Every Stalker Game Reviewed

hey guys before this video absolutely convinces you to throw massive amounts of your free time away on a ukrainian fps i just wanted to let you know i was able to strike a deal with the folks over at good old games right now the entire series is on a 70 discount now i'm not really sure how long that's going to last so you might want to jump on it soon so if you've even sort of considered taking a dive into some of the most immersive gaming you can find well you might as well do so at a severe discount i'll have links down in the description for the sale and well what the hell are you waiting for go play some damn stalker then yes yes that's an order for as long as i can remember i've always been attracted to the more immersive elements in video games the little design choices that made me feel more like i was a part of the game's world and for a while i thought it didn't get any better than re2 final fantasy 7 or vampire the masquerade bloodlines in the realm of immersion i mean how could it these were some of the best most detailed narrative worlds i'd ever come across well allow me to introduce you guys to stalker a series that holds an incredibly important place in my heart a franchise that would forever change the way i look at video games but more importantly it was a gateway through which i experienced one of the richest and most fully realized fictional worlds ever created so if it's cool with you guys i would like very much to lead you through the anomaly laden area surrounding pripyat with the goal of uncovering just a portion of this unexplored landscape and hey if we end up coming across some rare artifacts i'm sure none of you would say no to a lifetime of wealth and fame so if you're keen on joining in on this little expedition make sure to check your weapons and ready your head because you never really know what to expect once you've crossed that threshold into what may as well be a whole new world and hey speaking of which it looks like we're here stalkers welcome to the zone [Music] that's it all right listen i know you're here for stalker but there is an obligatory history lesson that absolutely needs to be understood before we move forward stalker shadow of chernobyl is the narrative product of two pieces of media most of you have likely never even heard of before and i think it's fitting we start with the catalyst for all of this the excellent roadside picnic a sci-fi novel written by the strugatsky brothers in the early 70s the title being a reference to one scientist's description of a world-changing event in the book where aliens visit earth the visit appearing to this scientist to resemble a group getting together and driving to some remote area so they can enjoy a picnic all the signs they were there being compared to tire tracks being left in the dirt and the reality-bending artifacts left behind basically equating to trash left after such a normal excursion a roadside picnic was an incredible look into a very grounded realistic world despite the sci-fi nature of the story most of the book is spent setting up little mysteries like a phenomenon that some people near these alien landing sites experienced where they heard a noise so loud they couldn't describe it and after hearing that noise each of them immediately went permanently blind you know little things that we'll never really get an explanation for making them all the more intriguing i would wholeheartedly recommend checking this book out as it is easily one of my favorite pieces of fiction but we're not exactly finished here [Music] eight or so years after a roadside picnic came the film stalker written by the same brothers responsible for its inspiration stalker is the tale of a guide with enough balls to enter the exclusion zone an area cordoned off by the military because some sort of event has happened there leading to spots where physics are altered and reality is bent into new forms in the center of the zone sits a room that is rumored to grant wishes the movie's plot chronicles this stalker leading two people through the zone's hazards with the intention of getting them to this wish granter now i will admit up front this is a very long very slow watch but one that's absolutely worth sitting through personally i've always really enjoyed the stalker film just based on how much i love the interconnected narrative world that is the exclusion zone but i was really surprised to find out that this russian art house movie is held in really high esteem with film buffs so if you're just getting into these games and wondering where you can find more of the same start with the roadside picnic i know books aren't exactly the first thing a hardened gamer is going to reach for but trust me if you like this type of story you'll love seeing where it all came from as for the movie while it's much more subtle than the book and has a heavier focus on philosophical conundrums it's still very much worth the watch i'm sure the cinephiles and the audience would get a kick out of it regardless but fans of the stalker games will undoubtedly revel in the chance to get a new perspective on the zone got a job for you marked one okay so what does all this have to do with the game at hand well stalker shadow of chernobyl is the product of equal parts roadside picnic and stalker the film it borrows nearly its entire backstory from the aforementioned film and book but before you start screaming about intellectual property theft the game's developers did add a very important element to this concoction a real life event so damn fitting and narratively appropriate you'd think all the media leading up to this was some kind of nostradamus like prediction one of the atomic reactors at the turnable atomic power plant in the city of kiev was damaged and there is speculation in moscow that people were injured and may have died instead of dealing with strange alien visitors coming to earth and abruptly leaving shadow of chernobyl uses the titular chernobyl nuclear power plants meltdown as a catalyst for its events and like i said before the marriage between these two ideas is almost too damn perfect if you need any more proof of that not long after the meltdown the people who would risk their lives to sneak into the exclusion zone with the goal of bringing back valuable items were actually called stalkers i think we've all heard about art imitating life but very rarely do you hear about life imitating art now don't get me wrong a story about aliens coming to earth never actually being seen and now sifting through what remains of their journey is cool as hell but if i'm being honest explaining all that craziness with a good old-fashioned man-made nuclear disaster well that's just one more step towards being more grounded and now that we have moved into the realm of the game itself we actually have a little more history to cover while stalker shadow of chernobyl did eventually adopt the cnp's meltdown into their mix of stalker meets roadside picnic the game actually started out as a futuristic affair called oblivion lost not a whole lot's known about this build other than what's been shown in leaks and trailers but it seems to share the same obsession with giving the player a massive detailed world to play in after oblivion lost made the change over to shadow of chernobyl it started to gain a bit of steam and in 2001 it was announced with a slated release date of 2003 a date they would end up blowing past by a good four years by the way during development the team at gsc game world would give near-constant previews in the form of screenshots and promotional videos even though the game is nowhere near a finished state at the time even i remember watching some of these previews from way back in the day specifically some kind of an interview on gamespot.com that showed off the game's focus on ballistics and how you can shoot through soft materials like wood but the path your bullets would be altered by it slightly by the way if you've seen that interview please leave a comment because i remember it vividly but i can't seem to find any videos of it and i really need confirmation that i'm not losing my mind here after seeing a few low bit rate trailers i was pretty damn interested despite the fact that i was rocking a compact rosario pre-built that could never dream of running it long swaths of time would go by and most of us would assume stalker was just another piece of vaporware but eventually thq would take an interest in the project and after even more missed release dates we would finally get our hands on stalker shadow of chernobyl alright so i think we're just about current as far as prerequisites go so maybe now is a good time to start talking about what kind of story this homunculus made up of other pieces of media has to tell oh and by the way i know a lot of you who are familiar with the game have already noticed or will notice this but i did use a few mods in this playthrough and yes i will address that eventually first things first though let's find out what the hell we're doing in the zone in the first place this one seems to be alive what a lucky guy shadow of chernobyl starts off with a cutscene of a guy driving a truck full of let's call it mixed cargo and as if living in constant fear of the radioactive hellscape you find yourself in isn't worrying enough you've also got to be on the lookout for rogue lightning bolts after the accident a stalker who's really good at his job attempts to scavenge the site and comes across our main character who's surprisingly still breathing and branded with a tattoo identifying him as a stalker an acronym that stands for scavenger trespasser adventure loner killer explorer and robber he then brings our banged up body to a local trader named sidorovich and since he's the guy who nursed us back to health we sort of own a few favors you do some jobs for me and we're even it's not exactly a one-way deal though he's also willing to help us with our amnesia using the only clue we have a task found on our pda that has us hunting down a fellow stalker named strelok the side goal sadorovich has us looking into is finding a proper route to the center of the zone apparently actually getting to the chernobyl nuclear power plant isn't a walk in the park and the very few that do seem to never be heard from again so here at the start we're given these two goals that are a little more intertwined than it first seems first and foremost we need to ask around about this strela guy and see what he did to warren a bounty and also meet up with more than a few possible connections that might help us find a path into the zone's heart which you might wonder about i mean these guys don't exactly look like the explorer for science and discovery's sake type well to answer that we have a little bit of history to cover in this world the deadly meltdown that occurred at the cnpp went down just as it did irl but this time afterwards scientists and other groups move in to study the effects of the meltdown on the environment along with a few experiments that might need to be done in the sort of place where you can assure no prying eyes are going to see him sometime after this a second and even more devastating accident occurs that you could describe as chernobyl times 10. this second disaster floods the area surrounding the plant with massive amounts of radiation causing some quote-unquote alterations to the natural environment and the people that were unlucky enough to be inside the exclusion zone when it all went down and now the zone acts as some kind of alien world here on earth with elements of the landscape gravity physics and the people in it being altered by the effects of this accident the humans and animals that used to inhabit the zone are now twisted creatures formed from the radiation and some other stuff into brand new species of dangerous threats but most interesting to me some areas have spots where physics stop working in a way we can even comprehend and these are referred to as anomalies anomalies typically only cover a small surface area but can do some amazing things some spots are simple like small strips of land where