Stalker: Call of Pripyat Review

8.7

Format PC

Developer GSC Game World

Publisher Unknown

Genre First Person Shooter

9 Comments

I am terrified. I'm standing in the total dark of 2:00am on the rusted deck of a decades-old barge. My gaze is fixed on the line of bushes obscuring the nearby swamp. Five, six, seven sets of bright yellow eyes emerge from the gloom, then sink back into it. I'm exploring the unearthly heart of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and I'm terrified.

It's not the first time. 2007's Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl was GSC's first attempt at crafting a disquieting, alien landscape in the Ukrainian countryside. A hybrid shooter borrowing a light quest format from RPGs, it was followed by Stalker: Clear Sky. But while the developers' first two bites of the radioactive cherry produced some impressively creepy moments, it's Call of Pripyat's Zone - set closer to the epicentre of the disaster - that stands as the ultimate realisation. By turns haunting, lonely, aggressive and sad, the Zone is the most evocative environment of any game, save BioShock's Rapture.

This time, filling the boots of an undercover special forces type, I'm braving mutants, bandits and eerie anomalies to uncover the fate of five helicopters sent into the area. Additional missions are provided by the Zone's inhabitants, the itinerant Stalkers who've moved in.

Deathmetal
The action takes place in three regions, each with distinctive visual cues and their own major dangers. Underpinning them all is a constant, radioactive hum, imparted by fantastically creepy sound design and a radiation warning whenever you venture close to metal that's absorbed the blast's nastier effects.

Danger is hard-wired into the Zone, where even standing next to a broken-down tractor is enough to melt most of your face. The landscape, not happy with simply imbuing everything nailed down with lethal, invisible badness, is peppered with anomalies: rips in normality caused by the disaster. There's the abandoned train and the globe of pure electric charge that travels its length every few seconds, or the 500m gouge cut into a valley face, covered with a floating haze like a road on a hot day. I stepped into this trench once, and immediately the screen turned blue - the cause of this monumental scar on the landscape revealed as massive psychic pressure. My vision blurred, thumping sound and the draining of my lifeforce the sole reward for stumbling into such an place.

But come to an anomaly prepared, with a sturdy suit and the right kind of sensor, and you can find artefacts. The Zone's unique by-product, these sell for thousands, or provide weird bonus effects when plugged into a suit. I made sure to keep a selection of these unnatural lumps on me at all times, switching health regeneration artefacts for those that halved the radiation I absorbed frolicking in irradiated barns, or that reduced psychic damage, letting me explore the brain-trench in peace. Finding these items is a tense game of risk/reward in itself: stocked with health-kits, I wandered anomalies with an artefact detector flipped open like a Soviet-era mobile phone. It's a low-rent, ultra-deadly version of a scavenger hunt, but pays a good wage if you bring artefacts to avaricious collectors. I found myself setting time aside every day in the Zone to poke around unearthly spots of the landscape.

Sausage
Exchanging artefacts for cash is a vital part of Call of Pripyat's economic cycle, but it's not the only part. Everything in the Zone has to be kept in constant balance, topped up to prevent you succumbing to imminent death. In other RPGs I've given up looting corpses after a few hours, overstocked with supplies. Here, I scour each and every body - zombie, bandit, mercenary - to scrape up enough bandages and morsels of sausage to keep me sustained in a wilderness that wants me dead. The hunger mechanic remains vital but unobtrusive: don't eat and you'll take longer to recover your stamina bar, needed for lifesaving sprints. Or put another way: if you don't eat, something will eat you.

If you're not pulped by gravitational anomalies, Pripyat's fields, bogs, buildings and tunnels are liberally spotted with the strangest kind of fauna that'll do the job quite nicely. Packs of basic mutants wander the wilds: scabrous dogs and things that were once apparently pigs; but while they bite hard, keep enough open countryside between you and they won't attack.

Look who's Snorking
The worrying starts in enclosed spaces, or in the very few scripted sections. The fallout from the disaster has done worse things to the once-human residents of the region: leaping Snorks are an acrobatic menace fond of caverns, the remnants of a gas mask giving their creepy profile a floppy, alien trunk. Controllers - horrible psychic potato men - lure travellers into dark corners. I was jumped by one on a mission with some friendly stalkers: a minute or so at the whims of the Controller, and they were shooting at me instead of the monster in their path. But Bloodsuckers are worse: with the tentacled features of a scaled-down Cthulhu, and the bastardish ability to turn completely invisible, they populate marshes and tunnels, and enjoy sneaking up behind you.

Having one attached to the base of your throat is an exercise in genuine revulsion. Not since Half-Life 2's zombies has a foe inspired me with such a need to get the hell away from them right now, and it adds immeasurably to the character of Pripyat's environments. And for God's sake, don't go out at night. Stranded in the gloom with a torch lighting only a few feet in front of you, you will know my fear.

With this iteration of the Zone near-perfect in its portrayal - stark, bleak, beautiful - it's all the more crushing that the engine feels underpowered when it comes to combat. Bullets ricochet all too readily, flying unconvincingly upwards after you shooting them into squishy mud. A headshot will snap the target's head back, but the hit-box feels small, leading to some frustrating engagements at distance.

A neat weapon upgrade system eventually produces results - my trusty assault rifle became noticeably more accurate as I purchased add-ons and mods for it, fitted by a helpful safehouse drunkard - but my altercations still lacked the punch of truly engrossing combat.

Anomolies
It's a mostly forgivable problem, but it gnaws at the base of the game, and will topple it entirely for those who buy their shooters for the boom-dakka-dakka. The flimsiness of combat is replicated in the inventory system and PDA - the catch-all map and quest-log. When your current objective is just an unhelpful line of text, you have to dig through reams of chat text in the PDA's log to find the conversation that spawned it.

Similarly, while nowhere as close to horrifically bug-ridden as previous Stalkers, Call of Pripyat's AI is dangerously stupid: my allies blithely pushed me out of the way as they ran towards immediate and tentacled doom, while my foes employed the advanced military tactic of walking right towards me, firing occasionally.

But I found myself looking past these problems, captivated by the atmosphere. Sprinting through the night after a badly planned excursion left me far from safety, I happened upon a friendly trio of stalkers. The light from their helmets illuminated their target: the floor directly below them. The three of them spun on the spot, glitching madly over a section of anonymous metal. Sneaking a glance below, I spotted a corpse: their AI was trying to loot it.

It was a ridiculous image and I would've laughed, but then a burst of lightning illuminated the room. Through the window, I spotted a hulking silhouetted figure on a far hilltop, and I heard a pack of dogs howl. And I couldn't laugh, because, after all, I was terrified.

PC Gamer