Hair fall out, offer a variety of RPG-lite upgrades.
As you move from map to map there'll normally be things kicking off that you can help out with too - defending a barricade from a rival faction's onslaught perhaps, or protecting a warehouse full of friendly Stalkers from the military.įinally, if you can't be arsed with the scripted stuff, certain missions ask you to do semi-random stuff like clearing out warehouses and mutant nests or seeking out rare radioactive artefacts that, rather than rendering you sterile and making your The general direction of travel is north, as the storyline urges you further and further towards the Chernobyl reactor, and leads you on a merry dance through underground laboratories, undead Stalker-infested swamps and many and varied army bunkers. The game isn't endlessly free-roaming a la Oblivion, but instead is divided into ten or so separate levels with loading zones in between. First stop is a village full of guttural men, and then you're out into the wastes. A trader who lives in a hole asks you to do some odd jobs for him, including tracking down a few people, and everything progresses from there. You're not just anywhere either - you're in a living, breathing representation of the forbidden zone that lies around the more infamous reactor at Chernobyl. It begins with you, a token FPS amnesiac, waking up knowing only that you want a chap called Strelok dead. Despite this, despite the epic wait and despite the amount of scissoring that's obviously gone on, we've still ended up with an excellent shooter. If you choose to buy STALKER, you need to be aware that this is not a supersilky Hollywood production - there are rough edges and it's not tied up with a pink frilly bow. After descending into the darkness, I was confronted with tense close-quarters combat, some green-glowing anomalous zones and after a bit of exploring, one of the now famous, and also pretty tough, tentacle-mouthed mutants. Arriving on the scene and taking out any soldiers via heavy use of any cover, I came across one guy cowering in a stairwell, who led me to an underground entrance. The last scene saw a settlement of allied stalkers calling for help after being attacked by the military.
A few anomalous areas were visible, sending up strange sparks as a visual warning, while the fully-modelled buildings enabled a spot of stealthy sneaking through the ruined interiors to get closer to my destination.
The few ground troops used cover to their advantage, hiding behind vehicles only to pop out and take shots at anyone venturing into the open. As the team advanced down the deserted streets, enemy soldiers opened fire from windows, rooftops and sidestreets. STREETS AHEADĪnother level saw us infiltrating the streets of Pripyat along with an allied group of stalkers. A stroll around town revealed other groups of stalkers, each wearing their own distinctive outfits, converged around fires in ramshackle buildings, patrolling the complex and frequenting the bar, while an elite group hung out in their own private camp within the grounds.
Dead animals littered the entrance way, shot by a bunch of stalkers guarding the entrance. To start, we investigated a mini-town set in the middle of the zone where stalkers congregate to seek lodging, find work, trade and bet on the arena.