STALKER... this game came so close to a five out of five yet a few glitches and missing features prevent it from leaping over the final hurdle into becoming a true classic.

History: STALKER actually has a development history longer then most FPS games (yet nowhere nearly as long as DNF,) and there was even speculation that development had collapsed under the weight of it's own ambition. Yet obviously, the game did eventually manage to see the light of day. While obviously things had to be cut and many of the features that got the ax would have been grand, the end result is still has many high points.

Gameplay: Think Real Life- The FPS and you have a good idea what to expect. STALKER manages to successfully straddle FPS and RPG mechanics in a way that hasn't been really done since Deus Ex. Your avatar handles like a character in a FPS but at the same time, he gets hungry, he gets hurt and starts to bleed out, he can get irradiated (hey, it's Chernobyl,) and you can juggle between a dozen different suits of armor and a number of assualt rifles, pistols, shotguns, and other weapons, all in both NATO and Warsaw Pact flavors.
The gameworld likewise is a character almost on it's own. Every level is modeled after an actual physical region in Chernobyl and somehow manages to feel... lived in. There are decayed factories and mills that have subcumbled to weeds, abandoned villages that you can almost imagine people living in, and secret underground laboratories that radiate a creepy aura as the player plows through them.
If I had one complaint, it's that the game still lags and occasionally glitches on my machine. But then again, that the problem becomes tolerable once the graphics are turned down.

Graphics: Even on the lower settings, the color scheme manages to convey a sense of decay and neglect in the abandoned buildings and junkyards overgrown with weeds. Not quite as awesome as Oblivion is supposed to be on its highest settings, but still pretty good stuff.

Replay Value: It's not as free-roaming as Grand Theft Auto, there is a main storyline that you are occasionally forced to take part in and drags you through every point of interest. However, Chernobyl is a big place with a lot to explore. There's a good chance you may not find it all on the first run even IF you play like a urban ninja. Plus there are seven different endings you can get depending on how you play the game (although frankly, five of them are really crappy.)

Fun Factor: I believe the basic question is, is this game fun? Simply put, yes. This is probably the first FPS where I have fought with mercenaries while both of us were on two seperate roof tops at DIFFERENT ends of the level. Granted, it's hard at times and it was only was with the latest patch that the game is mostly stable, but I still manage to have quite a bit of fun.

Learning Curve: Instant!

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STALKER is the child of FPS and RPG, set in a wasteland created by the Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor incident in 1986. The area affected is labeled the Zone, and quarantined from the rest of the world. However, despite the presence of dangerous mutants, people break in to get the 'artifacts' scattered about the Zone, mainly because they're extremely valuable. These people are referred to as Stalkers.

STALKER drops you into the game with Amnesia (how original), so even you don't know who you are. Throughout the game, you'll be able to make friends by helping people, and enemies by fighting them. Sometimes this spans as far as clans. You may help one clan in a mission against another and, although you now have one clan who will look out for you from time to time, you have one who will try to rip you to pieces from time to time. It's the decisions like this that govern how well future missions can go. I should know, I got my ass kicked pretty damn badly on the last mission because of this.

STALKER is, however, the biggest disappointment since Halo 2. During development, we were promised huge free-roaming spaces, drivable vehicles, disease, the need to sleep, drivable vehicles, mutants fighting over territory, and so on... However somewhere along the line, this took a great big kicking, and was removed from the finished game. It's a good game regardless, however it is a shame to see all this gone.

The bottom line is it's quite a good game, even if it's missing a lot of what we were promised.

Learning Curve: Takes a second

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I really enjoyed this game. Is absolutely amazing. I had the feeling that it was going to be not as good as HL2, but it's as good as it. Where HL2 fails, STALKER strikes. And vice-versa.

GRAPHICS - 9/10
Easily the best graphics I've ever seen. Not only amazing illumination effects, but also high polygonal charge, awesome textures, wonderful animation... the game's athmosphere is simply great (the first underground mission is scary). The downside is the high-end machine it requires for running well. The physics in the game aren't perfect, but far above from decent.

