let's start with a few. general explanation about difficulty Initially I had this whole rant about how master difficulty is the only difficulty you should play on because when I was flipping through some of the modding guides I used they all claimed that the publisher forced the developer to basically implement some difficulties easier and that, because gsc didn't want to do that, the easier difficulties turned you and the enemies into bullet sponges, which made the game much more frustrating for these people posting guides on Steam and arguing stuff on reddit with New players also said that bullets disappeared a lot more on lower difficulties.

This is all completely made up and has been disproved multiple times by multiple people by delving into the game files and finding out how the difficulties actually work. Much of the community does. It tends to get annoying because master difficulty is the only true way to enjoy a seasoned stalker, but I really can't stand that kind of control if you like to play awkward, go for it, unfortunately, I didn't realize all this. I didn't find out about the master difficulty until I finished recording, I imagine it would have saved me some headaches in the future, but it's all good, this brings us to the quality of life and debugging mods that are available for the game if you look for them.

Obviously I'm not going to add new content or replace all the mutants with big titted anime girls for this review, but I will fix some bugs by installing some texture mods, revamping some of the systems, and overhauling the weather system that makes the game probably the best it can be without completely redoing it in a newer engine, said lag is still something I have to deal with quite a bit and something you'll see in the video in more densely populated areas there were definitely some dedicated modders for the game and I'm very grateful for the work they have done.

The guide I followed will appear in the description. If you want to improve your game, most of the tutorial is explained in long bursts of text. screen explaining how reputation works with factions how the levy system works and general controls the controls are not a problem, but the non-voice text on the screen goes by quite quickly when you try to digest what it tells you, luckily this information is stream to your pda, the game has a set of controls that are reminiscent of a less complicated gun in the sense that there are different firing modes for your weapons, a crouch and crouch system and a tilt system, this also means that you can do stupid things like the ones I mentioned before.

These wandering people are known as stalkers. Each stalker has a faction that he is assigned to, as well as a ranking. There are many factions, each with their own agenda, ideals, and hostilities towards other factions. I will give a summary. We'll talk about them later in the story portion of the video, what I'll tell you for now is that each stalker from each faction has a rank. These classifications are quite simple and cover four different grades: rookie, experienced veteran and expert, where rookies have low-end armor and weapons and die fairly easily and experts are long-time survivors of the area.

These ranges also tend to reflect how far in or out of the zone the stalker is, as novices tend to stay on the outskirts and experts are almost exclusively in the center of each coming stalker. The width along with their faction affiliation and name can be found on your PDA, which is your main tool for obtaining information in this game. Maps show your status. Shows if there are other stalkers around you and lists your past quests and dialogues. What I found the most. However, it was interesting that using it doesn't pause the game; In fact, you can't do anything while the game is paused, apart from watching any threats that come your way and thinking about your life choices;

There are no pauses to check your inventory or heal or equip something different, everything is in real time which definitely adds an extra layer of stress to the game, as I mentioned before, most other stalkers don't tend to have much to say to you, His behavior changes depending on how much you favor him. I've stuck with their faction, but most of the time they'll tell you about some rumor that's been going around about where to find the loot or they'll have some side job for you to earn some money or something, then I'll run out of things to tell you about.

The dialogue is actually extremely boring after coming off something like Knights of the Old Republic, but it's also much easier to ignore and get on with what I want to do. A finer detail that I enjoy is that They will get angry if you have your weapon near them, which makes a lot of sense, but most of the time you find the higher-ranking ones, talk to them about jobs or rumors, and then plan your next big adventure and that's something like that. What is Stalker really about? If you're expecting big elaborate side quests with lots of interesting little characters giving you extensive backstories and interesting anecdotes about various characters and areas, you're

playing

the wrong game if you're looking for a game.

Where can you go, I think I'm going to go see what that factory has and see if I can loot it. Then the stalker has you covered in spades and that will probably put a lot of people off, but it's a lot easier. to digest if you know because the start of this game is painfully slow, there's not much direction, you're weak and you start with weak equipment and you have no knowledge of what exactly is going on or what you're going to do. I need to be prepared for it, I was actually caught off guard by how slow Shadow of Chernobyl is, but it's actually one of those games that you just have to keep playing to get better at and understandably it's not everyone's cup of tea, one of the aspects most interesting in the game.

