Anyone grabbed a copy of STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl yet?

So far my conclusions are:

-Great athmosphere! Very reminiscent of Fallout1, Doom3(but then less gore) and a bit Thief3 - Shalebridge Cradle. This game definately has it's scary points. And not scary in the simple 'we'll spawn a demon behind you' thing, but scary in how the light obscures corners, the abandonded feel of installations and the dreariness of the world. You'll definately feel the need to run away once the geiger counter starts clicking!

-Combat is fun once you get a more accurate gun. The first few are frustratingly inaccurate, but once you have a more accurate one(can be found in the third area already) you'll be having more fun with it.

-Like the above point, the game starts off a bit slow and confusing. But once you've been to the third area, you can really start to explore and roam about. Be careful not to choose any sidemissions until you've been at "the BAR" zone.

-The game seems a bit buggy concerning hidden caches and stashes. Sometimes the stash icon won't go away after you've looted it, and you'll encounter many of these. Also, some stashes use other icons only visible on the big map, and not on the radar.

-The same thing goes for some quests. Some quests won't have working goal-icons, and some quests will just pop up when you're roaming about. Thankfully, quests are rarely necessary so don't feel the constant need to quickload if something like "protect the base" fails.

-The respawning thing (especially with bandits in the first two areas) seemed to be a bit over the top. You could have just annihilated a base and another team would spawn. I haven't had the time to check if the patch fixes this, but I sure hope so. In any case, this isn't a major grievance as you can just avoid these places.

EDIT: oh bugger [img]graemlins/awcrap.gif[/img] , I posted this in the wrong forum. Will someone be as kind as to move this thread to the miscellaneous games?

[ 03-27-2007, 04:34 PM: Message edited by: JrKASperov ]

Sounds like a very promising game. I've read a few reviews, and not all of them were positive, but I can definitely see a lot of potential here.

My brother tried it but didn't like it so gave it to me. I haven't tried it yet because I'm out of room on my hard drives.

Some of the reasons he didn't like it is that it barely supported his video card and would only work in windowed mode, he encountered a bunch of bugs, and on top of that thought the graphics were several years old. I'll let you know what I think of it once I've tried it, in a couple of days maybe.

[ 04-01-2007, 10:34 AM: Message edited by: Luvian ]