fire or electricity can literally spawn from nowhere sections of ground where gravity is cranked up to 11 and localized category 5 hurricanes just waiting to suck up an unsuspecting victim into some kind of unnatural vortex alright so why the rundown of all these threats you're gonna face i thought we were covering the story right well anomalies play a huge role in why we all came here in the first place with these things being so deadly you'd think they'd be something you'd want to steer clear of but it's actually quite the opposite if you only knew where i've just been on what i saw see these random patches of absolute chaos have the side effect of producing something called an artifact by combining mundane stuff like concrete metal with extreme heat or moisture incredible amounts of gravitational pressure and sometimes just good old-fashioned radiation the result being a small trinket that houses some kind of unnatural property some of these things can have positive effects like ones that protect anyone holding it from other anomalies or high levels of radiation but the real draw for artifact collecting isn't the personal benefits but instead the high price they could be sold for as you can imagine the scientific community is more than a little interested in rocks that can serve as perpetual energy sources or the discovery of brand new elements so we're all basically here to profit from the absolute buggering these two events did to the planet earth and if we're able to open up a route to the center of the zone a massive cache of undiscovered artifacts will be ours along with the draw of a bit of a folk tale that stalkers have come to call the wish granter an unnatural monolith sitting at the heart of the nuclear power plant that supposedly is able to grant any one wish someone might have so now that we're a little more caught up we can get back to the present in the process of trying to get to the center of the zone we acquire the coolest nickname of the marked one and meet up with all kinds of stalkers who might have a few clues as to where we can find this strelok guy and in my opinion this is one of the most interesting parts of the story for the entire game we keep coming across these small chunks of evidence that strelok ran with a pretty tough crew and each of them were trying to accomplish the same goal we are depending on who you talk to some say he actually did so here we are working our way through all these disparate second hand accounts of what strillock was up to like following a trail of radioactive breadcrumbs first we come across a stalker named fox who had dealings with straylock but after helping him with a little canine issue he's only able to point us in the direction of a guy who can lead us to mole a stalker who's looking for a little help pushing back a military raid on his turf as a reward he points us in the direction of strelok's underground hideout where we find information that leads us to some of strillock's group in the process of that we retrieve a few documents from the military for our buddy sadorovich that leads us to some secret underground labs where we can disable devices that send out psi emissions so strong they essentially melt your brain leaving behind a soulless zombie [Music] so we follow up on some leads which has us coming across the corpses of strelok's teammates who all fell to the zone in one way or another after finding the center using some contacts developed along the way we find out there's a good chance of meeting up with one of the last living members of strelok's entourage if we go back to his hideout underneath agriprom still alive and sadly i won't be able to talk about much more without majorly spoiling the plot here so if you've never played this game and think you might want to skip to the time stamp on screen follow the link in the description or skip past the chapter named spoilers okay all right let's get to spoiling so in the process of meeting up with srilock's last companion we sort of fall prey to one of his booby traps causing us to lose consciousness once we wake up it's the same companion helping us to our feet only he's got some pretty insane news for us it turns out this whole time the guy we've been wanting to kill has been in every room with us he's at every outpost and ran every mile we did and that's because we are strelok you were the one who suggested that we take this by caution at least at least you are still alive now neither of us is too sure why strelok lost his memories and woke up with an order to essentially kill himself but doc's also got a hot tip about the center of the zone according to this guy the wish granter isn't exactly what everyone thinks it is instead of rewarding stalkers by granting their wishes it's used as a distraction to keep them from finding the truth at the heart of the zone so we head off on our way to investigate only now that we've turned off the zone's self-defense system as it were the military duty freedom and a hell of a lot of free stalkers all have come to pripyat at once so we're not only gonna have to dodge the dangers of the zone but also a faction war over who gets to enter the sarcophagus first oh and by the way we are gonna cover the zones factions in a bit so don't feel too bad if you're a little lost by some of the terminology here after battling through a never-ending supply of brainwashed monolith fighters we eventually make our way to the very center of the cnp and we've got two paths ahead of us had we have not heeded our buddy's words and not checked a certain area in pripyat containing a decoder that would allow us to get deeper into the power plant our only option would be taking our chances with a wish granter but like he said it's not what it seems it's more of a monkey's paw sort of situation where you think you're getting what you want but it ends up being some kind of twisted version of that wish in reality the wish granter is a ploy set up by the people behind the zone and its purpose is to brainwash anyone who makes it this far most of the time these brainwashed stalkers either return as zombies members of monolith or sometimes it's something else we'll talk about later but no matter how they end up the zone itself expands a little every time someone gets to the wish granter however if you did happen to come across the aforementioned decoder you can see the game's real ending which has strelok coming across the real reason behind the zone's existence alright so strap in this is gonna get a little weird unfortunately they made a mistake and our interference spawned his own we're told by a hologram calling itself c consciousness that the zone is not the result of any nuclear meltdown at least not directly after the cnpp went critical in the 80s a bunch of soviet scientists saw the resulting exclusion zone as a great spot to conduct what some might call ethically questionable research in the process of trying to find the human mind's untapped potential they discover what they like to call the no sphere a sort of energy grid that surrounds the earth and acts as a metaphysical and psychological connection between every mind on earth at the time the scientists really didn't know a lot about it but they hypothesized that it could be tampered with and since it somehow connects everyone together their original goal was to combine some of the smartest minds on earth into this collective consciousness with the goal of removing negative emotions from the noah's fear like hatred or anger sadly their little humanitarian aid idea went horribly wrong and their tampering is actually what formed the zone so it's not nuclear reactions causing these mutations in horrible conditions but instead a crack or tear that is formed in what is essentially our fabric of reality after finding out about the zone's true origins we're told that stalkers who make it this far are typically brainwashed and used as sort of sleeper agents a process that has them being wiped clean mentally speaking and secretly reinserted into communities all around the zone once they're activated they'll start immediately working towards whatever goal they've been given by sea consciousness as if it was their own idea most of the time this has to do with keeping other stalkers from getting to the center but sometimes they're given orders to find and kill the ones that have already made it through only for some reason there is a bit of a clerical error and strelok was assigned the task of finding and killing himself after these two giant bombs are dropped on us we have two choices either join c consciousness and aid in their fight to not only keep the zones real origin a secret but also perpetuate its existence or you could go a little caveman and put hot lead through everything that started this messed up situation in the first place in the end if you choose the more gun centric route we see a strelok who's finally able to rest wondering if what he's done has made things better or worse oh and by the way i love this homage to the stalker film very well done alright so there's definitely a lot to unpack here but i'm going to try to keep things related to the spoiler stuff for now all right here we go so personally i both love and hate this ending sequence on one hand i thought it was actually pretty cool finding out why strillock was on a self-assassination mission now i know a lot of people complain that they saw this one coming a mile away and maybe i'm some kind of an idiot but i absolutely did not so that's one revelation i thought was really well done and truth be told it was amazing finally putting some of the missing puzzle pieces together as far as the zone is concerned i just sort of really enjoyed the thought that this was all due to a few bad nuclear meltdowns radiation to me at least is sort of like this real world fantasy element it can have these wonderful benefits and these amazingly nasty downsides i don't know i just really like thinking that these mutations and anomalies were caused by radiation interacting with elements like earth weather biology and energy in ways we've never seen before the existence of this no sphere isn't terrible as a plotline in my opinion but it just feels a little more mystical than i would like and something that has so far been relatively grounded the key word there being relatively now i still enjoy this ending and i have since grown to really be interested in the whole no sphere thing but at first i will say i was a little disappointed what i was looking for was maybe an explanation that saw scientists or the soviet government conspiring to conceal the fact that they sort of purposely did this irrevocable damage to the earth even though i would have personally gone in a different direction i still find this ending to be incredibly cathartic it answered a lot of the questions i had but posed brand new ones and then just sort of left me on a cliffhanger of well i guess we'll find out one day whether or not you did the right thing and i'd like to get into that a little bit more but i think we should meet up with the others first after all you can't leave a bunch of newbies in the zone alone for too long thanks bro you really helped me alright so without spoiling the events of the ending i'll say that things do take a turn for the more strange and while i don't like it very much it's still a really good ending now a lot of people tend to criticize shadow of chernobyl for how sparsely the stories doled out during the campaign and while they're not wrong i mean this is a slow burn of a story that never bothered me for two reasons number one i'm very much used to small pieces of story being given out between long swaths of gameplay so i never had an issue with that but more than anything you're not here to complete a storyline sure it is awesome finding out who strelok is and how the zone got to be how it is but the real draw should just be the zone itself stalker soc is a case study in environmental storytelling and since you often won't get answers to why a helicopter went down where it did or how the hell a bloodsucker was able to use a single wounded human as bait to draw on more stalkers you sort of