The game is stealth, it's not a game where a little eyeball appears on the screen telling you if something has seen you and that can be scary. Instead, these little meters appear at the bottom left of the screen that let you know how much noise you're making. what you are doing and how visible you are to enemies almost everything makes noise, I mean everything switching and reloading weapons makes noise using a medkit makes noise walking slowly makes noise plus these things like hiding in bushes in darker areas reduces your visibility as well as keeping your distance obviously this all sounds great, well unfortunately it's not, much of the stealth system is horribly forced in the enemy's favor.

We're talking about a regular rookie soldier who can spot you from the other side of the map if he can see you. When you reload a save, your weapon is saved and then automatically removed, which makes noise. Noises in general can alert almost any enemy, even if it's something really tame and usually soft in volume, and once you break stealth with a threat. Virtually any enemy in the immediate area knows exactly where you are and attacks your position. The stealth system is a wonderful idea on the surface, but God doesn't need more than a simple tweak, as most are considered unfixable, even with modifications, there are a handful. of mods that attempt to simplify the omniscient AI to a level that doesn't make you feel like you're being chased by a predator, but the easiest solutions are to modify the game files to decrease its knowledge of you or right-click the game and navigate to the uninstall button to try it out, as I mentioned side jobs can be obtained from a lot of different stalkers for extra money and supplies.

The side quests in this game are okay, they're basically what I just did. They describe money makers, they are not elaborately written works of art and they are not intriguing in any way, they are fetch quests and kill things quests and they range from hey, a group of men were attacked by some wild dogs, go kill them both, there is an abandoned warehouse that is said to have a lot of good loot, they are boring and don't add much more than a means to pad the game with additional content and are best left alone as soon as you feel you've earned enough money to grab any equipment you want from the merchants and move on with your life.

Something else to keep in mind here issmall my character seems to be compared to all the people in the game. This is because the game's first-person camera is housed. on the chest of my player model, so every time I'm in first person it's like I'm role-playing like Tom Cruise running around Ukraine and destroying mutants. Luckily, I can bypass this 5ft 11 curse with my mods from before and also remove the absolutely horrendous thing. Shaking my head, I can tell you right now that if I judged this game solely on unmodified glitches and potential bugs, this game would be a pure spectacle by 2020 standards, maybe even by 2007 standards, finally, as far as To the overall mechanics, there is a lack of any kind of sleeping or weight system, which surprises me because it seems like it would fit perfectly into this game when you start.

You don't have access to night vision or anything like that, besides a flashlight , which makes night stalking much more dangerous and unpleasant, but if you want to wait until morning you have to wait, it's an unfortunate lack of a feature that really looks like it could have been easily added and is implemented in later entries to some extent. period, also, while the health system is a bit complex on the surface, it's really just a standard health system with more sources of damage attached, you take damage from bullets. dropping mutant claw and bite anomalies, etc., but many of them can also cause bleeding, meaning you'll have to wait for the bleeding to stop or patch your wounds if it gets too serious.

Beyond that, there's a starvation system where you have to eat or suffer a slow and steady health loss and stamina cut and then there's a radiation system that does the exact same sort of thing, except the problem is It's that you have to rely on listening to the Geiger counter on your pda to realize that Otherwise, you can pick it up and check it while you're being microwaved. Yes, they are microwaving me. It looks like it should have been on the HUD as well and I think that's one of the biggest disappointments of the game. As for exploration, sure you can go wherever you want, except sometimes certain groups keep you out if you haven't progressed enough in the story.

Buzz Off Stalker, we don't let all the losers go Buzz Off Stalker, we don't let all the losers go. Through Buzz Off Stalker, we don't let all the losers pass and even then, if you want to take a shortcut directly to your target, blankets of anomalies or radiation litter your path most of the time, causing you to perform these strange moves Zigzag across the map. With no fast travel, it's a little annoying when the game wants you to go back to the beginning to turn in a quest you completed halfway across the map and that makes me not even want to turn in those quests. playing with weapons at the beginning of the game when you only have a gun is bad, very bad.

