Review | S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

Format: PC | Genre: FPS | Publisher: Bit Composer | Developer: GSC Game World | Release date: 05/02/10 | RRP: £29.99

As expected, Call of Pripyat’s story is a functional one – it’s the world itself that holds your interest, rather than the tale that plays out within it. Indeed, it’s a good ten hours before much of anything happens in the thrust of the main missions. Until then, it’s an almost purely exploratory game, with different narrative threads hinted at but very little overtly revealed. But Call of Pripyat excels through its portrayal of life within the Zone. Characters now have depth and substance, and side missions tell their own self-contained stories. In essence, where Shadow of Chernobyl was about the Zone itself, and Clear Sky was about the struggle for control over it, Call of Pripyat is about the individual people and groups who live there, and what their day-to-day life is like in this harrowing place.

PLAYING FAIR
It remains primarily a first-person shooter, albeit one in which you’d do best to avoid combat wherever possible. There’s an improved stealth system integrated, with Thief-esque meters informing you how visible and audible you are at a given time – although it’s put to minimal use, which is a shame. Notably, it’s a less profoundly difficult game than before. You’ll still hammer through a hefty dose of medkits and bandages throughout the game, and there’s pretty much no chances of surviving the endgame without a decent armoured suit, but things have been levelled out rather nicely. Call of Pripyat isn’t the sort of game, for example, that will happily place a level transition directly in front of an enemy machinegunner, or drop you into an irradiated bunker filled with both enemy forces and invisible mutants. Instead, its challenges are fair ones, and death is almost always your own fault, rather than the game’s refusal to be reasonable.

AI’s toned back too, but it works. Human enemies still fire pot-shots from behind cover, but they’re less inclined to dart and dive around at a supernatural pace, or throw grenades which land inch-perfectly on your skull a split-second before they detonate. Combat is still wonderfully shaky and imprecise – less about fancy gunplay, more about felling your foes as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Managing the Zone’s economy is the biggest task of the game, though – in the first two-thirds, at least. Your transition to the final area is absolutely reliant on having an enormous amount of money to buy a particular protective suit. Until then, there’s comparatively little coin to be made out of completing the excellent side missions, which means regular walks through the wilderness in search of artifacts – stat-boosting, incredibly valuable and inconveniently invisible objects that reside in deadly anomalous areas – to sell on for high prices. One early character even collects them to sell on to researchers, and offers an astounding amount of money to anyone who can bring in specific items in time for his deadline. Weapons break and armour degrades, reperable only by technicians who charge through the roof. It’s a bleak, unforgiving world to live in, and a magical place to visit for the 15-20 hours of Call of Pripyat’s duration.

ALL ALONE
It’s never as relentlessly terrifying as the first game. Those excited by GSC’s promise of imposing underground bunkers will be disappointed to find only one section that matches Shadow of Chernobyl’s absolute horror (notably, it’s the highlight of the whole game). But that’s not to say this is any less engrossing, or anything but hugely atmospheric. Call of Pripyat is a lonely game, one that constantly goes out of its way to make you feel as isolated as possible. In many ways, this is the strongest offering of the three: a noticeably more mature effort that still retains everything that has always made Stalker the extraordinary uniquity it is.

And that’s important. No one else makes games like this. Call of Pripyat’s final third may disappoint, the engine might be showing its age, and the odd bug might still rear its head. But it’s undeniably Stalker – and its astonishing world is constructed with more elegance and attention to detail than ever before. By Lewis Denby

8/10

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