The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series is are a set of three first person shooter survival horror games put out by the now closed GSC Game World. The original game, Shadow of Chernobyl, was released in March of 2007 with it’s two expansions, Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat, adding new locations, enemies, hazards and stories to the series, were release in September of 2008 and October of 2009, respectively. A sequel was announced and was in the works for a time, but with the it’s developer shut down, it seems that at least for now it is on indefinite hold.
This whole thing is going to be just chock full of spoilers, so read at your own risk.
The series focuses on the Zone of Alienation, more commonly referred to as just the Zone, around the Ukrainian city of Pripyat. For those of you who cannot remember the importance of this city, it was where the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster occurred back in April of 1986. This created an area around it that the government quarantined in real life. Where the game diverges from history is that this disaster was caused by scientific experiments that caused an energy surge in the area, blowing the reactor apart. Many scientists stayed in the area, which largely resembles what the Zone is to us today, underground in secret labs until about 2006 when something went terribly, terribly wrong. The landscape became warped in places, strange, physically impossible phenomenon began occurring all around the zone, and the wildlife (and in some cases the human inhabitants) became horribly mutated. Soon after this, it was discovered that these anomalies created odd artifacts that could not be found or recreated anywhere else in the world and caused a variety of effects in humans when put in contact with them, such as increasing metabolism, extracting radiation from the body, and so on. When this news eventually leaked to the outside world, groups of entrepreneurial Ukrainians began to arm themselves and journey into the Zone to strike it rich. These brave pioneers came to be known as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.s, or Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Looters, Killers, Explorers, and Robbers. Inside the zone these men face dangers in the forms of mutants, these terrible physical anomalies, the military, who began to shoot at them on sight, leftover scientific experiments that would destroy one’s mind, and other S.T.A.L.K.E.R.s. Factions began to form and fight each other over territory and loot, and bandits were far too common.
This is what the series throws you directly into. Shadow of Chernobyl starts you off in the back of a transport truck full of the dead being driven by god know who going god knows where. Before you can reach that point though, your driver runs the truck through an electrical anomaly and you end up being blown out of it with half of the other cadavers. Luckily before something comes along and decides to make a meal out of you and your dead friends, a wandering S.T.A.L.K.E.R. comes across the wreckage of your truck and decides to loot some bodies. He finds you still alive and so takes you back to a small town of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.s near the border of the zone to get you patched up.
Really just a depressing place to end up.
When you wake up, you are asked to help out a little around the area before being set off on your journey through the Zone with nothing but a few tins of food, the games shitty version of the Makarov pistol, a couple of rubles, and a pocket full of dreams. While you were dead someone left you a PDA with some simple instructions on it, to kill another S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and you, having no memory of who you are, where you came from, or why you are in this god awful Ukrainian hellhole, decide that you might as well track down this Strelok guy as even if you don’t end up killing him, at least he might know who you are and how you’ve managed to get yourself into this situation. Along the way you fight many mutated creatures, gather some artifacts, hurt a lot of people, and possibly become best of friends with one of the major factions in the Zone.
Being able to play the guitar is a very valuable skill in the Zone.
Once you get a bit into the game you find out that this Strelok you have set out to kill is actually yourself. You managed to get to the heart of the Zone, the Chernobyl NPP, before, but once you got there you were captured and your brain got fried by a group of dickbag scientists. You were then reprogrammed to head out and kill Strelok, because I guess they didn’t get that it was you, and so that’s why you couldn’t remember shit. In any case, you decided that killing yourself would be a bad idea, and instead decide to go back into the heart of the Zone and stop whatever if going on in there. You turn off a machine known as the Brain Scorcher, which was the main obstacle for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.s trying to reach the center of the Zone, as it did exactly as it’s name implied to anyone who got too close to it. With this thing out of the way, most of the people in the Zone make an attempt to get into the city, and so Hilarity and firefights ensue. Eventually you fight your way through all of the terrible things before you and end up in the nuclear power plant itself. This is where things change up. The game features many different endings, many of which center around the mythical Wish Granter, a device that is rumored to do exactly as it’s name implies, grant whatever wish you may have. In reality it is just a device set up by that group of dickbag scientists to keep people from finding them and putting an end to what it is that they are doing. This is exactly what you do in the canon ending though. You have a few conversations with the scientists where the explain everything to do with the zone, and find out that they have combined their consciousnesses into some machine that allows them to control the zone, and when you get that far they offer to let you join. You can accept, but again, the canon ending has you hunt down the pods that they live in and fill all of those pods with bullets. Content with the fact that the dickbag scientists, who actually had fairly noble goals but fucked up royally, are all dead, you head back out, find some relaxing grassy hill to lay down on, and enjoy that fact that you just ended the zone.