I remember not using a gun very often and quickly remember why, as my bullets seem to have almost no effect on enemies, this gets much better later on when you start collecting rifles, but it's pretty sad that the game puts a gun on you. at the beginning and hopes you have fun with it. Many times the enemies will concentrate on your location as mentioned above, but they also group up a lot and this makes it a bit of a pull and makes it easy to hide behind an object and use it to surround the rose until you can trick them out of it. effective way.

Additionally, all of your weapons have a durability bar, as does your armor. The most important thing about gun condition is that the lower the durability of a gun, the more bullets will start firing instead of where you are aiming. This becomes incredibly frustrating if you don't change your weapons regularly as your headshots start to miss and your gun starts to jam more frequently. On the other hand, it is simpler in the sense that it protects you less the more damage it takes. If you ask any stalker veteran how you should fight, they usually advise you to always aim down sights and never fire from the hip, it makes sense if you think about it. but for some reason my downward bullets never seem to hit what I'm aiming at unless it's the center of mass.

I try to headshot all the time and I can never seem to get them if I'm too far away, it can be something like bullet drop, but at the same time shooting from the hip almost always makes me take more shots overall, for some reason, I know that my accuracy in marksmen is usually dog-like, but there is something even more heartbreaking about stalker combat that prevents me from shooting people at least before I start picking up scoped weapons. In addition to this, I mentioned that the game has a gun-like control scheme, which is good for the game.

What it lacks is the ability to lock your tilt, for example when you lean to the right. to hold down the button you can't just tap it twice to stay tilted that way, it's not the biggest problem in the world, but it makes me use my thumb in a strange way to look and move to the right at the same time. One of the first dangers you see on the horizon are these strange little riffs in the air, as if someone is shooting bullets into a localized wind storm. This is one of the many dangers in Stalker known as anomalies.

I love the concept of anomalies, they're basically these super jarring environmental hazards that almost always have a negative effect on the player most of the time they're pretty hard to see during the day if you're just running around and sometimes it's impossible to see them by the night. They all have a trigger that causes them to activate and range from flow hurts to I'm dead and they have some pretty fun names too. There are gravitational anomalies such as the springboard and the vortex, which have different radii and danger levels. The trampolines fire a burst of energy. which hurts the player and tends to appear everywhere, making them particularly annoying during gunfights.

Gigs launch their victims into the air before exploding, usually dismembering their bodies with their sheer force, and the vortexes have large radii that, when activated, attract the victim. their center before constricting their body into a samus ball and eviscerating them with a blast of energy, these all have their own telltale appearance and sound and can be activated in different ways, then there are the flame, burner and comet anomalies, the burners are these crack patches. They land with a hazy, transparent vapor shooting out of them and are harder to spot during the day when activated, they shoot large pillars of fire at you.

The Comet, which only appears once in this game, is a mobile version that moves quickly and is extraordinarily powerful compared to the already powerful burner, the electrical anomaly is a cousin of the burner and more or less does exactly the same thing except with electricity. instead of fire, like the fruit punch anomaly with corrosive damage and finally the less dangerous anomaly known as Burning Fluff supposedly reacts to the rapid movement of living things by releasing projectile spores to the victim. I've tried activating it a lot but it doesn't work or it just doesn't hurt enough through my armor even if it did work.

It can be easily avoided by moving slowly. All of these anomalies have their own power levels and are known to gradually disappear and appear after a while. Some anomalies can be survived if your power is low enough. Some are a death sentence. They have a set of artifacts that they can produce if they interact with certain objects. The bodies are exposed to the right conditions. These artifacts can be used on your armor while providing positive effects in exchange for negative ones, or they can be sold for a lower or higher price. The wins depending on your rarity and the effects anomalies are a fantastic game changer that really takes the game in a very positive direction and I think the stalker wouldn't be as good without them beyond the anomalies we have enemies of course , other stalkers are quite common. the mill and relies a lot on their rank but the mutants are where the game shines a little brighter if you can overlook most of their horrible names you have a pretty easy time dealing with them and pretty common enemies like these Stevie Wonder dogs that tend to to run past me most of the time you also have mutated pigs that are somehow even less dangerous than dogs, then you have boring carnivores and cannibals, you get the idea that you have pseudo dogs that are quite dangerous and tough, although I think The most interesting thing about them is the fact that they tend to lead packs of blind dogs and when they are killed, the blind dogs tend to scatter and run away.