have to fill in a lot of these blanks with your own imagination as i stroll through this irradiated no man's land my brain keeps struggling to unravel these tiny little mysteries i come across and for me that's what makes up most of stalker's story it's not what the game tells you outright in plain english or russian for that matter it's those thousands and thousands of tiny little unanswered questions like i wonder what this building was used for before the meltdown or why do some mutants fight each other but others don't the zone serves as a canvas for this great tale but your mind's gonna be running most of that show and i think that's what makes the game so special to me normally i tend to steer towards your more linear narratives you know the ones that have a cool story to tell and get you to the ending with very little variation or branching and to be fair if you stay on the beaten path that is what shadow of chernobyl does and if that's what you're more interested in that's what you can focus on but for those of you who like me enjoy being thrown into a foreign world and trying to jump to your own conclusions as to where and what you are well this is likely going to be the very best video game you've ever laid hands on and to be very clear it's not like the included story isn't good i really do like it a lot sure there isn't a whole lot of it but that's a good thing the more the zone gets explained the more it loses its main appeal there's a small but really awesome story here having to do with your main character his actions before he lost his memory and the origins of this hostile batch of land but it does pale in comparison to the myriad of larger stories being told all around you for example finding out why we're looking to murk strillock is very fun but maybe take a few minutes and start researching the zone's many factions talk to a few people at a camp or members of these warring clans and i assure you you will find a nearly bottomless well of narrative you've got duty the strict military outfit that sees the zone as a dangerous foe that needs to be destroyed and then there's freedom a diametrically opposed group that sees the zone not only as a miracle for scientific research but also as a place where they can be truly free then of course you've got monolith a religious cult that believes the wish granter at the center of the zone is an alien artifact worthy of their worship these guys can whip themselves into a trance and tend to feel no pain or fear nothing when it comes to protecting the center of the zone from mankind you see what i'm talking about you could pick any one of these groups and find hours worth of lore just in the game itself and way more god forbid if you get interested enough to start reading through wikis listen the core story here scratches every itch i have but just strolling through one of the zones many alien landscapes i could find a million small interests that match or even rival how much i like this game's story and all i have to do is just look around for a little bit this location how this world is what should draw you into stalker if you're looking for the game to answer all your questions you will definitely be leaving unfulfilled but if you're instead looking to step foot into a game world so viscerally immersive you might find yourself eyeballing prices for airline tickets to ukraine and a tour of a failed eastern european power plant well may i please introduce you to the greatest video game ever created by human hands sure after your first plunge you might find yourself agreeing with a general opinion that the story here is pretty anemic but if you spend even a second outside of that single narrative you'll find a nearly infinite source of interest all around you on the negative end aside from a scant few cut scenes every piece of information in the game will be displayed on these dialogue screens but i doubt very much anyone who's familiar with console or pc rpgs would mind that very much there are certain things that you might have been able to argue were flaws or benefits at one point but eventually all of this stuff just sort of became synonymous with stalker's brand and how it does what it does so i know i might have confused you a bit with my meandering there but you gotta forgive me i love this series in the world it's set in and to me it is the single greatest creative work this medium has to offer in terms of sheer immersion in making these videos one of my biggest issues is not making a 10 hour long rant per entry in the series so my thoughts are going to be a little scattered on one end i want to spill my guts on everything i love here but on the other i'm worried that my experience with these works of art will be so deeply personal that i could never really translate it to you guys in a way that's not only informative but easy to consume it's sort of like a mad dash to figure out what is and is not important enough to put into this script as an example is it crucial for this video to include that you can use bolts to find anomalies just like the main character in the stalker film these are the things i'm wrestling with and it's a little hard to figure out what is and is not something you guys need to know or something i just want to gush about so let's take a second and simplify things stalker shadow of chernobyl has a great story that will do an awesome job of leading you through the zone with purpose some people do complain that there's not enough of it but for me it's perfect however if you are worried that a few cutscenes aren't going to cut it for you trust me there is a never-ending flow of story oozing out of every anomaly and temporary stalker base running parallel to each other are two different experiences here one of them a more traditional story told through the game's characters and making sure you have a reason beyond just being in the zone to play the game and the other is a bottomless pit of small mysteries and historical lore that could fill several encyclopedias maybe there's a chance the zone and all of its wonders are something that's specifically interesting to me but i'm willing to bet most of you would love to lose yourselves in this kind of a universe there's truly more to learn about this place and its inhabitants than you could ever imagine and it's my hope that most of you suit up check your weapons and sneak past the military checkpoints into the zone just keep an eye out for anomalies don't shoot please stalker is a very odd duck as far as gameplay is concerned it's one of those games you sort of have to learn how to play properly which might be a bit of a surprise since it does look like your typical first person shooter looks however can be incredibly deceiving and trust me when i say that if you come into stalker with the mindset that you'll be playing around with do maternal you will find yourself wiped by the first pack of feral dogs you come across but before we get too far into the weeds let's lay down a bit of a baseline stalker can be a hard series to nail down as far as genres go but i think if i had to i would call it a first person survival game with a focus on realism or at least realistic mechanics what that equals out to in actual gameplay terms is that you won't just be centering your screen on a target and hitting the left mouse button you've got to take all kinds of things into account before even drawing a weapon here in the zone stuff like a gun's condition whether or not you've eaten anything in a while bullet velocity what group your target belongs to and most importantly whether or not you're cool with an entire faction of the zone considering you a shoot-on-sight kind of threat the basic gameplay loop is that you're given a singular driving goal at the start of shadow of chernobyl but much like your typical pc rpg you're free to do just about anything else in the meantime the events of the game take place on several gigantic maps that might as well be self-contained open world game environments themselves so don't worry about ever running out of things to do and sights to see there are a few traitors in some scattered areas of the zone and these spots will act as temporary hub areas for you once you find one of these traders you can get side work from them that can range from clearing out banded strongholds or just retrieving items some stalker left out in the wild completing side quests will net you money and items but getting your gear the legit way will make up a very small percentage of how you actually progress in this game see stalker runs like an rpg on the surface there's lots of written dialogue being thrown at you in the form of static boxes an emphasis on the whole quest sidequest dichotomy and your gear and artifacts have their own stats that might help or hinder you and while shops will carry some good stuff from time to time a huge portion of what you'll be doing in this game is looting corpses which i think really plays into the more grounded realistic survival-based approach the developers were going for even if you go into a mission packing serious heat there are all kinds of factors that will have you checking every single body you put down on one end you'll probably be using at least a few healing items when engaging in combat and there's a chance some stalkers you've downed can help refill your supply but most importantly if you start running low on ammo your only choice might be to pick up a weapon your enemy was carrying and finish the fight with something you'll be more likely to find ammo for as you move on every once in a great while a dead stalker may have something really valuable like an artifact on them but basically corpse looting will be how you come across 75 percent of the gear you end up using the rest is made up of hidden stashes stalkers not being the most trusting types often hide their plunder in unassuming locations in the hopes of coming back and cashing in on their hard work when they're not under fire or being chased by mutants you can get these coordinates by checking down bodies and getting their info off of pdas sadly you'll need to have come across the actual stash location before you can find anything inside the stash so it's not a bad idea to keep some of the obvious hiding spots in mind as you come across them so what's stopping you from going out clearing every cache and ruining the in-game economy well a little burden called gravity stalker limits how much you can carry around with a relatively realistic weight limit you can only comfortably carry around 50 kilograms with anything over that causing a massive drain and stamina once you get to 60 or so kilograms you stop being able to move all together so you're gonna need to be picky when looting because that weight limit will dictate nearly everything you do in the game there's a quality over quantity issue to watch out for as well when you find weapons on dead stalkers you run a pretty good chance of those guns being pretty well worn each gun and piece of armor in the game has a conditioned meter and the more it sees use the more that'll degrade now not only will guns and armor net you less at shops if their condition is degraded but you also run the risk of them not working well anymore for armor it'll lose some of its effectiveness meaning all of its stat boosts go down and with guns they can jam at crucial points and it may not seem like too big of a deal to just manually reload three rounds into a fresh magazine but in the middle of a tense firefight one of these weapon failures can be deadly so you might be wondering well what can i do about this problem and that's a really easy answer because there's nothing you really can do at least not officially speaking the developers did intend to include a repair dialogue option for some npcs but never got around to fully implementing it most of the code is in place but they just didn't have time to finish it so with guns you'll need to constantly be looking for a newer model and with armor well outside of an interesting glitch that'll repair armor if you're wearing certain artifacts while being damaged by certain anomalies well you're just gonna have to buy replacement