"My Ideal Holiday" by Bodster. Thousands of square miles of overgrown,
unkempt, woodland; cities and villages turned ghost towns by the lack of
involvement of humanity for at least 30 years; a military presence to execute
interlopers on sight; wild and chaotic, sometimes psychic, monsters and
mutants; helicopter patrols primed and ready to fire at a moment’s notice;
obscure random events liable to kill people at a moment’s notice often unseen
to the untrained eye; a blown out nuclear reactor that is working once again.
Yep, I want to be a STALKER.
There was much hype built up around this game "Shadows
of Chernobyl" for a game set in and around Chernobyl and Pripyat, mapped
and modelled after the real locations and having suffered much of the events of
the location but also tying in with an relatively obscure piece of fiction at
the time, Roadside Picnic, which I heartily recommend to any avid
science-fiction fan looking for a short story.
Plot wise, you are Mr Memory Loss (so obviously you're a
fuck up somewhere along the lines, why people can't just be Captain Bland, I'll
never know) who has awoken with a burned tattoo on his arm earning the nick
name Marked One like it's the biggest and cleverest joke of the century, given
the local population, it's understandable. After a brief "What you got no
memory? Go do X, Y and Z to learn the layouts and I'll tell you what I
remember" sets you up for the big events in the game and readies you in
getting and gathering weapons, scavenging in buildings, avoiding radiation
zones and the infamous anomalies.
Or... it would have done. But I'll rip into that later.
Your amnesiac self has to travel the "Zone" a
cordoned off military are around the Chernobyl Reactor to stop people getting
close and meeting death from the anomalies. These being ghostly things that can
travel the landscape and cause things and people to die suddenly, bloodily,
excessively or cause horrific damage for no real reason. In the book they're
described as being the remnants of a picnic left over from aliens (as a metaphor)
and it's just the debris from their littering doing what it usually does. You
however get to avoid the nasty ones, find items affected by the reactor's
blowouts and trade them for bigger and better guns and items or keep them for
the bonus factors they provide (Until someone gets smart and gets enough bullet
protection to HEAL each time they get shot...nice one for working that out).
While trying to do various things like not pissing off the local factions of
fighters and survivors, raiding groups of glory hunters, mutants and monsters
spread liberally around the countryside, finding out whom you were or trying to
get into the reactor to find the grand prize.
That grand prize being a single wish, but the wish granter
is a prick, so it'll back-fire hilariously. If you've ever seen Wish Master
films, you'll know what I'm talking about. "I wish to no longer see this
world in pain and suffering" Bye, bye, eyeballs. It's that kind of wish
granting little bastard.
It takes the story from Roadside Picnic and combines it with
the real world events that happened in Chernobyl, the anomalies and odd items
in the zone, the STALKERS and scavengers that would aid people in finding and
selling items while skipping military cordons but the story and film had a lot
more suspense and potential than the game does in storytelling, but wouldn't
make as much fun to be a game. The overall package however of the first STALKER
game takes the more interesting aspects for action and story and combines them
to create this game.
You'll travel from place to place, trade your items and
weapons for other items and ammo, armour and the usual survival items like med
kits, radiation cure and equipment to give you lights, grenade launchers and
other such fun things. You'll explore derelict buildings avoiding traps and
radiation in the cities and complexes while negating the military turning up to
stop you here and there because as far as they're concerned, nobody should be
making wishes as it can't be controlled so there's a nice little pro-anarchy
notion for your political bullshit comparisons. You'll have to explore how to
shut down defences to let you get closer to the big prize and suffer the
hallucinations accompanying it while skipping back and forth and fighting
almost every step of the way.
The physics engine is gorgeous, if a little clunky in
places. Bullets punch through as far as they would through wood, metal and
concrete so seeing a guy taking cover behind wood you can machinegun his body
into a ragdoll through the barrier he's hidden behind. Bounce grenades off the
walls nearby to land near him to flush him out or charge in with a double
barrel shotgun and unload your pseudo-penis into his face. Breaking parts of
buildings can cause other parts to topple and fall upon opponents and launching
barrels via explosions into people to kill them is always rewarding to observe.