There are packs of rats known simply as rodents that act as expected. As much as I praised the anomalies for their unique names, it's a little hard to overlook names like rodent and wild boar, hey nikolai, I'm glad to see you've made the dog-faced man and I'm excited to see the progress on small rodents and normal boring ah, this is not a dog with a man's face andre this is simply the limitation of our graphics engine ah okay, that makes sense then we will call it a blind dog because a dog with a face like that probably can't see the game progress any further Then these run-of-the-mill enemies, although with things like secondary dogs, which can affect your mind and make you see many illusory dogs attacking you at the same time and causing you to have to determine which one is the real aggressor, then there are these poltergeists. which are these half-length floating creatures that lunge at you, they suck to deal with, they're not scary, they're just really annoying because they just whip around barrels, boxes, and everything around you until you find their bodies barely visible in Luigi's mansion. and exploit them, snorks have easily my favorite name in the game, a claw attack and I guess kick you the controllers are these strange looking bloated humanoids that attack your mind instead of your health, they shouted this loud scream and released the psychic more penetrating. lightning attack that kills you if it hits you once or twice.

I hate them more for the sound they make than anything else, although if you take enough mental damage you will die immediately and will not be able to recover your mental energy of any kind. of medkit or medication that makes recovery slower, the best thing you can do is try to stand over them and stab or shoot them to death because they try to wiggle away instead of attacking you when you get close most of the time and then finally we have the most discordant mutants, the bloodsuckers and the pseudo-giants. I hate these things as a player and I love them as a concept.

The bloodsucker is this long, disgusting zombie-like creature with the ability to turn invisible and remain completely silent to the player while stalking them when they are hooded, their eyes glowing as their body glows slightly in the light. This is also when they are weakest and when I do my best to kill them before Panic triggers when they are unmasked they move extremely fast across the map and are almost impossible to hit if you are me and have the accuracy of a parking lot. Denny's, the pseudo giants on the other hand, I have no problem punching these huge bags of meat, they are these big, dumb, lumbering cousins ​​on the left or the dead tanks that can be overcome with relative ease I just have to endure heart attack while I pray they fall before I run out of bullets if they come charging at me on the ground okay let's talk about why there are all these dots between the letters of stalker, the acronym stands for scavengers, trespassers, adventurers, loners, explorers and thieves, it's really dumb and it doesn't matter, I just wanted to tell you about it anyway, so the opening scene doesn't actually look horrendous, I mean, yeah, it's super dated, but it does look like some love went into it. , sure your character is driving this truck full of corpses as fast as he can through a torrential downpour, suddenly a big ol' lightning bolt from Zeus comes crashing down like a final fantasy summon and explodes your makeshift meat cart into a small ravine. or a big ditch, depending on your perspective on life, the next day some guy runs down the mountain to loot the bodies and still finds you alive.

He is very happy about that and he tells you what everyone wants to hear after being rescued. Let's see what. The value that Cedrovich will put on your head enters the meat man, he is ready to buy a corpse, but it turns out that this one has not expired yet and he is quite excited about it and immediately checks your body for something that you both agree to. referred to as the brand. mark is the name of the game, which is nonsense, plus my pda has only one goal for me, to kill the strelok, well, it turns out that no one knows who or what, it's not even my character, since it iswake up with amnesia, so here we are.

You are a nameless character with no memory who now works for this guy. Here the tutorial consists of Sidorovich explaining to you how to use your PDA and all the little things it can do and then telling you to recover a flash drive with valuable information from a stalker who recently disappeared as your first task to pay this guy for, among quotes, save you, making it obvious that you are definitely in his debt, so I take care of that and when he returns I receive information about the possibility of opening a path to the center of the area in which this game takes place, known as the zone, The center of the area is supposed to be full of artifacts worth a lot of money, which is what our merchant friend is mainly interested in.

Conveniently, this strelok guy has also moved downtown, so it's a win-win if I can get there, so now my main goals are to try to get information on how to avoid the madness that apparently prevents most people from entering the center and locate my boy Strelok before I do. To get to that, it's probably best to split up the game's factions and what they fight for, your character is initially part of the lone faction who, as the name suggests, tend to keep to themselves, live off the land, try to make money and make money. war. against the bandit faction, the bandits, on the other hand, are the antithesis of the loners who rob, kill, and attack other factions with reckless abandon, which has caused almost all other factions to hate them, aside from the freedom faction, freedom fights for exactly what its namesake exudes.

