Just got back from a three hour game of “Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl” and I’ll admit that I was pleasantly surprised and the game is really good. I won’t comment if it was well worth all the delays, I’ll only be able to do that once I play it some more. But the signs so far are good for that as well.
In the game you the player, assume the role of one of the artifact hunters that inhibit “The Zone”. “The Zone” is an area of land around the Chernobyl power plant after an explosion rips it apart. The surrounding land is contaminated by the radiation, in some places so far as to bend the laws of physics and biology.
The game itself is a hybrid of FPS and RPG. More so FPS. The RPG elements concentrate purely on the storyline and character interaction, so there are no levels, no experience, no stats or anything like that. I wish more FPS games were like Stalker actually, imagine an FPS where you can go anywhere you want to, talk to people, get jobs/missions from them, or just go around killing things if that’s your sort of thing, and all that with a compelling background story.
No more running down a single possible path to the end like in other games. No more, enter room one, kill everything that moves, and move on to room 2, and repeat. In Stalker you’re free to wander around, and when you feel like it, you can return to the main storyline and continue that.
Oh and another great thing about Stalker is that it looks great, even better than the last Might and Magic game, and all that without the horrendous saving and loading times.