GAMEPLAY - 10/10
HL2 is simple, linear, instant. STALKER is exactly the opposite: complex, opened and slow. There's a RPG feeling in the whole game. In STALKER, you've got the feeling of having to survive. There's no other point than surviving. You are in the Zone, you forgot your memories and you just know that you must survive and recover your memories. To accomplish such a thing, you must know who is "Strelok" - in the PDA you start with, it's written "find and kill Strelok".
The game is free-roamish. You have an actual storyline and you have to follow it, though you can advance in the game with any method you want - and that's what I like the most about STALKER. You can just go a la Rambo killing everything that moves, you can go the Mission: Impossible doing amazing stunts to get to one place quickly, you can use stealth and kill everyone with a silent knife slash after sneaking up behind, you can kill, get the corpse's objects and run until you can't move anymore, you can just go killing only when neccessary...
Also, the items/stamina interaction system is pretty well implemented. Simply, you have a defined amount of stamina, and you use it to run and jump. The more weight you have in your bag, the more ammount of stamina you lose when running/jumping. Weapons and some items have also a "durability" system. Basically, the more you use them, the worse they get, up to the point of becoming useless.
Worth mentioning is the A-Life system. If you kill a whole mercenary camp and a pack of mutant dogs appear, they'll go for you. But if the mercenaries are alive, they will fight with the dogs, doing the cheap work for you (of course, you will face them after). Or, if you kill some bandits at some spot, more will appear over the next day or so. The allies are also influenced by it: kill someone from any faction, and the rest will attack you. Not all the factions can be befriended with though: bandits, mercenaries and the Monolith faction members are always enemies.
The AI is unique in this game. If you find someone wounded and give it a health pack, it will become your friend and maybe even give you money. Of course, STALKERs, bandits, and humans in general, will fight intelligently. They will cover, flee or taunt the enemy depending on the situation. If you kill a mutant dog, the rest of the pack will flee.

SOUND - 7/10
The sound is just good. The weapons firing are realistic, footsteps sounds vary from surface to surface, etc.

DURATION AND REPLAY VALUES - 9/10
Simply amazing. Not only the storyline is really long, not only there are several different endings, not only the A-Life makes the game virtually endless, but also there are nearly infinite secondary missions to keep you entertained. These missions are usually "kill that STALKER/mutant", "clean this area of [insert enemy here]", "find this weapon/object/anomaly"...
Ther e are also a lot of mods, in forms of add-ons, patches, reskins...

CONCLUSION
STALKER is just a must-play. There are big pieces of FPS and RPG in it, and tiny pieces of other genres too. The game is long, beautiful, fun, dynamic and absorbent.
FPS total freaks might dislike it for the fact of being semi-RPG, but as I said, you can go Postal and kill everything alive. It requires an high-end machine to run too, but graphics are NOT what matter most.
The learning curve isn't short. There's a FPS after all, though the RPG and such elements make it longer to master.

Learning Curve: Takes a while

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I am so glad this game is finally out, Some people refer to it is the fps version of Fallout, i tend to agree, I am very happy to see a game that is an FPS carry over elements of an RPG.

It just proves, that there is no such thing as a fixed genre, various games can be "hybrid" but still hold the main/important elements of the 2 or more genres it can be classified as.

Great buy, definitely go buy it if you liked fallout.

Learning Curve: Instant!

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The first person shooter version of Fall Out. It may have taken 6 years for this sucker to finally get released, but at least it got released. And oh was it worth the wait! The ambiance of this dark and gritty game, combined with the open-ended sand box exploration, makes this one of the best (hybrid) shooters to come along in a very long time.

The multiplayer experience (maps and game mechanics) has me by the irradiated nads and won't let me go!

Learning Curve: Takes a second

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STALKER is one of the best games I have played in years. It is an absolute joy to roam freely around the Zone and observe the amazing A-Life system at work. I cannot even begin to tell you all the amazing, and unscripted, moments I've gotten myself into because of the A-Life system. There are some bugs in the game, and if you are running Windows Vista, as I am, wait until there is another patch out, or you'll be experiencing some major crashes. However, the gameplay completely makes up for any bugs you might experience, and I can tell you, the Dev team is hard at work making this baby shine. Their first patch they fixed 70-some bugs. It's a gem of freeform FPS/RPG gameplay.