They believe that the area is a place where everyone can be whoever they want to be and that no one should take over the area. His relaxed and carefree behavior clashes strongly with the Duty faction that seeks to destroy the area and its plague on the world. They actively hunt mutants and kill all who oppose them with an iron fist, this is the opposite of how environmentalists believe they are a group of scientists who are absolutely fascinated with the existence of the area and see it as a scientific blessing; then there is the Ukrainian army, which has a heavy presence shooting at all outsiders;

They tend to be the second enemy along with bandits. For the first part of the game, the nemesis of the second part comes in the form of the Monolith faction, which is a group of brainwashed cultists who stop at nothing, not even their own wounds, to kill their enemies. enemies and protect the secret of the area we will touch. More on them later, siding with factions you can ally with tends to open up new merchants to buy faction-specific armor and the like, although you can usually find these armors elsewhere in the game as well, so I decided to remain neutral .

As I could with everyone on the way to this information, you go through several encounters with various factions of this game. You have some military guards who have blocked the main road. If you want to pass, go up and we if not, I suggest you leave before we get angry. You have some bandits who really like to hang out in your anomalies and attack random or lone faction members and then eventually you end up in the middle of a military battle. attack a guy who has your information, your quest lines tend to continually involve you helping someone nearby who needs your backup against a group of enemies, usually bandits, when you help them they tell you where the next person is who may have your info, it's a pretty boring system from a worldbuilding perspective, but it's what I expected anyway after defeating these idiots clustering at the door, this guy is hiding in the guy directs me towards the system of sewer and life is simply divine. horrible down here like this is one of the points in the game where I'm almost always on the verge of panic doing my best to get through the area while taking out military stalkers, a bloodsucker, and running away from a controller that appears Well, turns out not I properly talked to the guy from before because we were in the middle of a military assault and I didn't want to die, so he didn't tell me where Strelok's secret hideout was underground, so now I have to go back to the tunnels and find the stash with a loose controller.

Incredibly, fortunately, the area on the other side of the tunnels is right above one of my two objectives, so I take the information from the center of the area and then return to the tunnel guy, talk to him properly, return to the tunnels where everything stays dead for a few days, apart from that controller that makes my screen turn blue and sound like I'm in a wind storm, grab the Strelok flash drive and then Come back now, it goes to the 100 rads bar, a Safe haven located in service territory, it is one of the few civilized centers in the game and features the bar itself, a place to register and become a member of the service faction, and a fighting location. arena Funnily enough, I feel like the fighting arena is a little out of place in a game that takes place in the middle of a mutant-filled wasteland of less than a thousand people or something, but yeah, I guess that's something that's probably only a one of those things the developers thought would be cool to have, it's a shame I broke it and I couldn't get it to stop appearing off the map after I won, so what do you get when you find documents that were derived from talking to a type that leads you to another type that leads you to another type documents that lead to a search to find more documents, of course, the next set of documents that are supposed to solve the case of reaching the center of the area.

They are located in an underground laboratory that is in a place known as the dark valley, of course, I need another key to enter, which involves killing bandits and uh, okay, so the story doesn't move too quickly here, let's move on to after let's go back with the new documents and I hope they actually have the answers this time, the Elden ring again, so yeah, running around this place and taking out a pyrogeist makes me experience some of my memories being restored, I'm not sure what it is happening exactly, but the images are great after this, the military.

He starts actively raiding the place to try to get the documents I just picked up. I'm pretty beefy at this stage and my aim has improved so no problem, like I said the combat gets a lot better as you continue anyway, Trader Joe from the beginning of the game wants me to come back to him and tells me that the I walk back to the trash and by extension the bar is closed, but it's not, there's just more military guarding it, no problem, I just walk past them and into their place. He chooses to go back to the bar to hand over these documents that I found fine again and what can only be described as the epitome of the great mission design stalker tells you to go to another lab, but hey, you have to find out where he is talking to some scientists and they wait to escort the sacred mission, it's as if they took all the bad mission ideas they could muster and grouped them one after the other.