at some point this can sort of be an issue on a vanilla run of soc but it's a feature that's easily modded back into the game and trust me we will talk mods in a bit but just know that if you plan on playing the game totally stock this whole thing will be annoying but totally doable but i think the most important thing to mention is that stalker shadow of chernobyl is a game that takes a little bit of time to really feel good when you start a new game you'll be packing some of the least intimidating heat imaginable and as you progress you'll notice early game guns are horribly inaccurate and do [ __ ] for damage in fact part of the fun of starting a new game in my opinion is trying to guess how long it'll be till you come across a rifle with a scope so you can really start enjoying the combat for me this is a game where slow controlled shots made over a great distance are going to be way more effective than long auto fire bursts made at a close range not only is this because ammo is always going to be an issue no matter where you are but because by the mid game all the people you'll be shooting at will likely be packing some killer gear too so what might take 6 shots to the chest to accomplish can easily be handled with a single silent shot before anyone even knows you're there so once again don't go into this thinking you'll be playing your average fps this is a game that rewards accuracy distance good cover and planning ahead over sheer willingness to spray large amounts of ammo inefficiently of course if you want to do well in soccer you might want to avoid getting shot at as much as humanly possible a job that's a little harder than it sounds the zone has a lot of factions and each of them have their own allegiances and enemies who you take quest from can improve your standing with some of these factions but keep in mind duty hates freedom and vice versa so any favor you get from one might be compensated by the opposite effect happening with the other if you decide to join up with either of these groups you'll get access to killer gear and weapons from their stockpiles but you might find yourself getting drawn down on in the middle of neutral territory i typically stay away from joining either side because i don't like the authoritarian approach of duty and freedom or just a bunch of smelly hippies so a little secret for you guys looking to play soc you can accept missions that'll have you taking part in a raid on one of these factions but if you never fire a shot at anyone you'll never be painted as an enemy to that faction so you might have to rely on the game's ai to finish the fight but it's worth it to not have to watch your back any more than you already do plus if your guys lose you can always join the opposite team and have an easier time wiping the other guys out and speaking of ai we absolutely have to talk about a life gsc game world in developing stalker was very focused on the idea of the zone being a living breathing location and in pursuit of that goal they created an ai system that would have events taking place in the zone whether or not you're there to witness them basically life in the zone continues with or without your physical presence and i think that's one of the greatest features stalker has to offer every single playthrough of this game feels uniquely different thanks to how dynamic a-life is you'll be running from place to place and maybe witness a firefight between factions leaving a battlefield of corpses to be looted or a swarm of mutants descending on a small camp of loners monolith fighters might be trying to breach the barrier at the warehouses or mercs might be looking for you and stumble across some members of duty out on patrol it's chaotic in the most satisfying way you really never know what you're gonna get when you click that new game button and i absolutely love it and just to be clear these aren't scripted events being triggered randomly each stalker will react to threats appropriately mutants will attack anything they think they have a shot at ticking down and factions will fight if they come across each other you might be talking to someone and they'll randomly just whip out a gun and start shooting at a mutant that got a little too close for their liking one of the reasons i put more than 3 or 400 hours into each of these games is because a life gives each new game a wholly unique feel and when you have to start accounting for things you can't really expect the realistic survival focus of the game really starts to shine through you really start thinking hard on where you're going next and how much gear you can take with you to both account for the possibility of coming across valuable loot and the reality of coming up against a threat sure you could run off after a shopping spree at the freedom base with hundreds of rounds of ammunition on you and a few guns in your belt but i hope you weren't planning on getting anywhere anytime soon because you will not be running so much of this game is balanced towards these more realistic survival features that a lot of the appeal with continually replaying soc is just jumping into the zone again and feeling the thrill of strategizing your next move and trying to account for whose turf you'll need to cross to get where you're going and exactly what you need to bring with you in case you find yourself surrounded by an unexpected group of mutants this world may as well be alive to us stalker fans and most of what we like about the game is how you really have to change the way you think in order to play it well you gotta keep up with your characters eating bandages wounds to keep them from bleeding make deals you don't want to and do things you might not like just to make sure you have access to the tech you need to do better once you've played it long enough stalker eventually stops feeling like a video game and more like some kind of a survivalist simulation it's truly a heavenly experience for a lot of us but if you've ever heard of it before you've likely also heard about its legendary glitches and yeah there's some crazy [ __ ] going on here to the degree where part of learning how to play stalker is just getting familiar with the ass backwards and sometimes broken ways a lot of common game systems work here in the zone i mean sure it is nice having near random npc actions keeping things fresh but when those random actions lead a crucial quest giver to be sniped out of existence before i'm able to turn in his quest well we might have some issues here sometimes a quick load can revert enemy ai to a previous state so they may go from mercilessly kicking your ass to not really caring about your presence and of course there are the absolutely crazy glitches you can come across now i will admit this was way more of an issue back when the game launched as most major game ending glitches have either been officially or unofficially patched out by this point during the few games i started for this video i only had one crash to desktop and in the stalker world that's about as close to bug-free as you can get of course major issues with how the game operates can be a [ __ ] but if i'm being honest it's kind of a hidden source of entertainment as well sometimes you'll shoot a bandit and see him literally break into particles and get stuck in a wall or maybe a stalker will drop a weapon that'll hover above the ground like it was a pickup from some 90s fps if you're playing a modern build of the game a lot of the fatal issues that might cause the game to be unbeatable have been dealt with mostly so you might have been justified in worrying about those kind of things at one point but nowadays i'd say it runs a little better than most brand new pc releases in fact this most recent playthrough was so glitch free that i was a little disappointed i didn't really have anything to show you guys but getting back to that whole learning how to play stalker issue a lot of people tend to stack the deck against themselves before they've even started a new game see in the world of stalker much like the reality warping anomalies in the zone difficulty just does not work the way you think it does what you really want to do is set the game to master difficulty now i know how this sounds at first like some kind of elitist [ __ ] trying to get everyone to play at the difficulty level he's comfortable with but i swear that's not what's going on here in stalker the difficulty doesn't just apply to you if you increase how much damage you can take you're doing it for every npc in the game so counter-intuitively if you make yourself harder to kill by dropping the difficulty expect firefights to be way more frustrating and challenging as the bandits you're shooting at will be equally hard to kill setting the game to master means you can reliably take threats down with a single headshot and trust me this is the way you want to play stalker at first it may seem like it sucks that foes have just as much of an advantage over you but i think it plays into one of stalker's strengths like i've said a hundred times before this isn't the kind of first person shooter where you're going to want to go into any situation guns blazing the fact that a random bandit from a beginning area can one shot you even in the strongest gear in the game just sort of adds to that tactical nature of it all that high risk high reward sort of system just really plays well into what stalker is all about so please make sure not to [ __ ] yourself right from the start and since we're talking about new players i think it's about time we touch on stalker's strongest quality it's a massive modding scene which brings up a bit of a tough pill to swallow one that hardened stalker vets are not gonna want me to say even though a lot of us in the fandom came up around vanilla soc and loved every second of it the hard truth is a stock playthrough of this game in the modern era is likely to act as more of a deterrent for someone looking to get into stalker for the first time than anything else yes there are a lot of aspects of this game that cause you to treat it differently than other first-person shooters but a lot of those features are things that we specifically learned to love about the game in my opinion it's unreasonable to ask a new player to risk not enjoying the game so that we can continue some kind of stalker purity mindset so if you're watching this and thinking you might be interested in picking shadow of chernobyl up i would very much recommend you do so with the help of a mod now that isn't going to be much help as far as advice goes because for this game alone there might be thousands of mods to pick from so i would say try to stick with the big packs that combine several game fixes into one the complete mod is kind of an okay option for that but a lot of people complain it lowers the difficulty to an unsatisfying degree and over spawns artifacts both pretty true statements so the mod i would personally recommend and the one i use to play a majority of this game for this playthrough is the starter pack it includes a lot of quality of life improvements along with some nice touches that'll help the game feel a little more modern as far as presentation goes it does tend to take things too far by replacing all of the npc skins but if it's your first playthrough i doubt very much you would even notice that it also seems to be doing something funky with the game's gamma level so your flashlight might end up blinding you and looking at anything up close and certain types of night vision is almost out of the question but that didn't hinder me too much at all if you happen to be looking for a closer to vanilla experience you could try out the zone reclamation project which is essentially a few bug fixes some minor presentation improvements and not a whole lot else of course no one's saying you can't start an unmodded game of soc right now but the goal here is to get more people playing this series and i think it's a little unrealistic to expect someone who's not already in love with these games to put up with all of their little issues even if i personally think most of those issues are actually features plus