Except you really didn’t, but more on that later.
About a year and a half after Shadow of Chernobyl was released, CSG released the first expansion: Clear Sky. Clear Sky is a prequel to SoC and follows the events leading up to Strelok’s first journey to the center of the Zone. It also follows a different protagonist, this time an older mercenary named Scar. The expansion introduces a new faction war system wherein you can actually become a member of several factions and help them win territory from whatever rival faction they face. The atmosphere is a bit less terribly dreary than that of SoC, something that worked very well to set the mood in the original, and the new found brightness works well for it being a prequel, but left many fans somewhat disappointed in it. Also added was a new system to customize your weapons in various ways to improve how they handled, their accuracy, and how reliable they were, and you could actually repair weapons and armor now, which is nice.
As stated earlier, the game centers around the seasoned mercenary Scar. In the opening to the game, you, as Scar, are seen escorting a group of scientists through the Zone, probably to take some readings on a random anomaly. After the scientists have a conversation about how no terrible wall of fire should be coming their way anytime soon, since this is a regular event that can be planned for accordingly, everyone in your travel group gets a reminder that the Zone hates them for no particular reason, and a giant, terrible wall of fire sweeps across the Zone and kills everyone who wasn’t in some sort of shelter, including your group. For some reason though, it does not kill you. You are the one-in-a-million human being that for some reason or another has something in their system that makes it so that you didn’t get completely obliterated by this “emission” as they are known as. This does still leave you pretty messed up, but luckily a completely different group of scientists, known as Clear Sky, find you and decide that you surviving the emission was pretty neat and so you could probably help them in making sure that these emissions stop. They also let you know that you shouldn’t be caught out in an emissions again, because it will probably kill you this time. Them you get sent on your tutorial mission to kill some mutated pigs, and as soon as you do THERE IS ANOTHER GODDAMNED WALL OF TERRIBLE FIRE, PAIN, AND SADNESS. Miraculously, you manage to survive again, but are told that if you go through another one of those your nervous system will burn out and you will die a terrible death. They then inform you that they think the reason behind these now unpredictable emissions is because a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has managed to get to the center of the Zone, and this has pissed the Zone off. This is hilarious when you find out that Clear sky was founded by a group of scientists who worked directly with the dickbag scientists who created this whole mess, and they still have no idea as to what the hell is actually going on.
In any case, you spend a majority of this game trying to hunt down this S.T.A.L.K.E.R. to prevent him and his group from reaching the center of the zone and ruining everything for everyone. Along the way you help out various factions and individual S.T.A.L.K.E.R.s with whatever tasks they have for you, much like in the first game, and eventually you find out that the group is Strelok’s gang, and they’ve managed to get their hands on a device that will help them get past the main defense of the Chernobyl NPP, a machine called the Brain Scorcher, which does exactly as its name would imply. So you get set up in a mad dash to try and stop Strelok from reaching the power plant and so you and your Clear Sky buds rush the city and fight through the army of brainwashed soldiers and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.s that the dickbag scientists use to keep people away from them. Eventually, after fighting through the waves of brainwashed combatants and the remnants of the military in the area, you reach the plant. All hell has broken loose at this point with the Military, the brainwashed “Monolith” forces, and your friends in the Clear Sky faction battling it out. At this point, you are given one final task. Take a rifle specially designed to break through Strelok’s fancy ass headband that allowed him to get past the Brain Scorcher (you ended up having to go around it) and render him vulnerable to the terrible psychic energy that was near the plant. You go ahead and do that, and all is right with the world. Strelok get’s his Brain fucked up, and the Zone should calm down and stop releasing these emissions to try to destroy him. Your Clear Sky friends start to calm down and take readings to see if everything is alright with the world.
Then another fucking emissions happens, everyone nearby is either killed or gets their brain fucked, and the game plays a cinematic showing everyone that managed to survive getting brainwashed, including our original hero Strelok. The End.
Call of Pripyat was originally released in the Commonwealth of Independent States in October of 2009. It follows the events after Strelok kills all of the dickbag scientists controlling the Zone, and introduces a new protagonist: Major Alexander Degtyarev. The faction war system in Clear Sky was dropped, and the factions that played larger roles in past games are now but shadows of their former selves. After the events of Shadow of Chernobyl, the Ukrainian government finds the path to the heart of the Zone open and decide they want to launch a large scale scale military invasion of the Zone. To do this, they send in five teams to make detailed maps of the anomalies and terrain in the area in special helicopters designed to be resistant to the various anomalies. Because nothing nice ever happens in the Zone, all of these helicopters are destroyed and their teams go missing. And so enters our hero Major Degtyarev. The military wants to know what the hell happened to their five helicopter teams, as chalking their loss to “Just another day in the Zone” isn’t good enough for them. They decide that instead of sending in a ground team, one experienced man will be enough. You are sent in disguised as a regular S.T.A.L.K.E.R., as everyone still hates the military for shooting at them whenever they felt like it, a couple of not too terrible guns, and is let loose into the Zone.