I mean, realistically, the game came out in 2007 and a lot of this stuff wasn't completely taken to the ground. As much as the industry introduced it into their games later, this is only further evidenced by the existence of zombie soldiers that start appearing after this, there really isn't much difference between regular soldiers and the zombified ones beyond the fact. that zombies don't. They don't take cover or anything and they don't flinch when you shoot them. What's a little more interesting is how they turned into zombies. This is explained when you reach the scientific base here in this region, apparently before this whole place disappeared after the war.

In the second explosion there was a thing located in the next area of ​​the laboratory known as "Get This, the Brain Burner." At this point, I'm more amused by the names in this game than disappointed, so yeah, apparently whatever it is, it melts people's brains when they get too close. So it turns them into radical zombies, this means I can't get into the lab unless I have some super secret device that hasn't been invented, but wait, there's a prototype, we just have to load it up, this means more escort mission , realistically, the guy could. die and I just have to do his job, but you get angry for keeping him alive, fortunately the escort is not far away and when I return I receive my anti-mine helmet, supposedly even with it my time will be limited.

The lab until I can turn off the brain scorcher, well, going through this absolute nightmare of zombies and snorks makes me wish I had bought more shotgun ammo at this stage of the game. I had no idea that not upgrading my weapon was causing my headshots to sniff more frequently and it was annoying me extraordinarily, plus every time there's a non-human enemy that ducks and lunges in a game, you bet your ass I'm not hitting your head. I had ruled out the shotgun until now and well, now. I wish I had brought more shells with me for these waves of snorks, either way I finally make it to the lab, load up, put out the molten mine and witness another cutscene, this time our guy Strelok is a little more defined, he seems to have been someone obsessed with the countless oddities and mutations of the area and they warned him not to continue venturing because it would be his end, well, indeed, he almost dies when he returns with his doctor friend who searches for everything, they repair it and he decides to advance even further north this time to the center of the area.

I'd say the mystery is appealing, but I'm honestly not going to play this game for the story. When I leave this hell, it seems that the military has decided to shoot. take down everything in the facility, which is cool because I left everything alive there and decided I would loot the place later, except even after that everything is still alive, so I don't know what the helicopters were shooting at, but yeah, I guess yes. I'm not sure if I missed something here, but the main brain scorcher wasn't what I just turned off. Now I have to head to the next place to turn it off, but first I detour a little towards the beginning of the game, where I turn. on some missions and ask about the doctor's whereabouts, I really miss the non-existent fast travel feature at this point as I run back and forth across the map, this doctor was the guy who helped stretch me in my flashback, which in a way realistic probably means I'm strelok all things considered, come on man, wake up, have you lost your memory or something?

I guess that explains that, so basically this doctor tells me all this about how he was right about some things related to the monolith and something called a sarcophagus that apparently no one has returned alive. My goal now is to head to Pripyat to get some hide there, in addition to turning off the brain burner. What confuses me the most is that he's standing over me like that all the damn time, so the next place you have to run is to the army warehouse area, this place is full of missions that you can do from both the factions of freedom as a duty, they usually end up choosing a side and becoming the enemy of one of the two, although it is not impossible. staying neutral with both and still receiving quests from each is an interesting area in its own right, but it's nothing to write home about from a narrative perspective, instead we'll move into the red forest as I get closer to the edge of the red forest. , I'll try it.

Of the enemies that will come in the form of a Monolith Soldier Raid, as I hinted before, the Monolith Soldiers are absolute bastards to deal with and are among some of the best armed and armored enemies you will have to deal with their fanaticism. makes them rarely flinch when hit by bullets, which really sucks sometimes, well the red forest is complete and it's a total hell, there's no other way to describe it, the monolith soldiers litter the road shooting at you, apparently there are bags extreme radiation. Randomly and constantly trying to monitor my radiation levels as I approach the lab, these ghostly entities charge at me and scare me.

I didn't realize until too many bullets were wasted that they don't actually hurt me because shooting them makes them disappear. I died so many times entering the lab that when I finished there I had almost no weapons left in my main weapons. Fortunately, this place is pretty deserted, except for three bloodsuckers that I can deal with using my low damage weapon. I also find ammo for my main weapons, which is nice because after I turn off the brain burner I'm assaulted by oh, I don't know, 24 monolith soldiers before this, though I pass out again and see a bit more of Strelok's memories.