there are more reasons than just gameplay improvements to consider here personally i play a modded game for every new playthrough mostly because i just can't stand the stock sound effects for guns in shadow of chernobyl and when you listen to something for hundreds of hours you sort of want to like it i'll include a list of top mods for the game in the description and if you're going to start a new game just know modding stalker is as easy as moving a folder over and changing a single line of text using notepad so no barrier to entry to worry about there but no matter how you experience it vanilla modded or whatever it all leads to one of the most unique and challenging gameplay experiences you're likely to ever have with a video game without being hyperbolic i can honestly say this is one of the greatest games i've ever played in my entire life and the whole point of this retrospective is to share some of that with you guys i mean there's a really good reason this series has such a hardcore following more than a decade since its last entry it's truly something special before stalker there was nothing like it and even now i would struggle to find maybe one or two games that come close to matching it and sheer depth and attention to detail it most certainly has its flaws some of them pretty serious but i would still recommend it with every ounce of support i could possibly give this is one of the most immersive experiences you can possibly have with a video game and i severely hope that all of this blabbering has made that clear i know it can be a little intimidating getting into something brand new with this hardcore of an underground following but trust me when i say this game is worth braving all that shadow of chernobyl was a revolution for the industry but its underground status means that very few titles would ever try to draw inspiration from it meaning it's still a gameplay experience you can really only get here even with the scant few imitators that can definitely be found on steam the original still stands unchallenged in terms of quality and realism oh and if you do decide to take the plunge into this amazing first entry of a great franchise just do yourself a favor climb your way up the ladder next to wolf here in the starting town then work your way up to the roof jump to the next house and grab yourself this suit that would normally take a few hours of gameplay to be able to afford now that may sound a little bit like cheating but in a game where you can be wearing badass gear and still be one-shotted by a boar while checking your map trust me you're gonna need all the help you can get stalker has always had a distinctively recognizable look and to be very honest as a fan of these games it can be a mixed bag when you're running around the zone looking at stunning vistas of irradiated vegetation growing over rolling hills of mutants and military conflict it can be a marvel to look at all of the big picture stuff is so well done it's insane and the attention to detail is seriously impressive these guys traveled to the area surrounding pripyat and often used actual locations as inspiration for landmarks every dilapidated building and rusted out car looks true to life and the underground labs really do give off a heavy 70s soviet tech sort of vibe as far as your environment goes i don't think you could find much wrong with it visually the only real problems come in when you start focusing on the more up close stuff for example skin in a stalker game for some reason has always looked like saggy leather pulled over several sausage links and the animations of npcs will always make sure you remember you're playing slav jank from the early 2000's to be totally honest there are all kinds of issues with this first stalker game as far as presentation is concerned but for the life of me i just cannot fault it it excels way too much it way too many other things for me to get upset when skin looks leathery or bump mapping doesn't have the right depth applied to it on the opposite end of that coin a lot of time and effort obviously went into modeling a lot of real world weaponry and that effort definitely paid off of course mostly these will be russian-made guns so don't expect any of them to be worth the damn but their disheveled look is awesome and plays into the idea that the zone only has like 100 firearms in it but stalkers just keep murdering and robbing each other for them so the same guns keep needing to be used and serviced over and over and over again honestly though what i like most about the game is the general look given to the menus now i know that's not exactly the most exciting graphical element to praise but come on look how cool the inventory or dialogue screens look the rusted metal an old ussr tech sort of theme is constant and does a lot more to further the feel of the game than most would like to admit there's no escaping the fact that this is a very very old game running on an engine that's more jank than actual code so you'll need to take a lot of this with a grain of salt i am incredibly biased towards this game and i've always thought it looked amazing so it's a little hard to be objective here i mean if this was all just some kind of internal dialogue in my own head i would never mention any of the game's visual shortcomings because the good aspects of the presentation are so great that they more than make up for what are realistically pretty big flaws and on that note this is a game that was never meant to be run in 16x9 so you are gonna see the odd artifact from stretching on screen for example the way sunlight works sort of only accounted for a 4x3 aspect ratio so while running during the day you might get a glimpse of the game's shadow map just sort of forming outside of the corners of your vision and like i said before the 2d ui elements are going to look a little stretched out but overall i'd say these things won't get in anyone's way at all you could certainly choose to play in 4x3 but i really don't think it's necessary for this one many other old game and you know i'd be all on board the square pixel train but this is a game with a lot of horizontal real estate to look at widescreen is just a much better option here in my opinion plus a lot of the mods you're gonna find tend to replace these old assets with new ones anyway so you might not even see any of these limitations the zones mutants are very unique looking if not a little inconsistently designed but i would say out of all of them the snorks are my favorites there's just something undeniably cool about soldiers wearing gas masks getting caught up in a second chernobyl disaster and coming out of it as feral beasts only capable of quadrupedal movement it's just cool as hell to me the color palette of the zone seems fitting with a lot of browns and grays being used but a lot of mods nowadays seem to add more color to it and that's not a bad thing on its face but i kind of liked how it used to look i know a lot of people who lived through the xbox 360 era tend to [ __ ] on this color palette but in this circumstance it's not a ploy to make the game look more gritty if you look at old pictures of pripyat before vegetation started growing back the entire place looked like it was locked into some kind of eternal fall season like i keep mentioning immersion is a very key factor for me and with that in mind i'll admit the heads up display in soc is not exactly conducive to that goal there's all kinds of unnecessary information being displayed here including whether or not you're making noise or visible to the enemy which is hilarious since a stealth system was a planned gameplay feature but never actually made it into the game hitting the minus key will get rid of the hud here in the starter pack mod and to be honest i'm not 100 if that's the case in vanilla but part of me thinks it might be and while it is awesome having this clean unobstructed view of the zone it makes the game far more difficult and a little more fun if you ask me with the hud turned on you can see hostile stalkers as red dots which will always let you know where your enemies are in a fire fight but stalker's ai lets these guys act pretty damn smart so not knowing where the last bandit is and just knowing he's sneaking up on you as you frantically try to clear a jam it's pretty damn exciting also the zone is a pretty gigantic place and it can be really hard to navigate around without really knowing where you are on the positive side though it'll have you navigating by landmarks and that feels really cool and immersive it's not exactly what you would call traditionally user friendly but it really does add to the more grounded real life approach this game has to its gameplay it can be a little annoying having to constantly check the map on your pda to find stashes that normally would be easy to find with your on-screen mini map but nothing stopping you from turning the hud off for a little bit and then back on again when you don't really need it and another little tip in the realm of increasing immersion would be to make sure you disable the in-game crosshair as soon as you start a new game i'm not going to lie it does kind of suck not being able to accurately fire from the hip but actually having to stare down iron sights to shoot properly once again feeds into the more you know tactical grounded realistic yadda yadda in fact it's becoming such a common thing among stalker fans that most mods i've seen just disable this thing by default on the technical side of things soc offers an insane level of control over how good you want the picture to look with sliders for all kinds of things you might want to lower in case of bad performance the issue there being the x-ray engine is not exactly known for how efficiently it uses system resources so you might want to expect bad performance no matter what hardware you're rocking or options you're using i captured footage for this playthrough on a system running a ryzen 3900 and a 3080 ti and dips in frame rate were still an issue every once in a while this game has always been a punishing title to run on any hardware and no matter how much is spent on your pc you'll see frame dips and hangs at least some of the time originally it was only meant to take advantage of 4 gigs of ram so it's not exactly a surprise that it doesn't run too well on modern machines but the good news is a lot of mods you'll find have addressed at least some of these concerns to be fair performance can be rock solid like 95 of the time but when it starts to mess up you'll definitely notice it another bit of realism that drew me to stalker was the dynamic day to night weather cycles having the sunset in game and you realizing you're stuck out there in the wilderness in the dark with packs of bloodthirsty mutants and bandits looking to jump you for your loot can be amazing when it turns night and it just so happens to be storming really bad out well that's positively orgasmic little things will randomly take place during your time in the zone like a rainstorm or gust of wind and this combines with the random nature of the ai to further add to the feeling that you're in a real place [Music] honestly a lot of what i love about stalker stems from its presentation but it would be pretty dishonest to tell you it's flawless there's a lot you're gonna have to forgive right out of the gate mostly because this is such an old game but also because it runs on an engine even stalker modders have yet to fully figure out you will not get through a whole playthrough without seeing glitches and odd occurrences but to be honest they're really funny when they happen so you should sort of look forward to them there will be massive performance dips every so often and there might be a bit of an adjustment period for you but through all that you'll be looking at one of the best looking games i've ever laid my eyes on yes that statement comes with an amount of asterix so great you can't even imagine but i stand firm stalker's shadow of chernobyl still amazes me to this day and the fact that the maps are so massive and so little of it is closed off to the player i just know there are buildings