S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call Of Pripyat Mini-Review
Game: S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call Of Pripyat Review
Developers: GSC Game World
Distributors: Koch Media
Available on: PC Only
Call Of Pripyat, the third installment of BitComposer’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R series has landed. Featuring mindless hordes of mutated monsters; grey, miserable weather; and a blighted landscape pitted with irradiated craters and the corpses of the fallen, it provides a perfect escapist fantasy for your humble reviewer who has recently moved to Wimbledon.
Ducking and creeping through the aisles of Tesco this morning, picking through the meagre supplies that have been left by other bank holiday scavengers, I reflect that if only I had an assault rifle, life would be much simpler.
The game is set in post-apocalyptic Ukraine, in a real-world city – Pripyat – which lies inside the “Zone of Alienation” that surrounds the site of the Cheronbyl disaster. You play a Stalker – one of the poor souls who roams the dead city and its surrounds in search of magical radioactive blobs of goo called “artifacts”.
Graphics, Sounds, & Other Matters of Interest To The Discerning Gamer
Call of Pripyat has a graphical aesthetic to match its atmosphere: bleak tones of brown and grey are the order of the day, and while the landscaping set-pieces look fantastic, it’s a bit like playing while wearing sunglasses. Dourness aside, the game looks superb with photo-realistic sets, and some frankly terrifying monsters. The mood is lightened occasionally by radioactive storms known as “emissions” that set the sky alight in baleful red. It’s all good, grim stuff.
The sound, too, has no intention of leaving your sleep untroubled. From the distant howls of mutated boar, to the continual hiss and geiger-click of radiation, this is a game that makes it abudantly plain that it wants you dead.
Sadly, though, the game fails to engage despite a wealth of atmosphere. I’ve recently been playing Fallout 3, and it has captured my attention to the point where it is threatening my relationship with my fiancée. What does Fallout get right that Stalker gets wrong?
It’s all about the fun, baby.
The unremitting grimness of S.T.A.L.K.E.R is ultimately a turn-off. It takes itself far too seriously, and there is no levity, humour, or whimsy to soften the edge; and yet despite the heavy-handed misery, there’s no real challenge to the game.
Supplies are easy to come by – you can simply wait for one of the daily “emissions” and then go around picking the bodies for ammunition, food, and medi-kits. The mutants are relatively easy to dispense, since you have so much ammo and medicine, so the only real challenge comes from the weather, and from invisible spheres of energy that fly around the place frying you in your tracks.
The sameness of the landscape means you have no real urge to explore – where you might spend all your time in Fallout roaming the wastelands, here you just want to schlep through it as quickly as possible so you can get to the next waypoint in yet another linear quest. Try though it might, the game never makes you *want* to play it – it just makes the process as grey and depressing as it can.
It’s a pity, really – the NPC interactions in the game are fantastic; the inventory system is well though-out and flexible; and the atmosphere is top-notch, but the game is far too linear. I wanted to love this game – I wanted to lose hours exploring the carefully-crafted game-world, and building a character, but it’s just simply not rewarding enough.
If you see this game available on discount – pick it up – it’s a decent enough distraction, and hardcore fans of the genre will find plenty to love; but for casual gamers, or those who don’t like spending hours wandering over blasted moors, Geiger-counter in hand – there’s nothing that will change your mind.