The plot is pretty straightforward. You find the helicopters, and they end up all having been broken in one way or another. Eventually you head into Pripyat proper to look for the last couple of helicopter, and you meet up with what is left of the military teams who have been holed up in some laundromat and have been suffering constant losses from the mutants in the area as well as the remnants of the brainwashed, and now leaderless, Monolith forces. These forces, having gained a measure of their patron scientists dickbag-ishness, probably are the ones who set up a scrambling device that has been preventing the military from calling for help. Before dealing with this you are sent to investigate one of the secret labs in the area to try and gain knowledge for your Ukrainian overlords. The whole lab is a terrible shithole, but you do manage to find a fair amount of information on what the fuck the deal is with the Zone. This is realized to be extremely important, and getting this back to the Ukrainian government then becomes your top priority. The commander of the remaining military forces agrees with you, and tells you that they think they have found the source of the jamming signal in the area. You go out and break it, a fairly straightforward task, and find a medic who was thought long dead trapped in a freezer. After communications come back online, the leader of the surviving military forces informs you that a large group of people are closing in near your position. At first it is assumed that Monolith forces are trying to make another push against the military, so they send you out to murder them all, because that’s just what you do. When you get to where all of the people are, you realise it’s just a shit load of zombies.
And Strelok.
Apparently the bastard had survived up until this point, which is impressive considering the Zone is a terrible place. You lend our old protagonist a hand with the zombies, and he joins you and what is left of your military friends at the laundromat. He explains that he also needs to get out of the Zone and talk to the government to explain everything he knows about the Zone, and as he is the most knowledgeable man alive on the subject, you agree to get him out in the evacuation along with the remaining military personnel. One of the things he lets you and your friends in on is the main reason your operation failed. When they sent in the helicopters originally, the maps they were using were outdated despite being less than a few weeks old. As it turns out, every time an emission occurs the anomalies throughout the Zone shift around, and as now emissions occur every couple of days or so, reliably having an up to date map on where it is safe to fly and where it isn’t is a bit difficult. This means that before a rescue can be attempted to get all of you out of there you need to wait for another emission to occur and make a new map for the rescue helicopters to use. So you batten down the hatches at the laundromat and wait for this last emission you have to deal with blow over, and as soon as it’s finished you, Strelok, and all of your military friends book it out of there. The evacuation point is conveniently on the other side of the city, and the entire journey you and your well armed group are constantly harassed by various mutants and “Zombified” S.T.A.L.K.E.R.s, men who have had their minds scrambled by the likes of the brain scorcher before it went down or another Psi-anomaly and have been reduced to shambling shadows of their former selves who are sadly still armed to the teeth. If the game is feeling particularly hateful, some of the most dangerous mutants in the game will make their presence know in this final dash, and you’ll take at least a few casualties if you happen to have this poor of luck. After murdering your way through Pripyat you finally reach the evac point only to realise it is right next to the areas Monolith forces headquarters. This sets the stage for one final massive firefight as you try to hold out against the waves of Monolith forces while waiting for the helicopters to land. When they finally get there, you are presented with a choice. Either you can stay behind and continue living in the Zone, which allows you to keep playing after the game finishes, or you can climb on that helicopter and get the fuck out. If you choose to leave you get a nice end game slideshow that tells what happens to everyone after the events of the game depending on what choices you made during it.
The gameplay in all three of the games is fairly similar. The way to gain most of your supplies is to loot whatever you can. Slain enemies, fallen allies, and people you feel nothing towards that you found on the side of the road will usually have something valuable on them that you can take. If you can start taking in a fair amount of Rubles, you can also buy things from various traders throughout the Zone. You can also sell these men any unwanted equipment and supplies you find on your journeys. You must eat from time to time, so acquiring food from time to time is a necessity, and you will always need medical supplies and ammunition. Almost everything has a weight to it though, and for the most part you will won’t be able to carry too much on you, so hoarding ammo and supplies really isn’t the smartest of options unless you are setting out on a tough mission that will require you to use most of the supplies and unload most of the ammunition.