in the zone i've never entered spots i've never explored despite the fact i've easily put more than 500 hours into this entry alone i mean hell i spent a good 140 hours messing around with the steam version recently so do keep your expectations tempered just because it offers an incredible visual experience doesn't mean that experience will be consistent for every sprawling vista that makes your jaw hit the floor there'll be a character model or glitch that'll have you wondering how this game made it to market it's the textbook definition of a mixed bag but the aspects of the game that excel are more than worth braving the downsides for even if the gameplay doesn't interest you i would still implore you to find a sale and pick up soc for a fiver just to see how amazingly stunning the zone can look it's truly a work of art the way it's able to mix the standard and mundane look of the real world with this alien fantasy appeal is beyond impressive and more than worth getting an eyeful of sure you might get mauled by a pack of dogs in the starting area after 3 minutes of gameplay but hey such is life in the zone oh and real quick before we wrap up i want to touch on stalker's incredible audio design too music doesn't really play a large role in the game and even when it is being used i'm not sure you could really call this music per se maybe it's more of an ambient soundscape which might not work in other games but is masterfully pulled off here on top of the more subdued soundtrack is an incredible focus on ambient environmental noises little things like mutants off in the distance making noise the random crack of far-off gunfire and more natural stuff like a short breeze or the creepy sounds that seem to emanate from nowhere in the zone it's also well done that i still struggle to think of any game since that top stalker in that regard it's a first class showing in audio design and i'm not even scraping the surface of this auditory iceberg trust me once you spend any amount of time in an old abandoned russian lab underneath chernobyl with only the sound of incoming threats and a constantly turning emergency light to keep you company you'll come around most games tend to miss a huge opportunity by not really focusing on world building through sound design like this and forever when i see games that do stalker will be the barrier for entry the proverbial standard by which others should be judged well guys i hope i've been able to make an okay case here to be honest i'm a little worried so much of what makes stalker so incredibly endearing to so many of us in the fandom is very personal it's the little moments that occur randomly in between the most mundane of tasks the time you spend running from one end of the zone to the other with only quiet time where all you can do is try to predict what ungodly threat you have to face next the existential threat of coming across an amazing stash of goods but not being able to carry any of it back to camp to put it bluntly a lot of what i love about stalker is just deeply ingrained in my own brain so deep in fact that it can be really hard to actually verbalize despite the fact that this is by far the most time i've ever invested in any video game franchise i still often lack the words necessary to explain exactly why that is with a game it's easy to assume you're only playing something for the story or how fun the gameplay is but i think there's some outliers in the media games you don't simply play because you enjoy how it reacts when you press certain buttons or for the story it tells for a title like that you're there for one thing and one thing only and that's the experience and i don't mean that in the same small way i often do when i use that word in videos stalker is an experience not a game not a narrative but an honest-to-god experience one that if i had my way everyone would be able to have so yes i'm both completely head over heels in love with this game and conversely unsure if i can express why that is so i hope all the droning in this video got at least a percentage of that across i doubt very much you will ever play anything even remotely like stalker as long as you live and that is very much including the new stalker sequel that was announced listen we stalker fans have been [ __ ] over by news like this in the past trust me this is not our first rodeo so please spend the five bucks it'll cost you to dip your toes into the irradiated pool here and find out if it's for you if it's not to your taste you just wasted a fiver and maybe an hour of your time but if it does click with you i can promise you will be spending the next several hundred hours immersed in the game world so damn engaging you might find yourself thinking in stalker terms in the real world there are certain landmarks this industry can claim stuff like the et atari scandal and subsequent death of the medium the release of benchmark titles like resident evil final fantasy or super mario and in my opinion the creation of stalker has earned a place among those events if you ask me the industry would be a much worse place had gst gameworld decided not to base their upcoming project on an old russian sci-fi novel and its arthouse movie adaptation i truly wish i could convince the entire world to give this game a chance realistically though i know it won't be to everyone's taste but if you've gotten this far in the video i have to assume i've said or shown something in the course of this review that has at least piqued your interest if that is indeed the case i implore you just spend a little bit of time in the zone at least try it for yourself once if you have any questions or want to know anything that might improve that experience i will try my absolute best to help i always keep my twitter dms open for just such indication and i do try to spend as much time as i can here in the comment sections of these videos plus i'm sure other stalkers are going to be in here and they can provide that exact same service so together we should be able to offer some kind of assistance and if this doesn't seem like your cup of tea well i hope i was at least able to entertain you for a bit we've got a lot of ground to cover though i know it took a while but trust me when i say there is much much more of the zone to see now whether or not you actually want to see what lurks in the dark corners of this land well that's another issue altogether i hope all of you make it for next time as we trek through the events of the follow up to this gateway drug of a video game but until then stay safe stalkers the ambush is really close here let me mark it on your pda you may live but don't let me catch sight of you ever again stalker's shadow of chernobyl for all intents and purposes was a total success sure it wasn't raking in that big budget aaa games industry level of cash but for slav jank pc only release it really did numbers and if you'll remember there's essentially several games worth of scrapped content included in that final release so when it came time to follow up on their success with another stalker game the team at gsc game world had tons of nearly finished work to build a round the development process for the last game was an incredibly long experience all things considered but even with a full five or six years under their belt these guys just weren't able to implement even half the content they intended their chosen game engine being held together with the digital equivalent of sticks and electrical tape most of the effort at the time went into making sure that the first stalker game didn't set gaming pcs on fire at launch so with the bulk of the work done for them already gsc got right into implementing a lot of the elements they actually wanted for that first release that means huge strides forward in performance presentation and mechanics but don't go getting your hopes up expecting those improvements to have come with zero downsides i mean this is the x-ray engine we're talking about here but enough with all the technical stuff let's dive in and see what kind of story the stalker follow-up is trying to tell anyway enough about me about your stalker he was here stalker clear sky fills in some remaining blanks by taking place about a year before the events of shadow of chernobyl which is probably a good time to mention that this is the second part of a full series retrospective on the stalker franchise which means i'll be glossing over some pretty important information from the first game if you find yourself lost you can check out my previous video covering shadow of chernobyl which if i've done my job properly should be appearing as a little card in the corner right now clear sky's matter-of-fact nature basically necessitates you already being familiar with the previous game's events and that means this video sort of does too so go check that out if you need a little refresher alright so at the start of clear sky we see our main character scar leading a group of scientists through one of the more dangerous parts of the zone when a huge emission takes place which is basically a massive explosion of radioactive and psychic energy emanating from the dead center of the zone like a nuclear detonation's blast wave now we're not exactly clear on the details but from what we hear after the fact we somehow lived through this event a phenomenon not yet seen in the zone after losing consciousness scar's body was eventually come across by a faction in the zone called clear sky and their leader lets him in on a real emotional roller coaster of exposition on one hand scar is the first person anyone ever saw walk out of an emission without immediately having their brains melt in their own skull so that's kind of cool but don't go getting your hopes up he goes on to explain that they haven't killed him yet naturally this represents a terrible danger the same process that affects everyone is still taking place inside of scar but it's just taking a lot longer than usual basically scar can only survive a few more of these emissions before his nervous system fries itself which is where scar and clear sky's goals symbiotically intertwine it's in scar's best interest here to look into why these emissions are now becoming so frequent and somehow put a stop to them clear sky similarly sees the emissions as a danger to everything in the zone and is looking to accomplish that same goal it's their belief that the rise in explosive waves of energy in the zone has something to do with rumors about some upstart stalker named strelok and his crew getting to the chernobyl nuclear power plant a feat once thought impossible our new friends in clear sky reason that the emissions are like an immune reaction to the center being penetrated and they'll continue as long as strelok lives so scar sort of forced into a position where he has to work for clear sky or die a horrible death an easy enough proposition to consider so scar sets off and basically follows in our footsteps from shadow of chernobyl just like us he has to follow the breadcrumb trail left by strelok's actions in the zone and just to clear things up because i sort of struggled with this at first we're not here trying to prevent the events of the first docker game but instead the events that preceded them see strelok's made it to the center of the zone about three times now and in clear sky our goal is to prevent that second trip the one that would see him disappearing and result in some tattooed rando gunning form with a diy assassination order on his pda clear sky being a group that exists inside the zone isn't incredibly charitable so if he's going to get any information out of them scar's going to have to help them with their territorial issues apparently everything in the zone was at a sort of equilibrium before strelok first breached the center but now the zone's been plagued by these blowouts that have the side effect of rearranging anomalies shifting around the mutant population and moving pockets of extreme radiation so paths that were once thought completely safe have been overrun with bloodsuckers and dangerous anomalies some factions have lost their bases of operation meaning once