I was eagerly awaiting the release of this when I first heard about it. It seemed fantastic! A game set in the Ukraine with Russian weaponry and atmospheric.

After waiting years for it to come out, I bought the special edition and installed and started. Great fun. Until I found I could only run it on the lowest graphics settings on my AMD 3500+ and nVidia 6200 based machine. The game quickly lost my interest when I found out that the torch beam does not show up on the minimum settings, thus making the game pretty unplayable!! I sold the game and thought nothing more of it.

Anyhow, I bought a new machine for my final year of university that was powerful enough for me to run computational fire models for my degree. Because the easiest (and almost the cheapest) option was a Dell machine, it also had a fairly decent graphics card, a nVidia 8800GT. Now I’d given up on PC gaming but this breathed some life back into my gaming and when I saw STALKER was cheap on Steam, I bought it. For just over £10, I thought it’ll definitely run on my new Intel Quad core and 8800GT combo.

Installed again and was very happy I can play with pretty much everything at max and quite happily play on my wide screen with 1440×900.
All I can see the game is very atmospheric. From having friendly stalkers sat around a camp fire, playing a guitar and singing along in Russian to investigating abandoned dark buildings, the game always makes you think your actually there.

The weapons in the game are very good as well. For someone interested in military gear it’s quite a nice game. At the start of it, the guns predominantly Russian as you fight the military a lot. AK74 feature heavily and the guns are well modelled with slight differences to the real ones, specifically to make it better for the game. IE, the AK74 has the cocking handle on the left of the gun as you hold it in your right hand. It’s a bit more obvious then that you cock it each time you reload. Later on, you get other weapons. The first time I used an SA80 (with a different name in game, possibly due to trademarks), I almost had to stop dancing around the place as it also contained a SUSAT and I was then quite happily picking off zombies and mutants from 4x away! Though this did have the downside of seeing some rather nasty mutants well before I fought any…

Also the jam function is quite a nice touch (but not whilst your under attack!). Basically the more you use a weapon, the more it deteriorates and thus the more likely it is to jam.

Overall the game is very tense and fighting through some of the areas populated by just mutants is quite nasty. Once or twice I’ve physically jumped back from the PC in fear. Luckily though in this game, flash lights never run out and unlike Doom 3, you can use both a gun and the light as the light is should mounted (if your the same as every other person in the game). The quest are fairly good as well. A mixture of this and that, never being to much of pick this up, shoot these people etc. it’s a very immersive game. The game storyline is great for drawing you in.

Downside is the long walks between some places. A few places in the game require some long walking between the two which isn’t good. Also, at times I can be quite hard. All I can see about it being hard is explore more. It can become much easier if you do that side quest you turned down etc. It’s worth asking people about anything and everything and looking around.

Just out of interest, I managed to stumble upon a Half Life reference in the game.