Conclusion

If you get the feeling that S.T.A.L.K.E.R is a bit more deep than your standard linear first person shooter you are correct. The game’s designers have gone out of their way to give the player the feeling that they are in a living world with events that happen outside the player character’s missions. From the AI aspects of the NPCs to the roaming creatures that you may or may not have to deal with, to the overall sense that this post-apocalyptic world is vast, S.T.A.L.K.E.R is already looking like it will take some time to complete its single player plotline.

It helps that the visuals in S.T.A.L.K.E.R echo the desolation of the game’s setting. The game’s vast outdoor environments only cause load scenes when you go through one of the game’s various zones; otherwise the game looks and feels much like a free roaming environment. Character models are first rate as are the visual effects such as the anomalies you have to encounter. We will say that the beta build we received from THQ to try out had its share of crashes to the desktop and on our 2.2 GHz P4 rig with a GeForce 6800 card and 640MB of RAM the game had some framerate issues on 1024x768 with high graphics settings. Since our rig is a bit on the old side and this was a beta build we certainly expect the final version to run much better on a higher end machine when the final product is released. We can’t comment on the promised multiplayer features of S.T.A.L.K.E.R either; our build didn’t include them for our use.

Yes, it has taken six years for GSC GameWorld to give us their vision of a future nuclear disaster but it’s looking like that long development time might not have been in vain. Based on our experience with the beta build, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is aiming to combine deep RPG-like gameplay with the action elements of a FPS, not to mention an impressive looking visual and artistic graphical style. We will have our final review of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl when publisher THQ ships the game to stores in late March.