S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl reviewed

Updated:08:32 PM CEST Aug,29

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Gameguru Mania News - Mar,20 2007 -

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl reviewed - media
(hx) 05:19 PM CET - Mar,20 2007 - Post a comment / read (11)

Bit-Tech, Boomtown (9/10), C&VG (8/10), Eurogamer (8/10), GamePro (4.25/5), Gamespot (8.5/10), IGN (8.2/10), TrustedReviews have reviews of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl online for your viewing pleasure: The game's artificial intelligence is impressive, both in and out of combat. In combat, enemies are cunning when given enough room to move around. Human enemies hunt you intelligently, using cover and the terrain to their advantage. Meanwhile, creatures such as packs of mutant dogs behave like you'd expect wild animals to. They attack when they feel they have the advantage but flee if given a painful lesson. It's this kind of behavior that makes the zone feel alive, with these different factions and animals all trying to go about their daily tasks. The AI does take a hit when placed in tight interiors, though, as the lack of maneuvering options makes it turn a bit predictable, but you'll likely appreciate this fact early in the game, as hiding inside a building and picking off the grunts as they come through the doorway is the only way that you'll survive some of the early battles.

So what kind of hardware power are you going to need to run this thing? It may not show off all the latest graphical effects, but this game is rather demanding. While it's by no means a top of the line rig, our Pentium 4 3.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM, and 512 MB Radeon X1900 system had problems at maximum settings. The game also tended to stutter quite often, sometimes pausing for three or four seconds at regular intervals, which occurred on two different Windows XP rigs at maximum visual quality. Though that isn't the best of news, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. does support widescreen resolutions, which should please many.

last 10 comments:

xxxx	(05:56 PM CET - Mar,20 2007 )
Ok, so I take it's good enough to buy? lol. good. Better be.

djRom	(07:44 PM CET - Mar,20 2007 )
I agree. :)

devilhood	(07:50 PM CET - Mar,20 2007 )
Definitely worth the money from what my friend is telling me. He's probably about a quarter into the game and keeps ranting about how amazing the AI is :lol: I really can't wait to play it on thursday; I expect that's when it will arrive for me, according to Amazon.

yhancik	(08:55 PM CET - Mar,20 2007 )
\:D/ They didn't fail !! Oh the good news !

Nosferatu	(09:57 PM CET - Mar,20 2007 )
I can now be officially proud of our Ukrainian game developers. At least one great and memorable game came from my country! Ah, too bad I'll get it only on Friday or Saturday. Lots of people on russian and ukrainian forums have already downloaded an iso image and play the game. I'm already sick from reading their comments and salivating =)

SiReK	(01:20 AM CET - Mar,21 2007 )
Im as u see Poland and Stalker will be first after (burning crusade) oryginale game i preordered and want to play. I have checked it out and love it!

Smiley_ie	(04:19 PM CET - Mar,21 2007 )
It is worth getting, about an hour into the game. The best thing about it is it feels like a PC game.

xxxx

(04:54 PM CET - Mar,22 2007 )

Looking at the videos it looks like the AI is dumb as snot. Like guy at top of stairs..or the creature he's shooting that does nothing much but run around the same area... La La La. like the guy at the top of the stairs appears like he's doing nothing and the guy playing takes his time offing him... Gawd! I hope the AI is not like Farcry was.. Farcry was so lame when u took out a guy with a scope gun and his partner is like 15 feet away and doesn't even flinch.. I hope it doesn't have that crappy of AI... You see the same thing in Crysis too.

devilhood

(12:22 AM CET - Mar,23 2007 )

My friend has being playing it a lot recently, and here's pretty much what he's said to me over the past day (I'll reserve judgment until I play it for myself though, as he's incredibly picky with stuff like this):

The AI isn't super amazing, infact there are tons of bugs, like sneaking being almost impossible as the AI can see through walls.
There are also stupid situations where you can use a silenced gun to shoot someone in the head when they are talking to someone, and the guy next to him wont flinch or even act like he just saw his friend getting owned :lol:
Also, money is pretty pointless because you can't really buy anything, yet you can find tons of money; medikits are far too abundant and there are a lot of garbage items that have little or no use, such as armour that has +3 Bullet Protection but almost no protection against radiation, meaning you'll die in a few seconds just walking around :lol:
You can kill off 99% of a faction but the last guy alive in it will still have a friendly disposition when you talk to him.
Sometimes when you zone out, you can appear in a bandit camp and get owned without even noticing what has happened.
Bandits respawn like crazy, and there is pretty much almost no wildlife apart from what seems like a few scripted events and uninteresting random encounters.
The OpenAL version in the game is about 6 years old or something, and some guy on a forum posted the BF2 OpenAL just so people could use surround sound :lol:
The game is by no means as open ended as it was hyped, and for some people, the size and linearity of it will be a slight let-down.
The list goes on, there were a lot of other minor issues, but those were the main gripes.
Quite hilarious for a game that has been in production for god knows how long.

Apart from that, he said the game IS great, but it is in need of desperate patching. Looks like the Silent Hunter 4 dev team beat the Ukraine's to that though :P

xxxx

(02:47 PM CET - Mar,23 2007 )

Wow don't know if I am angry or just surprised. Though I have just started playing the game I can't get over this 'cheap' feeling in the game. It feels cheap. The AI is as I feared, crappy, like you say there is like Aimbot type quality. I figured I would play STALKER skill level and the aim some of these guys have is just nuts. The physics are not all that I thought it would be and seems to tend to be kind of cheap. The narration or voices seem a lot better than the garbage I heard in the Demo.. so that's good. I guess I will play the game through but so far it's not as good as I hoped it would be. Level design is nice and open but unless this cheapness feel to it gets better. This game to me is average so far. I thought at least when you talk to guys they would talk back but instead it's this cheap reading crap. Didn't see that coming at all. On the otherhand the sound is not bad however the surround to me doesn't seem at all accurate. Like a guy shooting from the right, sounds like it's coming from the right but there is nobody there when you look meanwhile a guy on the left is shooting you from a mile away with a pistol. The other thing that's irritating and stupid at same time is that you start the game off and everyone is using pistols. Not one submachine gun... kinda lame. I know why they did it but it's not realistic to me...

Anyhow, I also bought the followup to Titan's Quest so that will fill in for the loss of excitement of STALKER. Multi-player is out for me, it's elite camper heaven and when you got a group of people on voice camping for the thrill of pissing genuine players off playing, nah, honestly I got better things to do.

devilhood

(06:44 PM CET - Mar,23 2007 )

I actually spoke too soon about Silent Hunter 4, you never guess what they've done with that game.
No matter what resolution you pick, the in-game graphics (minus the menu GUI) will be perm set to 1024x768.
Hooray for today, two potentially great games with near-show stopping issues, it seems like games are getting worse and worse in-terms of final release stability, what the hell is going on? :lol:

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