There seems to be some sort of glowing blue stone I was reaching for at some point, but I have no idea what it is, just that my objective updates to reach the aforementioned sarcophagus and sneak out of here is actually one of the things.more fun. I have had in the game with soldiers if running and shooting is more your speed as it is usually mine. I imagine this whole area will be hell for you, but as it is, you can get away with it by crouching and hiding from enemies to pick them off. One by one as I walk out of this lab, it seems that everyone and their mother has realized that the brain scorcher is down and are now heading towards the center of the zone, i.e.

Pripyat and the Chernobyl power plant. This means the military is here with their helicopters to try and kill something this time, which is good for taking out the remaining monolith soldiers and shit because now there are military soldiers. As I make my way towards Pripyat I am greeted by a squad of super heavy armor lenders who offer to escort me to the center of the city, these guys are pretty bad and although two thirds of them fall at the end of their escort they definitely take out more monolith soldiers of their due after clearing the secret hiding place here and finally.

Upgrading my armor, I make my final push towards the Chernobyl power plant. Well, I got a little tired of killing all the soldiers. I have to say that the sky lit up in this crazy shade of red looks amazing, but yeah, I beat this in no time, so this is basically the final area for the first ending of the game if you didn't do the optional things preceding it. So far, this is the default ending and it really sucks, at least on its own. First you run through this dark irradiated hell fest full of monolith soldiers because the developers forgot they designed more than one enemy all along this voice. gently caress your eardrums in Russian.

I haven't played enough to learn what he says yet, but I'm sure he has some words for you. You then have the option of approaching the wish grantor, who is said to grant anyone's wishes. Those who arrive there, the doctor warned you before, if you completed the quest to find him, that the wish-granter is simply a false idol that was created in the sarcophagus to attract greedy stalkers, so my boy approaches, spreads the hands and ask. immortality unfortunately the doctor was right and this is one of those monkey paw genies that actually grants my wish by turning me into a statue that's the end thanks for playing like I said on its own the ending sucks but When you realize that there are parameters in how your wish changes it becomes much more interesting this covers things like wishing for the area to disappear if your character's reputation is excellent and you have less than fifty thousand Russian dollars this wish is granted by leaving you blind other wants you to do it be rich in this the gold coins start raining on you until you die the reality is that the building collapsed on your character the most amazing endings of all are the wishes for humanity be controlled and wish to rule the world when You want humanity to be controlled or destroyed, as the original Russian scene says, your mind is flooded with information Full Metal Alchemist style, the images shown are of death, nuclear explosions and desolate landscapes and the same happens when your character You find yourself in complete darkness floating in the void and then finally, when you wish to rule the world, your character is violently lifted into the air before being absorbed by your wish-granter.

The latter is a little easier to explain when you find out a little more about the game's true endings after traversing another area of ​​the monolith and destroying these little reactor-type things. A hologram greets me. This hologram basically explains almost everything about the elements of the game and how the area was created. After the first Chernobyl incident, scientists moved in and started doing all kinds of crazy things. This desolate area was perfect for conducting experiments in a place where no one would think to look. This led seven scientists to link their consciousnesses into a super consciousness henceforth known as c-consciousness.

I'm going to be so tired of saying that consciousness at the end of this exists in this game a physical manifestation of real life scientist Vladimir Varnodsky's philosophy called the new sphere or Noah's sphere or I'm going to say fair news, the new sphere Basically, the idea that as life affects and transforms non-living matter, humans affect and transform the direction of life, so in the game the new sphere is a real, physical entity much like the atmosphere. The main goal of consciousness was to correct humanity by altering the new. The sphere no longer contains emotions such as greed and anger and anything else that they consider a flaw, unfortunately or perhaps fortunately, the experiment failed and the creation of the zone was the result, of course, the new sphere was not the only area of ​​consciousness experimentation.