Learning Curve: Takes a while

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This game is great, and is probably the best free-roam FPSRPG in years. There are lots of complaints about this game, such as bugs, bad graphics, etc. The Truth is, while the game fights with any DX10 hardware (Vista), most other PC's run it great, and it looks great, people have just been spoiled looking at Crysis 24/7. Since this game is a few years old with updated textures, the poly count in low enough not to lag, while the textures look brilliant, so you get great graphics with less lag.

This game is untraditional because of how different and more realistic is it from different FPS's. Sure, your gun jams in Gears of War, but the system is easy to beat with a good eye and reaction time. In Stalker, your gun seems to jam at the most inconvenient time, just like real life. You also don't encounter enemies every 5 feet, but rather bases and makeshift camps of bandits, and full-fledged HQ's of different factions. You also have to carry about 1000 rounds with you at all times if you don't want to worry about running out, because good luck finding ammo in an already looted underground silo. Which brings me into my next topic, weapons.

The weapons in Stalker are supurb. There's about 10 different ammo sizes, with armor piercing, regular, hollow-capped, hollow, sniping, and sub-sonic ammo types for most caliber. Plus shotguns have dart, elephant shot (one huge bullet), and scatter shot ammos. There's standard AK ammo, which is mostly found in low-value zones. There's 3 basic weapons that operate off AK ammo, including the AK 74, AK 74U (submachine gun), and Okoban (modified AK 74 for better handling, accuracy and rate of fire). There's then NATO ammo, which has about 10 different guns designed for it. This is basically the most available ammo in the last parts of the game. There's then 2 different typed of sniper rounds, sub-sonic and sniping. Sub-sonic is used in a special silenced and no-flash sniper rifle, and a machine gun that also uses that ammo, plus a slightly worse gun. There's then 4 main types of pistol ammo. The worst pistol uses the most common type of rounds in the game. The "best" pistol fires sniper rounds which are extremely deadly in a fast firing pistol. There's also 5 types of grenades, as well as a grenade launcher and 4 types of grenades for that. There's also a RPG, but the ammo for it is bugged and weighs too much to be worth it. All this, plus you find many modded types of weapons, such as an AK 74 with a insane fire rate (the best in the game) and that sniper pistol I talked about. But there's more! Most weapons can be equipped with a scope, grenade launcher, and silencer, so making the perfect weapon requires a lot of finding parts. Even with all that, you find that ammo is very scarce in the outer regions of the zone. This may be the only game where you actually are forced to use your knife a lot if you are not careful and waste your ammo on body shots rather than sniping in for head shots.

See how diverse just the ammo and gun system is? Not to mention how well the bullet dynamics are done. Plus the shadows are the best I have ever seen outside of Crysis, they just look real. And there is so much more to this game, it is truly worth your money.

Learning Curve: Takes a while

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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has been in development for a very long time, longer than Half-Life 2, and longer than many other blockbuster titles of recent years, and yet it falls short of these other games voulentarily in favour of an innovative open-world rpg style FPS.

The game is far from perfect. There isn't nearly as much voice acting as text, which I certainly can live with, but it's quite inconsistant in choosing who actually gets to speak. The graphics are dated, understandable, but they're still dated. Also, at the time of this review (March 23, 2007) the DX9 dynamic lighting is almost completely broken, and if you expect playable frame-rates, you're probably going to have to use the DX8 static lighting.

Speaking of bugs, many review sites and forums have been reporting issues with crashing on Windows Vista, however I have not yet run into any of these problems, and there is supposedly a patch in the works.

The A.I. is some of the best I've seen lately, it reacts appropriately when injured, sometimes retreating when it figures out you're tougher than it, but more often than not you'll end up flanked by some hot-shot dude with a machine gun, and that really adds a nice touch, however, the low ammount of health the game gives you in addition to enemies that can actually aim makes STALKER a little difficult, so PC shooter novices beware.

The multiplayer is fun for a while, but it's nothing you're going to see a ton of people playing.

To sum it up, STALKER is a competant entry to the FPS and RPG genres, and is a must have for fans of Deus Ex or System Shock, or anyone anticipating the upcoming Bioshock.

I'm sure I've left a few things out, but if you have any questions, PM me

Learning Curve: Takes a while

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