fruitful peace agreements have gone out the door and previous strongholds have changed hands a few times there are new trading posts now and bandits have become way more of an issue now that the factions are fighting with themselves more than they're policing their own territory and in the middle of all this conflicts it's scar a lone mercenary forced into doing a massively important job essentially for free as scar we have to follow up on leeds heading to places strelok or his team are rumored to have once passed through like i said before the zone is in chaos with all the major factions either at war displaced or both so while chasing strelok down scar's gonna have to take part in some of these skirmishes in order to get the information he's looking for the first stop being our old friend sadorovich who supposedly had dealings with our target in the past in very sador of its fashion though he's gonna want our help clearing up an issue before he'll give us the goods it seems like one missed delivery is all it took to rile up the free stalkers at cordon enough to butt heads with the military so scar needs to one way or the other restore the uneasy equilibrium it once had after that gets sorted sadorovich lets us know that one of strelok's boys named fang did pay him a visit looking for complex machine parts and since he didn't have what they wanted he pointed him towards the garbage which means that's exactly where we want to be at garbage we were able to trace back a few of fang's business deals and it seems like he was working with a group of diggers to get his hands on the parts he needs but when they weren't able to completely fulfill his order he ran off without paying for any of their work apparently they sent one digger to find him but in the process of following fang he got jumped by a pack of blind dogs so after we help him off the rock he's been stuck on he lets us know fang is headed for the dark valley and away we go after getting into the valley a freedom checkpoint lets us in on a bunch of attacks that have been happening right under their noses he's probably dead already and i suggest you don't hang around here too long unless you want to join him it seems like whole platoons are being wiped out while on patrol so basically if you're not inside the freedom camp you're likely to get taken out so after a little interesting investigation we wrap up this little massacre problem by getting to the bottom of a pretty complex web of betrayal then freedom's leader lets us know that fang actually [ __ ] off back to garbage after his time in the dark valley so scar does too and after tracing his pda to a basement below a temporary loner base at flea market he falls into a banded trap apparently laid out for fang himself this place is pretty damn good look at all these stalkers charging in here like flies to honey i wonder what they're after after waking up from a wild case of armed robbery fang's pda clues us into the fact that straylock had created his own small faction made up of only a handful of the very best stalkers the zone has to offer strelok's faction was completely dedicated to penetrating the center of the zone something they had accomplished once but the resulting blowout meant repeating that mission would require a slightly different approach their first try was supposed to be them dipping their toes in the water but now that they know what they're doing they plan on busting the center of the zone wide open a bad goal as far as scar is concerned as it will most definitely trigger an emission so big it's guaranteed to put him in the ground so our guy in clear sky contacts us and confirms it is definitely strelok and his crew that's responsible for all this and the blowouts are the zone's way of trying to kill these stalkers before they can redo their little magic trick apparently after his dealings with the diggers at garbage fang headed in the direction of agroprom research institute and when scar gets there he finds the places under siege by mutants coming up from the underground labs so scar agrees to help the duty faction clear up their little mutual issue and in return they give us access to the underground labs which if you'll remember is where strela kept his secret meeting area from there we find out this group plans to bypass the brain scorcher and we know the only people who could even conceivably help with that goal would be the scientist at the outpost in yantar once we like it there their lead egghead lets us in on his hypothesis that the brain scorcher is a man-made antenna that broadcasts psychic energy so strong it fry stalkers brains turning them into mindless zombies apparently strelok had been through here and tested a prototype piece of equipment that was supposed to protect against the brain scorcher but now that he's gone the scientists can't exactly whip one up in a jiffy so instead we do some digging and find out the brain scorcher is indeed a man-made device and the only reason it sends out strong ci fields intermittently is because its cooling solution is failing so if scar can solve that issue for him the researchers should be able to provide him with just enough protection to ensure he can make it into the brain scorcher's reach without coming out the other side with a thousand-yard stare and a sudden urge to eat brains after opening a path to straylock scar gets sidelined into a scuffle between bandits and clear sky in the red forest which serves as the perfect distraction to mask strelok getting away and blowing up the only route that we know of to get to him so we then have to track down a stalker named forrester who is rumored to know how to get anywhere and everywhere inside the zone this guy lets us know a group did find a possible route but was then trapped in a spatial anomaly that kept them from ever getting out of it after a little research in the field we find their radio transmissions and forester lets us know about an artifact that should help him navigate the zone better which means he could give the stalkers verbal instructions on how to get out of that rip in time and space this requires a lot of running around and some side tasks but eventually the deed ends up getting done and the once lost stalkers help scar get to lymonsk which all of their efforts have turned into a war zone the military monolith fighters and bandits are all at war for this new contested territory and we're just trying to get to the other side of it monolith of course isn't going to let anyone closer to the center of the zone than they have to so they set up a few surprises and an actual electric fence to keep stalkers from getting out of le mans we do our part in getting rid of these roadblocks and well from there things get a little spoilery so do me a favor and either skip to the time stamp on screen click past the chapter mark spoilers in your timeline or try the link in the description to make sure i don't ruin this awesome story for you go on my signal okay so this whole time scar and clear sky have fought tooth and nail to get to the cnp and they finally made it there may be a war going on around them but the mission is clear no matter what happens scar has to stop straylock or else he and everyone else there will die scar being the most battle-hardened fighter they've got clear sky leadership gives him a prototype emp gun meant to disable strelok's protection from the zone's side effects basically a death sentence and yeah that goes just about as planned however what does not go to plan is the fact that sea consciousness has had about enough of all this ruckus at their doorstep and initiates a massive emission that either kills or wounds every single person near the power plant during this event the last scene showing surviving members of the breach being indoctrinated into sea consciousness that means that not only did scar play a direct role in strelok not being successful in his second attempt to get to the wish granter but also his subsequent brainwashing and if you ask me this was a great way to tie clear sky into the events of the first game which was really damn cool to see because before all we really had were these disparate second hand accounts of what strelok and his team were up to at this time and now we get to not only see exactly how he got in the predicament that started the first game but we sort of caused it all too plus i really liked that scar only served as a small player in the overall game that is the zone in its politics sure he had a backstory and motivation but let's face it the guy was just out to save his own life and it's sort of fitting that he'd just be killed off in the end since the real main character here is still the zone when you think about it there are only a handful of important actors in this whole place and the rest are just caught up in something beyond their comprehension i really like that this idea that our main characters might not even be the focus of a stalker story but instead just a pair of eyes that we can use to view important events in the exclusion zone i think this did a great job of filling in some of the blanks left by the first game's much smaller story it really made that first story feel more robust and complete finally being able to jump in and see exactly what happened beforehand from a ground level perspective which is exactly why i think clear sky is sort of like a second attempt at finishing shadow of chernobyl's narrative but that's all i really have to say that would spoil anything so what do you say we meet back up with the others without a doubt stalker clear sky was aiming to address complaints fans had with shadow of chernobyl specifically that its story was a little too anemic and no matter how much people like me simp for it yeah there is some truth there the story here is much more hands-on and straightforward this time around with what i would estimate to be two or three times the voice dialogue in the first entry a lot of the background lore of the zone and its factions could be found among random stalkers sure you had to hunt around for it but there was a massive story waiting to be discovered if the player was keen on putting in the work here in clear sky the main story's bath has you being led through all the side information simultaneously and while i did love having to actively look for all this stuff before being told everything i would want to know by the same main characters who are giving me my storyline quest works fine too there's still a lot of side lore to be found in cs but it seems to me the bulk of it is focused on personal stories of random stalkers and what drove them to come to the zone in the first place and sure that's awesome to dig into but it doesn't do much to further flesh out the zone itself it does however paint a much clearer picture of what's going on outside the zone and the kind of people who seem to be drawn here you can kill each other all you like no matter how you look at it this is a much more wordy approach to storytelling than you might be used to if you're coming straight from soc but i truly can't pick which style i like more the lazy jerk in me loves not having to dig up plot details myself but at the same time going out and actively finding answers to my internal questions was fun as hell too i mean it's not like there's any more or less story going from one to the other clear sky just tells you all of it directly but very little input being necessary on your part where a casual play through of soc might reveal only a quarter of what's on offer what i'm trying to say is that both have great side stories to tell that'll require a few fireside chats with random stalkers and both satisfyingly flesh out the world of the zone without explaining so much that it loses its mysterious appeal there are a few plot holes i was able to come up with here in this prequel one of them having to do with the scientist at yantar dealing with strelok in this game and then totally forgetting about him in soc but overall this was one hell of a fun story once again the real draw here is the zone itself and all the small political social and sci-fi elements that go into its existence it doesn't