S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (Stalker) Call of Pripyat Game PC

If, when it was released, Shadow of Chernobyl had run without bugs or the need for incessant patching, I would have loved it to tiny bits. As it is, I sort-of loved it. The atmosphere and setting were brilliant, but having the game periodically decide it didn't like me really put my back up and I very nearly never bothered finishing it. I'm glad I did, mind you, but it didn't half irritate me at times getting there.Call of Pripyat is very much more of the same but this time without the random crashing and patching and as such it's a much improved playing experience. So why only four stars? Because this time the Zone feels a bit samey. I've been here before, killed snorks and found anomolies, and I couldn't shake the feeling that I wasn't really seeing anything new.What I really very, very much liked about Call of Pripyat is the way the plotting doesn't fall into any of the standard game tropes. How often have we played FPS' which start as a normal military mission and - totally unexpectedly (yeah, right) - turn into something completely different with boss battles and terrifying conpiracies? Well, in Call of Pripyat you're sent to rescue some helicopter crews, and that's just what you do. You can take your time about it - do side missions, hunt wierd artifacts and engage with the society which has sprung up in the Zone - but your mission remains the same. It might sound odd, but as the end sequence played through I had a huge grin on my face.It's worth playing just for that end sequence. It plays through differently depending on what you did, which side missions you took, which of the friends you make lived and died and so on - in the way that Fallout 3 promised but just didn't deliver. The first time I played, discovering that my failure to complete a fairly dull early side mission ultimately resulted in the deaths of many of my game-friends was enough to prompt me to fire the game up and start again. It's that entertaining and thought-provoking.So...I'd like to give it five stars, but the mutants and artefacts just weren't as terrifyingly unexplained this time around. There are no moments in Call of Pripyat which I found as gripping as the first descent into the Yantar labs in Shadow of Chernobyl, for exmaple. The overall gameplay experience is much better and smoother this time around, and the scripting actually works. I just wish they'd done this well with the first game. If they had, I'd still be playing it.

Since I rank  S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl (PC DVD)  as one of my favourite games, I was all set to fall instantly in love with Call of Pripyat. After my first play-through I'm a little disappointing. Don't get me wrong, it's still an involving, enjoyable gaming experiences and worth a play, but its lost almost all the things that made me fall in love with the series to begin with.On first impressions I was very taken with the free roaming areas and the improved AI of many of the old foes, the freedom to move around an open world give the illusion at least of a vast sprawling wilderness, there was a greater variety of fauna around the place for you to kill, and the NPC interaction was very intuitive. The best feature by far was the quality of the side missions, real effort has gone into making each one unique and interesting, a vast improvement on SoC's 'go to N, kill X of Y' formula for instant tedious grind. I actually complete most most the fun rather than rewards, which is exactly how games should motivate you. Each mission tells a story which often tie into other plot lines giving the game greater depth and more dimensions, other tassels like weapon modding, hotkeys and artifact detectors were convenient too.but...Despite the intricacy of the side quests, the story missions felt dull and aimless by comparison, centering around an insultingly easy orienteering exercise with no really climactic bits save a couple near the end (i.e. getting in and then out of Pripyat), and even that abrupt finish was flaccid and unsatisfying compared to SoC all-out War of a finale,as if a lot more 'game' had been planned. Speaking of easy, I originally had it on the second difficulty in light of how unforgiving a mistress SoC had been, but had to crank it up to get any challenge, I'm not boasting, along with the more diverse wildlife from the start came immediate access to the better equipment as well, loosing all the pacing of the first game, within an hour I had one of the strongest rifles in the game and with repairing and modding became near invincible, I drowned in ammunition and med pickups spilling out my lock boxes and by the end they were giving me these AND repairing stuff for free! Furthermore everyone you meet is sickeningly friendly- even bandits, detecting another PDA just meant someone to chat to; no threat, no suspense, which brings me to my main complaint;the atmosphere.I fell in love with SoC for the spirit squishing, nerve twisting, hollow, echoing loneliness that oppressed me like a tone of very sad bricks the moment I stepped out of Cordon, the creeping tension in your spine that your being followed through that laboratory from the shadows, and the knowledge that your vastly ill equipped to deal with it. Never has a game made me feel so vulnerable whilst holding a gun, the real need to hide whilst enemies pass by. My most treasured gaming moment is still cowering hungry in a dark corner, bleeding to death and down to my last pistol clip with unseen enemies creeping in from every side.That was FPS survival-horror at its best, CoP's liberal attitude to, well EVERYTHING and happy-go-lucky NPC community deflated all the atmosphere, made a bad joke of the survival and blasted the horror into orbit. Sure they tried to ape the old creepy lab crawling towards the end but by then all pretense and consequence was lost and it was more akin to playing whack-a-mole against sock puppets then fighting for your life.but that's me, perhaps i was spoiled by SoC to expect CoP to be something its not, thus being blinded to it's charms, perhaps I'm just an amazingly skilled gamer, perhaps I'm a turquoise walrus in space, who knows? CoP is still worth a look for old S.T.A.L.K.E.R fans for the side missions alone (though I'm still unsure what was calling whom to Prypyat in the end), so in my opinion, newbies; start at the beginning.