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My super negative knee jerk review -

Maybe I play too much cod4 on my 360. Maybe I’ve been out of the PC shooter game too long. All I know is I went into my STALKER experience last weekend with high hopes and a sense I got a steal (19.99 on steam). The experience began with a bit of a misstep, the game had to be downloaded, deleted and downloaded again, as the first time didn’t work, and I couldn’t get the game to launch. After that, the game started smoothly; and really continued my sense of “awesome” with the whole steam experience. I especially like that the download process also takes care of the install, so once it’s down, it’s ready to go.

But, that’s about where the fun ended for me with this game. I was treated to the most needlessly difficult experience of my life. I won’t mince words. STALKER has more ways to kill your character than any game I’ve ever played. First, you can die, if you get shot you die, if a dog or wild boar attacks you, you die, if a mutant does crazy mutant stuff to you, you die. So you’ve got a health meter, and that won’t get better over time, either you find yourself a med kit or, you guessed it, you die.

Not only that, but if you get a nagging flesh wound, from say a wild dog attack, and it breaks skin, you’ll bleed. If you bleed for too long… … you die. Health packs won’t help you here, especially not when that precious medicine goes spilling out the gaping hole in your chest. For this malady, you’ll need bandages. If you don’t wrap your wounds quick enough, you die. On top of that, you’re in the post melt-down remains of an alternate history of Chernobyl. For all of you non-history buffs, Chernobyl was a nuclear reactor that melted down, which in this reality leaves pockets of radiation some visible, most not, that will randomly and slowly (as radiation is wont to do), kill you. So if you don’t take anti radiation medicine in time - - you die.

Now that we’ve covered the many ways you can die, I’d like to touch on the other part of the equation – all in all, there are just far too few ways to stay alive. Bullets are scarce, armour is all but non-existent early on, and bandages and med kits are not growing on trees or just waiting behind brightly colored crates to be exposed. Even when you find bullets, your gun will jam, frequently while you are shooting it. When it’s not jammed, it’s slowly degrading over time.

The gameplay itself is not much better. Because your weapons are so unreliable, it’s not exactly easy to point your gun at a bad guy with much chance of success. In most cases, your best course of attack is to avoid confrontation, sulking around in the shadows, hoping that you aren’t going to run into some other form of invisible radioactive death. The times that you are actually forced to action are marred by mediocre ai with little difference between wild dogs and wild soldiers other than the ability of the one to carry guns. Both will tirelessly come after you, find you no matter where you hide or run to, and shoot you through the thickest, most maddening amounts of cover, as you sit there, bleeding in your solitary, ammoless ineffectual heap.

Maybe I just came to this game looking for the wrong things. Maybe I’m just looking at it wrong, but I loved oblivion, I love the original hyper instant death in ghost recon (for the pc), and just finished cod4 on veteran, but this game just took anything that might be considered “fun” in a video game and left it out. Thankfully, coronary artery disease and kidney failure are not amongst the frequent dangers in this game, at least not the early stages.

So what say you STALKER fans, other than being a useless noob, what could I do to enjoy this game more?