Here we have an older game that fans of will forever love to their dying day, claiming it as a hidden gem in the PC gaming world. Seeing people loving it, I wanted to give it shot myself, but sadly, I think this is simply a game that isn’t for me. Add to this some serious bugs and, this was simply never meant to be.
Story: To talk about the story of this game, you need to go back a few years in actual history. Shadow of Chernobyl is an alternate history game in which after the infamous melt-down, the shielding to protect everyone from the radiation failed and in 2006, the reactor blew up a second time. This time, all that could be done was abandon the area to become a radio-active hellscape.
With this backdrop, there are people who venture inside. Some are treasure hunters, others have no good choices otherwise, but they are all mercenaries known under a single title: Stalker. In your case, you are unique, however. You were found in a truck meant to bring the dead bodies found in the Zone around Chernobyl back for identification and reclamation of anything they might have found (for knowledge and profit), but instead was blown up by a freak-lighting bolt. What makes you unique is that despite the truck carrying you and the explosion, you were alive.
You wake up in “the dealer’s” office with absolutely no memories of who you are and why you were there. Rather, the only clue you have is in your PDA which contains your mission… kill another Stalker who’s name is nothing more then a rumor to most people.
From this basic point, the game leaves you to follow the trail to this man and who you are in reflection… if you desire. It is a very open-world game and you can pretty much follow whatever path you desire at your will. There is actually a descent amount to find out here, too, so the lore is not going to leave you board.
Sadly, I can not explain too much more here, as this was not a game I finished, but we will get into why later in this review.
7/10
Graphics: The fact that this game came out over a decade ago left it’s impression of what I expected the game to look like, but this is one of those games where the look has aged amazingly well. True, it won’t stand to modern games coming out now, but you can see the love and care that went into this title. Weapons are modelled realistically, if a little simplistic due to the limits of what was available when it launched. And the people/animals you meet don’t look real at all, but they actually animate and move around like you would expect them to. Things like watching an enemy trying to find you before crouching to get a better look. Or someone without much to do pulling out a guitar and starting to play in front of the camp fire. These people do more then just run around and point guns at everyone and everything.
But the real star here that completely floored me for the age of the game is the world itself. The grasslands around the zone actually are covered in blades of grass, while trees are realistically molded to be twisting things that once had live leafy branches, or are lush and healthy, as the situation demands. Meanwhile the manmade areas like old and delipidated buildings now abandoned or serving as military bases all fit in brilliantly to boot. And then we can get to the absolutely amazing weather effects, like rain that actually looks like rain and not “movie rain” and skyboxes that move and shift like you would expect it to really look. This game is a moment in history that still manages to impress!
8/10
Sound: Sound is a bit more standard then looks if you want my opinion. Shadow of Chernobyl was made to take a radio-active post-apocalypse landscape and play it like a realistic military shooter, and to that end, you will not get much in the way of music at all.
Rather, what you will get is great sounding leaves crunching beneath your feet or being pushed out of the way as you conceal yourself in the foliage or the fairly impressive gunfire (and meaty thunk if you take a hit). You even get some descent voice acting (if for some hokey lines once in a while) to mix this up right.
But this game also makes it obvious it was not originally in English at this point as well. While anything voice acted in your conversations was made into English, the yelling on the battle field was not. And I am going to be honest, this broke the immersion for me: both because suddenly someone talking to me started yelling in what I believe is Russian and because I was cracking up when one of the most common things yelled AT me sounded like “chicky-bricky.”
Overall you will not be disappointed, but there is some bits here that are strange in that lovable janky-way which you will enjoy, but also break the feel for a moment at the same time.
7/10
Gameplay: If you can imagine what a modern Fallout would be like as a tactical military shooter instead of an RPG, you have a good idea of what you are walking into with this game. It will drop you into the world with a pistol, a leather jacket, a few supplies and off you go into the wide world.