The best way to earn rubles is to go jumping around anomalies, which is extremely dangerous most of the time, and gathering up artifacts. As mentioned before, artifacts provide many strange bonuses to whomever holds them, such as resistance to being burned, electrocuted, or having your brain melted, but many of them also have some kind of negative to them. Most of the time this is just something as simple as a steady stream of radiation being poured into your body over time, but as most armors can equip different artifacts, and there are artifacts that only remove radiation from the body with no negative consequences, you can offset some of those negatives. In Shadow of Chernobyl it was more common to see artifacts with a more diverse range of negatives, such as bleeding more when taking damage, or just taking more of a specific kind of damage, but again, with the right combination of artifacts these could be offset.
The combat is what you would expect from a first person shooter in some regards. It is not a game that you can just use brute force to get yourself through. You will not have regenerating health unless you were to use artifacts with this bonus, or a set of armor that has this as a bonus, so carrying around bandages and medical kits is a must most of the time. The game pits you against a variety of mutants that each act and assault you in different manners. Two of the most iconic mutants in the game would probably be the bloodsucker, a large humanoid creature that is typically more of a lone predator with the ability to turn invisible when assaulting you, and the Snork, which is more of a pack hunter which are ex members of the military, who through exposure to the zone became hunched over killers who roam around on all fours and are able to leap great distances to try and rip their targets to shreds. They get their name from the fact that they still wear their old military uniforms including their military issued gas masks. There are many more in the game, but just those two can offer kind of a base as to what you’ll be up against. At times facing these mutants can be a terrifying experience,especially at night before you can use night vision. Not that nightvision would help you when your foe can turn invisible, but you know.
On the other end of the spectrum of things that want to kill you are all of the other S.T.A.L.K.E.R.s. Most of them will probably not fire at you on sight, but there are enough people out there between the bandits, military, Monolith, mercenary, and if you joined a faction, whatever their rival is, who will gladly attempt to end you. As the series progressed the AI for both mutant and human has improved, and so you will be facing a challenge most of the time in a firefight. Bandits are never really too well supplied, so they are the major exception to that rule. The AI can at times be very good at engaging you in firefights, and will enjoy making use of many grenades if you cling to cover. In Clear Sky this was most notable for me, as when engaging any of the better armed factions I’d find myself more often than not drowning in all of the grenades being thrown at me.
Many see the game as very difficult as it cannot be played the same way as many modern FPS games. To survive each encounter, you need to go into each one having a plan and plenty of cover. Guns the claws and teeth of the mutants will rip you to shreds in short order, so you need to make sure that you approach each enemy carefully. The first mission of the game manages to scare off some players in that it has you assaulting a fairly large large group of bandits in a garage complex. For news players starting off with nothing but the shitty pistol they give you, this is basically a death sentence. This degree of difficulty does help make the games good, as it gives them their charm. The whole series just wouldn’t have the same feel to it if you were some bullet eating demigod like in most modern FPS games.
The weapons throughout the series are generally the same from game to game. You will see a lot of Warsaw Pact weapons around, which as this is Eastern Europe, makes sense. Of course, with people from all over the globe being enticed by what the Zone has to offer, you will find weapons from many nationalities throughout the games. These tend to be a bit more rare, but still do have a presence in the game. The ammo system in the game reflects these differences as well. Instead of just having ammo for each class of weapon, it is more dependent on it’s nationality and how current the weapon is. For example, you will not be able to use the same ammunition for your AC-96/2, a Russian rifle, as you would a German GP37.
The graphics in the game are a bit of a complicated subject. While I would in no way call it the best looking of games, it also isn’t the worst by far. In fact, it still does manage to look really good for the setting, in that it almost helps to set the rather grim mood for everything. Thanks to the lighting system in the game, it can look downright beautiful at times. So, its looks aren’t anything to get excited over most of the time, but don’t really detract from the game.
Also worth noting is the dedicated modding community that the series has. As it has been out for for a few years now, you can find various mods for thing ranging from improved graphics to complete game overhauls. It is recommended to do your first playthrough of them unmodded, but once you have gotten through them, the mods can add so much more to the game and keep you entertained for weeks, even potentially months more.
Overall, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series is really one of the greatest first person shooters released on the PC in years. The setting is just plain interesting, and the gameplay allows one to enjoy this to its fullest extent. Everything about it just manages to grasp you, pull you in, and just immerse you in the best of ways. Even today, over six years after it’s release, you have plenty of people who played the game discussing their adventures and telling tales of life and death inside the Zone. While we may never see a true sequel to this game, it is worth mentioning that currently the team who worked on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is developing an MMO titled Survarium that will feature many similar themes from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games as sort of a spiritual successor. The game is looking promising so far, and any fan of the original series would do well by themselves to check out Survarium.
For being overall a great game in most regards, I’d give it a 9.5/10
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