The wish granter, which is said to be used as a defense to attract those who are greedy enough to reach the power plant, also explains the last ending I mentioned by implying that consciousness C already rules the world and that By merging with the wish-granter you become a part of them and of course these guys also dabbled in mind control and brainwashing which is how the monolith soldiers came to be and is also how I came to be as a strelok Basically, when the first excursion into the heart of the zone was made by Strelok he was detained and turned into a conscience agent due to a glitch in the group's system the end result ended with Strelok being ordered to commit suicide and then be released as a brainwashed agent now I'm with the idea that these guys basically take capable soldiers and brainwash them into doing their bidding and protecting their labs, but what I don't understand is why they didn't directly kill Strelok, I mean, even with the idea that he was good enough to go as far as he did they could also use him for their benefit, it just seems too dangerous and on top of that, as cool as the wish granter's idea is, It seems a little silly, I mean let's think about this, there are several layers of protection that the average stalker needs to go through to get to the wish-granter, I mean, the brain burner kept almost everyone away from him single-handedly, the odds of a person overcoming all that just to trust this legendary myth to grant any wish as if a genie is so ridiculously low that it seems like a gigantic waste of time that probably could have been spent creating something like, I don't know, heat-seeking turrets They line the outside walls of the laboratories anyway after all.

This gives you another ending if you choose to take it. This ending makes us join consciousness C to supposedly make the world a better place. There's not much else besides you going down and the doctor talking to his dog about you, which he sucks. All things considered, I guess I would have liked to see exactly how Strelok changed the world, or if he did, let's talk about the final, true ending of this game. We declined the offer to join. Consciousness c teleports you back outside, where you have to face. a gauntlet of monolith soldiers as you run through 15 different teleportation anomalies to reach the end, at the end all the streloks look towards the crowded tubes, he pulls out his ak and shoots them all, this is the canon ending as is shown in the sequel, although I ended up liking the combined idea of ​​the monkey's paw endings, I think this is probably the best in terms of how things should be overall, I can't say I'm not impressed by the story behind this game.

I mean, don't get me wrong, there's a lot to work through and I couldn't have cared less until I got to the end, but I enjoyed the idea behind the wish granter and I see consciousness as a whole, it's a shame that this whole story gets messed up. maybe in the last two hours of the game. I'd say that's really where the stalker story suffers the most because you can only follow the player with this opening scene and the idea that we're following a strelok guy. for so long and the way the story unfolds is painfully slow and doesn't go anywhere for a long time.

If the side quests were interesting enough to complement the main story it would push the game's ideas to new heights, unfortunately love was really put into most of it and the rest fell by the wayside stalker is an intensely atmospheric game packed with weirdness and nightmare fuel. It's extremely rare for an open world first person shooter to bring any kind of intensity to the table, but stalker pulls it off and then something just with its surroundings and ambient sounds that said the game is painfully slow in both gameplay and narrative at the beginning and doesn't really start to pick up steam until the halfway point.

I could easily see someone picking up this game. for two hours and decide they don't want to play anymore, but I can also easily see someone being drawn into this strange setting in a strange world, there are tons of technical problems with uninteresting plots and poor design. decisions, the game is by no means perfect, not even for 2007. You have to appreciate how much effort was put into the game with some of its physics, its mechanics, and its main story ideas for sure, and it's really a shame That many of those are hampered by the sheer scope that this virtually independent developer attempted to bring to life, but after all this exposition and explanation, the question remains: is Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl worth playing

today

?

Yes, but with a caveat if you tell a friend who has never even remotely listened. of this game, hey, play this then you're a bad friend because this game should come with almost a warning label, something that tells people that you'll probably enjoy it eventually if you're a big fan of fps games from Horror-driven by the environment, but it's going to take some adjustments to get used to and a little patience. This is another franchise that could really benefit from a remake, but with Stalker 2 on the way, I'm not sure if that will happen, but I had a lot more fun.

Than I thought I was going to have hell. I completely regretted putting all my first day's work into this video until I forced myself to move on, but it gets better and the experience was worth it for me. Thanks for watching, I really thought this was going to go. It appears to be a shorter video, but it turned into this as the game opened up more and more. I have a pretty good idea of ​​what I'm doing next and I think it might be fun for more of you who enjoy my usual stuff, but until then I have t-shirts for sale like this one from Vivec and this doom slash oblivion mashup plus some other interesting designs if you are interested.

I also have a twitch where I stream from time to time. I have a Twitter where I tweet new videos and occasionally pictures of my dog ​​or something. I have a Discord where people hang out and talk about what's on their minds at the moment and I have a Patreon and that's it. a good one