You won’t go without a potential direction, however, as you will be given your first mission to help a fellow Stalker trying take out a group of bandits, which will give you the choice of going it alone to be stealthy or take the mob with you. And combat in this quick instance will show you what it’s all about. You will have to duck, crawl, lean around structures, and run between cover as you get into a gunfight. You can’t take a lot of damage and you can bleed out if you don’t take care of your serious wounds, so you have can’t go in like it’s an action flick. Rather, you have to plan, trap and work around the actions of your enemies and with your allies as everyone is working to outflank the others they are aware of and do the same. It puts a much more serious point on combat (and avoiding it when possible) then most games.
And when you are not fighting, you still have a lot of mechanics to be aware of. First and most obvious you have a stamina which is effected by how much you carry with you. The more weight on your back, the faster your ability to run dies off, and if you have enough, your ability to jog along as normal also draws on that stamina, too, so you will be forced to manage the resources you bring with you, from bullets to assault rifles to food, to vodka.
But you also have several other stats you will need to keep track of. You can expect the condition of your armor and health, but this game is a radioactive world, and if you go where it’s too strong, you can get radiation poisoning, requiring you to either take anti-rad medication to cure it, or drink vodka to get by (and you can get drunk on top of it).
But if radiation was all you had to worry about, it wouldn’t be a survival game. You also have a hunger meter. You eat, or you pay the price when you see the fork and knife icon appear (going from green to red to show how much trouble you are in). Thankfully food is easy to come by, but as it has weight, measuring how much you need is yet another important detail to keep track of. Long story short, this is going to be a lot more involved then most first person games you know.
And while doing all this, you can take up both main missions and side missions from other characters you interact with. These as well as a map of the area are all handled in a PDA you have, but this is where the game starts to show it’s cracks. Simply put, the PDA is horrendous. The map will zoom into where you need to go and point an arrow when on you, but it is very wonky to control, including if the game is willing to point to where you need to go to complete the mission (which it refused for me a few times). It also sometimes doesnt put the same arrow up when you switch to your radar map to continue playing. In fact it is a bug related to this that killed the game for me.
7/10
Bugs: And sadly, this is where the game fell apart for me. Your mileage may vary, but I hit a few specific bugs often while playing that I need to report.
- Stream Off: This is an issue you likely will not have but for some reason when switching maps, the game would sometimes decide the stream wasn’t necessary and stop. I was able to resolve this quickly by pausing and restarting the stream, so no harm done. But it is worth noting.
- Setup to fail: This is the issue that broke the game for me. There is a specific mission where you save a mole who was uncovered in a military faction, who in turn gives you access to something you need to find in the sewers under the base. This is all well and good, but while in there, I found a team of bandits. Killing them completed a side mission, so I went to talk to the guy who wanted them dead… only to be stuck behind a door I couldn’t open yet. With a time limit before this mission failed, I was forced to just accept a failure. Annoying, but it’s a side mission, so I could forgive it. What I couldn’t forgive is that the mission to save the Mole was still open despite saving him, and coming back into that map put him back where I rescued him for the military (who spawned in at this point) to kill him on the spot, and end that mission too without a chance of success. This was a main mission, which now due to the way the game handled missions and maps, I can not complete, breaking the game. This in essence was the end of the game for me.
Overall: I wanted to like this game. For all the frustrations and proof why realistic military shooters were never my thing, I wanted to like this game. But it always was just on the cusp for me… giving me some amazing moments, but placing it between travel and severe design frustrations. If you have the patience I do not to get through that or the will to mod them out of the game, there is a lot of good stuff to be had here. I want to rate it well, because I can see all the good stuff, but at the same time, it broke on me in a pretty serious way (if one Im not sure will happen for everyone else). As such, I kinda have to go halfway on this title.
Score:
5/10
System Requirements:
- Intel Pentium 4 2.0 Ghz or AMD XP 2200+
- 512 MB RAM
- Geforce 5700 or ATi Radeon 9600 with 128 MB VRAM
- Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Windows 2000 Service pack 4
- 6GB of hand drive space
System Specs:
- AMD FX8350 (4.0 Ghz)
- 16 GB RAM
- Geforce GTX 960 with 4GB VRAM
- Windows 10
Source: Steam
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