The anomalies play with the physics even further by occasionally launching you
into the air if you wander into one, dragging you into the sky and ripping you
apart or electrocuting you with high damage shocks (or heal if you're immune to
shocks and electrics).
The story is played through in finding PDAs of dead people
you're sent to find or follow a path towards the main goal of working out whom
you are and the truth behind the wish maker, which side of the conflict to take
and ultimately determine whether to be a shitbag or a saint in the very obvious
moral choice system of "nice guy" vs. "scumbagbastard guy".
You can entertain yourself with various side quests to kill other STALKERs in
the zone, hunt wildlife (and it's VERY wild in some places) beat the arbitrary
arena fights that seem to litter free-roam games these days to become king-dong
of the arena. There's little here that hasn't been done before in say other
games but the stylish presentation and grotty feeling really sells the
environment and emersion is... where it falls down.
Originally the game was going to be full roaming, huge area
with exploration akin to Morrowind, Skyrim, fallout etc. Vehicles could be
commandeered and driven, anomalies would be randomly moved around when blow
outs happened (you get only one, it's scripted and you have to be indoors to
survive radiation death day), other STALKERS could finish quests for you or
even beat the game and make their own wishes. Most of this was scrapped and now
you get key "areas" and upon reaching the end of such an area, you
get "would you like to move on" and it RIPS you out of the story and
game's immersive properties. That said, the game is fantastic at the setup of
suspense and horror when scavenging inside the bigger installations and being
attacked out of seemingly nowhere by creatures that turn invisible or can rip
your consciousness from your mind and throw it back with psychic blasts. Moving
around the towns and the city itself is sadly limited by the usual debris that
blocks all doors and windows you could get inside had it not been there while
hyper-powerful and super-armed enemies are hitting you with death from above, a
little one-sided but knock one down and steal the gun for a BIG boost in your
fight back.
The attention to detail is lavished lovingly in this game
and it shows, even when running around the reactor buildings themselves in the
final fights and being teleported through anomalies left and right while combating
the same people that tried to sell you down the road with bullshit, gets
intense in the final moments and feels more like a fulfilling payoff than the
wish making itself (yep, those are bad endings). The final product is so trimmed
down from what was originally promised and moved back from the grand ideas and
story we were all sold, I can imagine that through the effort put in, the
decision to do so couldn't have been taken lightly and would have been a huge
blow the actual designers and programmers. You can feel the dedication in the
game and the fact it's a fraction of what they wanted to deliver (and videos
and demos show that there WAS those things in there) would have been soul
destroying to have to do.
What STALKER falls down on is variation. You'll enter a new
area, kill a few people, take their guns and ammo and trade off your older guns
and ammo, and repeat this with each new area. Once the bigger more powerful
guns come into play, you'll stick with those and load up on ammo, of which
there is plenty, and keep running and gunning to find new items and scavenge
further. There are a few different monsters in the game from large mutants, to
stealthy ninja monsters that turn translucent, to psychic attacking gnome/dwarf
things to dogs and blink dogs which generate fake dogs. In the bosses, there
are a few more ethereal creatures but not all that many altogether. Humans
range from military with high power guns and usually difficult to take on,
scavengers with lower guns, clan members aligned with their respective groups
that will have their own weapons, some will be armed in exosuits making them
walking tanks most people will fear but still die from a headshot from event
the crappiest pea-shooter. If you're accurate with a rifle and scope, no human
enemy will be a threat. Add in a rocket launcher for yourself and it's easy
street until sheer numbers MIGHT overwhelm you. Take your time and use cover
and there's little challenge here at all.
That said, it's a good game with great potential that was
sadly cut short either by meddling from the executives or skipped deadlines. I
have heard that various mods can be installed for people to play the game
closer to how it was originally envisioned but that takes a little trust on the
part of others to deliver that and not to bollocks up your game in the process.
Well worth a look however just to see how an apocalyptic survival game could
and should be done.
I'd wish you to stop reading but likely my hands will fall
off to stop anything else I write ever to be written aga...
No comments:
Post a Comment