STALKER: Call of Pripyat Review

05 Feb 2010 at 15:53:23 by Tim McDonald
Systems used to review this title: (PC)

STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, and sod the silly acronym-creating periods, was a game I respected. It's a carefully chosen word, that; I didn't exactly enjoy it, but I could understand why other people did. It was a very clever idea but with extremely shonky implementation; it required a water-cooled supercomputer to run, animations was off, the difficulty was uneven, the translation was flawed, and the game was riddled with bugs. Despite these problems, it was extraordinarily compelling. STALKER had an atmosphere almost unmatched in gaming, and the shonkiness actually added to that. It felt desolate, creepy, and wrong – exactly what you'd expect from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

The second release in the STALKER series, Clear Sky, improved and broke in equal measures. As a prequel, it explained some of the events prior to the first game and added a bit more depth as to the goings-on in the Zone. Sadly, bugs persisted, some design decisions killed a bit of the atmosphere, and enemies gained the ability to lob sixty-two grenades approximately half a mile with pin-point accuracy.

Now we have a true sequel in the sense of “taking place after the first game” - Call of Pripyat. This, I enjoyed.

This time around, you take the role of Ukraine Security Service agent Major Degtyarev, sent undercover into the Zone as a Stalker to investigate the mysterious crashes of the five helicopters sent over the Zone as part of a large-scale operation that took place shortly after the close of the original Shadow of Chernobyl. You start the game out in the Zone with some armour, an assault rifle, sufficient supplies to last a little while, five objectives – the helicopter crash sites – and no real bearings.

Immediately, this is a bit of a drastic change to previous titles; rather than starting off with light equipment and a few easy missions, you're out in the middle of nowhere and heavily armed (as far as early Stalker games go, anyway.) Likewise, you've no real initial contacts – the first group of Stalkers you come across will happily point you in the direction of the nearest safe haven, in this case a rusting ship, but you could choose to forge your own path if you fancied.

From there, it pans out much as in the other Stalker games: you get missions and side-missions, venture into the depths of the Zone, desperately make it back to safe haven with low ammunition and supplies, restock, turn in missions, upgrade equipment, and then continue. Eventually, it hits you that most of the usual problems have disappeared.

For one thing, as we're now in The Future, your computer can actually run the damn game. The translation isn't quite as odd as it once was. You haven't hit any major bugs; you're not spontaneously getting Mission Failed messages and character glitches are rarer than they once were. Enemies still have grenades, but you're not inundated with grenade warnings before your corpse is catapulted to the moon.

The one obvious issue with this is that, as it's The Future, the game looks a little the worse for wear. There are still occasional framerate drops in graphically-intensive areas, despite Call of Pripyat looking and feeling like something a few years old. On the whole, though, it doesn't matter; when you're not taking it apart piecemeal the wide-open areas are breathtaking and atmospheric in equal measure. There's still a gnawing sense of tension when you're heading back to base, in the dark, when low on ammo and supplies; there's a vague sense of sadness and loss when you come across the scorched husk of what was clearly once a school or kindergarten; there's a sense of beauty and grandeur mixed with horror when you get to the top of a hill just as the sun breaks through the clouds and illuminates the decaying structures, stagnant water, and occasional packs of Stalkers or wild animals, both of whom are scavenging through the Zone - and that's without touching upon the sheer terror and dread from some of the wonderfully-crafted setpieces. When you remember enough that anomalies stop taking you by surprise and you learn how to anticipate likely threats, you don't feel safe, but you feel like part of the Zone: an old hand who's not going to get caught out. It's as wonderful as it was in the first game.

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