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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