In Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, not many people seem to know about the Zone – but those who have heard rumours of this strange place and its ability to grant one’s deepest wishes are drawn to its mystery and simply have to go there…
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| The huge environments are breathtaking and detailed, full of rusting, radioactive detritus, abandoned vehicles and deserted villages |
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Likewise, non-gamers may be completely unaware of the tantalising rumours, unreliable announcements and ominous silences coming out of Ukraine for the past five or six years concerning a game called S.T.A.L.K.E.R.; those of us who don’t get out much, though, have probably been more excited by this title than any other in recent gaming history. We’ve endured innumerable false promises and missed release dates with a growing sense of resignation and a suspicion that the game was, perhaps, nothing more than a cruel myth.
But now, unbelievably, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is here. The only question is: was it worth the wait? We’ll delay answering that for a moment and recap what S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is all about.
GSC Gameworld, the game’s Ukrainian developers, have drawn on the catastrophic events that shook their country, and the rest of the world in April 1986 when reactor number four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, releasing a huge plume of radioactive material over much of northern Europe. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. proposes that a second disaster – of unknown origin – occurred in 2006, transforming the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone into a disorienting parallel world in which the laws of physics don’t always apply, hideous mutants roam at will, and strange anomalies and artefacts litter the landscape. The game takes place in 2012, when scientific teams sent into the Zone have disappeared without trace, military patrols attempt to keep people from crossing the perimeter and Stalkers brave radiation and anomalies to try and wrest valuable, if enigmatic, artefacts from the Zone’s dangerous heart.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s frame of cultural reference is somewhat wider than that of your conventional game, weaving together as it does the recent history of the Chernobyl ‘Zone’ with its literary and cinematic antecedents, drawn from Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s 1970s novel Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky’s film adaptation, Stalker. Blending these three rather different Zones was an inspired idea, and the game utilises elements of each: the real Chernobyl, the satellite city of Prypiat, now deserted, and the eerily beautiful, faintly menacing landscape of the real Zone, provide a distinctive, and distinctive-looking, gameworld; the Strugatskys’ SF premise of a Zone full of anomalies and powerful artefacts (leftovers of a mysterious ‘visitation’) provides both motive for the story and menace aplenty; and even something of the mysterious, visionary beauty of Tarkovsky’s enigmatic take on the book informs the game’s visuals.
Certainly, S.T.A.L.K.E.R possesses a unique atmosphere that’s hard to resist, and its huge environments – a number of large, open ‘levels’ joined together by entry points – are breathtaking and detailed, full of rusting, radioactive detritus, abandoned vehicles, deserted villages and ominous-looking industrial complexes. But this is a game, not a novel or a film, and the Zone is a more populous place than that of Tarkovsky or the Strugatskys. In fact, the developers have tried to make it a living, organic world of its own, filled with humans, animals and a variety of terrifying mutants – a population of over 1,000, in fact, all going about their daily business of hunting, eating, fighting and scavenging in the Zone. They developed their own ‘A-Life’ artificial intelligence engine to make this a viable proposition; meaning, in theory, that all of these NPCs are busy doing what they do even when you’re not around to watch them. Stand on a hillside and you might see in the distance a pack of blind, mutant dogs chasing a boar, or a tussle between members of Duty (the Zone’s self-appointed police force) and a gang of bandits. All of these groups will migrate from one area to another in search of food or booty, meaning that levels don’t just empty out as you work your way through them, and on returning to a previously quiet area the unwary Stalker might find a nasty surprise waiting.
You take on the role of one such Stalker, and find yourself, after an opening movie, dumped at a trading outpost with no idea of who you are or how you got there, (yes, that over-familiar chestnut) except the knowledge that you have to find and kill someone called Strelok. From here, it’s pretty much up to you what you do. You can strike out in any direction, accept jobs from traders, other Stalkers or whoever else might have work for an enterprising amnesiac. It soon becomes clear, of course, that some missions form part of a gradually emerging, overarching storyline that will take you, one step at a time, closer to establishing both your own identity and the nature of the Zone itself: crawling through tunnels to gain entry into seriously spooky underground scientific labs and retrieve research documents; pumping Stalkers for leads on Strelok’s group; removing the obstacles that block access to the Zone’s fabled northern reaches, and edging your way ever closer to the abandoned power plant itself. But there are side-quests aplenty – from searching for artefacts to helping out in battles between rival factions – and by carrying them out you’ll earn money and other rewards that can be used, sold or traded in turn.
But these quests are one of the game’s biggest problems: because this isn’t, strictly speaking, an RPG, the rewards for carrying out such side-quests are minimal. There’s no increase in skills or levelling up, and after attaining a certain degree of financial security, not even much of a pecuniary incentive to undertake arduous, time-consuming tasks (and the lack of once-promised vehicles means that you’ll be doing a lot of footslogging to accomplish your goals).
Most likely, you’ll soon tire of all this and pursue the major story arc instead; although don’t be surprised if you don’t always know what’s going on and what exactly you’re supposed to do about it. Information, in this game, can be hard to come by – whether it’s trying to interpret some of the lost-in-translation utterances of the NPCs, make sense of the extremely skimpy backstory revealed in (gorgeous) flashbacks and cryptic notes, or figure out what your next priority is from the sometimes confusing jumble of tasks on your handy PDA. And this is another aspect where S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s hybrid nature – neither FPS nor RPG – is somewhat troubling. Not only are many of the quests unrewarding, but the characters and dialogue are weak, to say the least, and your interactions minimal. The dialogue ‘trees’ through which you communicate with NPCs are extremely limited in scope, and your responses don’t make a heck of a lot of difference in most cases to the outcome of a given conversation. Killing people tends to be more satisfying, and combat within the game is well done, with some impressive enemy AI, a good range of weapons, and constant anxiety about having enough of the right ammo. The all-guns-blazing style won’t work here though; instead, measured, tactical approaches tend to pay off.
So, this isn’t Baldur’s Gate or Morrowind, and anyone who is still expecting the glorious, endlessly free-roaming RPG we were once promised – in which you competed with other Stalkers, and needed to eat, sleep and shelter from Zone-wide ‘blow-outs’ – will most likely be a tad disappointed.
And, inevitably after such a long gestation, other games – from Far Cry and Half Life 2 to Oblivion – have stolen various aspects of what should perhaps have been S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s thunder; none of which is to say that this isn’t a fantastic game. If you can get over six years of fevered anticipation of what once sounded like the Holy Grail of gaming and simply immerse yourself in a brilliant and challenging action-shooter set in a beautifully realised world, then you’ll probably enjoy your time in the Zone.
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