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STALKER Call of Pripyat review: Radioactive Utopia

STALKER Call of Pripyat review: Radioactive Utopia

CoP focuses on squad combat with several missions built around gathering and escorting reliable Stalkers.

Jump the cordon, catch a helicopter ride, bribe a guard—but get to the Zone. There are bloodthirsty monstrosities, armed fanatics, deadly radiation storms, anomalies that will obliterate your body, or turn you into a moaning walking corpse—after all, why would Stalkers choose to vacation in sunny Ukraine? Well it turns out than inside of the deadly anomalies are stones that can heal wounds, protect you from damage, make you stronger or absorb radiation. They are also worth a boat load of cash if you can dare the monsters and mercs to get them back to a trader.

Welcome to the outskirts of Pripyat Ukraine, in the middle of the Chernobyl exclusion zone,where life is hard on everybody. A recent military operation sent several choppers into the area around Pripyat and, despite precautions against anomalies, they still went down. Somewhere in the harsh reality of the Zone are the survivors—fighting for their lives. You are an ex-STALKER OSS officer sent to figure out what went wrong—given nothing other than the basic kit and the locations of the crash sites, and then booted on your merry way.

STALKER: Call of Pripyat (CoP) is the third installation of the series and of the three, it is the best out-of-the-box. GSC Game World has come a long way from the original release and CoP does an amazing job of adding all of the wonderful things that were in the STALKER: Clear Sky while gracefully stepping around some of its worst problems. The game feels overall like an apology for Clear Sky—getting right the little that they have added without doing a complete content overhaul. Perhaps this is because they are priming themselves for a true sequel which the fans have been begging for. Regardless, CoP is a great love note to the fans of the series.

Radioactive hotspots contain precious artifacts and face-melting anomalies

It is the least buggy at release by far, but this also may be the case because it came out in Russia months ago and they’ve had more than enough time to patch it. The game is still dealing with the uncertainties of a world where strange things like flying balls of fire are common. There are still moments (observed far more often in the previous game) where you wonder if what just happened was a glitch or if that was how the game was supposed to preform. You’ll see a floating bucket and think—is this the game engine screwing up or am I in an anti-gravity anomaly?

STALKER proved that exploration can be entertaining—with or without reward. STALKER is many things: a great shooter, a fun universe, an okay story, and horrible voice acting—but the best thing about it is just going for a walk in the Zone. Every time you step out your door, you have no idea what you’ll find. The three maps (which are huge compared to its previous iterations) are chock-full of secret labs to uncover, caches of supplies, hidden expensive artifacts, monster lairs and mysteries. Every time I leave a mission hub on a simple quest it turns into a full-on adventure. Go collect an artifact—oh look there is an underground lab—explore a bit, fight a huge monster, run for my life…how do I get out of here? Christ, I had no idea I was so low on shotgun shells. Where did these bandits come from?

Some of the greatest narratives are created by players themselves—that has always been a part of video games. There have always been people who have tried to get Barney all the way though Half-Life or play the Sims without a house. STALKER creates a playground that allows a player to create their own story. This is not to say that the game doesn’t have great set pieces that are wonderful and thrilling to play through, but the things that I will always remember from CoP will be the experiences that were created outside of the traditional narrative.

While there are fewer dungeon exploration sequences there are still plenty of opprotunities to poke around creepy radioactive millitary labs.

I will never forget the time that I was ambushed by a Chimera in the dark. I panicked and ran, accidentally hitting the G key—which dropped my shotgun somewhere in the woods—turning a night hunt into a desperate fight for survival (or the subsequent daylight searches for that expensive gun which turned up nothing), or the time where I stealthed my way past a group of thirty zombies to loot a weapons cache only to make a desperate sprint for safety. A quick Google search will turn up more STALKER tales than you can shake a stick at. Everyone who plays STALKER will have at least one crazy story about that time where they had a sniper duel in the middle of a lightning storm or a Bloodsucker mutant saved them from death at the hands of bandits.

Call of Pripyat represents the best entry someone can have into the STALKER universe. CoP’s story is not as bombastic or impressive as its predecessor Shadow of Chernobyl, and has a bit of a lackluster ending. It also lacks the survival horror sequences that took place in underground Ukranian labs. CoP does contain the most detailed maps of any of the series, though, and it separates thing into points of interest. In a way, this is unfortunate, because it herds most of the anomalies into ‘anomaly fields’. A bit of the adventure is lost when you know that most of the deadly anomalies are constrained to marked areas of the map, and that trouble spots are known to you even before you set foot near them. Perhaps it is because this is the third generation of STALKER games and it takes more than a Bloodsucker ambush to get my goat.

Call of Pripyat is a rare gem and contains a dynamic and unique gaming experience that has yet to be replicated. While it is temperamental, aged, and poorly acted, it succeeds in allowing players to experience a world that is fun to explore for the sake of exploring. A lived-in, moving world that its fun just to travel through and marvel at all its haunting and dangerous landscapes.

CoP adds to the mutant menagerie but brings back old standbys like this Snork.

Comments

  1. CB
    CB This looks sweet. I'm still making my way through SoC right now, but I think I'll be picking this one up soon after.
  2. Vick
    Vick this game looks intense
  3. kryyst
    kryyst Cool the previous games have been a lot of fun. Though I wish it was out for Xbox, I'd get much more playtime on it.

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