expand on much of anything established at the end of soc but instead covers all the stuff the game didn't tell you at the start and that really felt like a good move to me the developers knew we were already well familiar with this world and its major players by this point so it didn't really need to waste any time setting much of anything up which might act as a detriment to people who mistakenly played this game first so much of that initial lore dump was done in shadow of chernobyl and gse gameworld knew they had a hardcore following on their hands so clear sky jumps right into the deep end from the start a first-time player booting up cs will have literally zero idea what the zone is how it started and who anyone inside of it is and i really mean that there is no catch me up on the event so far type of exposition here it's all just a continuation from what was established before so this should definitely be your second stalker game that being said i can't help but feel like it might be kind of cool starting with this one sort of like how people playing silent hill 2 first would likely have no idea what was going on outside of james sunderland's personal drama which is sort of fitting since let's admit it most sh2 fans are oblivious to the fact that there are actually other silent hill games one thing i really liked here is how they were able to build on soc setup but they did so in a way where it could be explained why these things weren't present in that initial game for example you'd think we would have at some point seen or heard of this clear sky faction on our initial hunt for strelok but this game explains that clear sky endeavors to keep themselves hidden from other stalkers as their goal was only to study the zone for the betterment of everyone outside of it these guys genuinely want no part in the internal politics of the zone and its complex web of short alliances and long-standing conflict plus the ending takes care of a few extra questions you might have so yes the approach here is certainly what fans were asking for and it is very satisfying to finally have the game telling you most of its story passively instead of actively making you work for it besides the zone had already been established we already knew just enough about it to make sure we stayed on this thin line between knowing it all and keeping some things a mystery so instead of expanding on a bunch of other stuff and risk ruining the allure the zone has they told us just a little more of what was happening inside the boundaries of the previously given information they further contextualized events you lived through in the first game and took the raw materials from that first entry to create the stalker equivalent of fanservice this is without a doubt a game for stalker enthusiast it'll tell you nothing the last entry already covered so do make sure to start with shadow of chernobyl if you're looking to get into clear sky or maybe use this as a fun mystery type of narrative and then play soc to further flesh out all the stuff you weren't told before either way this is a top recommendation based on story alone as you know i was one of the few people who felt like the first soccer game had more than enough story to be engaging but i won't lie it's really nice having so much more this time around of course making a game more intuitive and trying to make sure it's more let's say in line with the common mainstream approach to storytelling can often feel like a step in the direction of selling out or dumbing things down for a wider audience but i think it's safe to say that's not what's going on here the fact of the matter is that people wanted more story in their stalker games and the developers were more than happy to deliver it may not have the same scope of what could be found in that previous entry but that's because it doesn't waste any time catching you up basically cs hits the ground running and expects you to keep pace and it doesn't hurt that it ends in a way that jumps straight into the events of soc in a word clear sky's story is perfect not in the sense that it's without flaws but in a very different way see it's not only exactly what the devs set out to create but exactly what we the fans wanted it to be now that's not something you see too often in this industry and the few handful of times you do well it should be celebrated stalker shadow of chernobyl pioneered its own specific brand of gameplay and it's going to be no surprise that clear sky is towing that same line but if you watched my last video you'll know soc had a rough development period that had them scrapping huge portions of the game just to make sure they could release a final project relatively on time and only 50 full of bugs well since that game did so well for itself gsc gameworld figured why not take some of those early concepts that were thrown out of soc and pull them together into one hell of a sequel an idea that makes a lot of sense both creatively and financially i mean some of these concepts have been fleshed out and even partially implemented already so it was no big deal to take their finished work and start adding some of the original intent back into it which is why it only took a calendar year worth of work till clear sky was ready for market but before we go down the rabbit hole of what's been changed i just want to assure you that the gameplay you loved before is still here and cs will give you the same experience you would expect from a stalker game only on a slightly larger scale you're still gonna have to approach this title as more of a survival simulator and less of a dual wielding fast-paced circle strafing fps the goal of course is going to be to complete the main story but you'll spend most of your time with side activities that will keep you very busy most of your play time will be spent navigating the zone so don't be surprised when you end up only using your guns for maybe 35 of the time in this first person shooter although i will say the genius move of adding guides who can fast travel you to a previously visited location for some cash both makes things way more convenient and fits in with the general world of chernobyl's exclusion zone you'll still be looking for artifacts to finance your trek through this localized apocalypse only this time around they won't be laying on the floor waiting for you instead you'll need to equip an artifact detector which is a little device that'll lead you in the direction of nearby artifacts and only once you pinpoint it exactly where they are will they appear to you this process is made infinitely more hard by the fact that artifacts can only be found in the center of anomalies like some kind of irradiated pearl and a clam this makes artifacts feel a little more hard fought and scarce in the zone plus it tracks with story reasons that would have things in the zone being very different compared to the last time we were here you'll still need to defend yourself against threats both mutant and human but it's that last part where the biggest change in clear sky comes in the faction war system was something planned for the first stalker title and here what it comes down to is a massive overhaul of the zones factions and how you interact with them and i think the swamp you start off in is a perfect little microcosm of this system at work as you come into new areas there'll be at least two factions vying for control over strategic points either leading into other areas or major outposts whoever you decide to join up with will want your help when they're in a pinch and since this is stalker they might as well tie that into the a life system so randomly while you're running from place to place you'll get distress calls over the radio asking for your help and pushing back either a rival faction or a swarm of mutants realistically it does get a little annoying having to constantly stop what you're doing and spend ammo on three bandits with makarovs running up against duty's exoskeleton clad soldiers but there is a tangible effect it can have on your playthrough depending on how you want to do it just like before you can expect residents of the zone to act relatively realistically they'll wander around interacting with other stalkers fighting mutants and overall just completing their own goals that means you stand a good chance of running into an enemy patrol at some point and the easier you make it for your faction to occupy important locations the less likely you'll be to see rivals on their turf you'll essentially have carved a path for yourself through that specific territory and as long as you're not near any mutant dens you won't really have to worry about a lot of resistance if you've already put the work in freeze and don't even think of touching that shooter thanks to this new system you'll find yourself getting into firefights alongside other factions pretty often and being part of an 8 on 8 skirmish is actually really fun it gives off some kind of a war movie vibe and just gives the combat and cs a more dynamic and kind of strategic feel to accommodate this pretty beefy gameplay upgrade the map now tracks all friendly and not so friendly units in the same territory as you so on one hand yes it does make it easier always having your target's location displayed on screen but it also makes it a lot easier to see conflicts before they happen trust me running through an area with a specific goal in mind and then having to deviate from that goal because you accidentally wandered into a herd of snorks while checking your inventory is a big pain in the ass and if you're looking at this through a modern game design lens i guess you could interpret some of these changes as an attempt at making the game more accessible but i think these guys knew what they were making and they knew there wasn't much of a chance for mainstream appeal i'd guess this whole map thing was just a move made to make implementing the faction more system a little easier and maybe more intuitive besides if it bothers you you could always get a mod that disables the on-screen map or one that gets rid of the indicators on that map and speaking of mods it's time to cover clear sky's largest stumbling block the thing a majority of you have likely been wondering how long it's gonna take me to mention clear sky for some reason i can't seem to find made some serious tweaks to weapon accuracy and ballistics compared to shadow of chernobyl and while i'd like to say those changes were for the better i think the entire internet would agree they most definitely were not it seems like nearly every weapon in the game has been made intentionally worse than its soc counterpart making combat much harder now stalker as a series already has a pretty extreme bend to its difficulty as it is but this is something else in a vanilla run of cs at least at the start of the game you will miss a majority of the shots that you take that aren't point blank and just in case you haven't been keeping up in a stalker game if your point-blank distance from an enemy you've likely already lost that fight and despite what i said before i might have a possible reason for this pretty noticeable change see the devs implemented another feature that didn't make it into the first game and that's a weapon upgrade system not only can you officially get your gear tuned up without a mod here in cs but you can also incrementally improve it that is if you have enough money and have found modification plans for that type of weapon so it seems to me the developers were wanting the guns to have very noticeable differences between their base form and the fully upgraded version and since a lot of weapons in the last game were already pretty useful they likely didn't want to make those guns compete with firearms way outside their league so they basically dropped all gun stats across the board so that you would need to really invest some time and money into a gun before it became satisfying to use and i get that idea i mean it clearly wasn't implemented well but for the sake of balance it makes sense that they would have to alter the base stats of a gun so that it can be substantially increased in terms of effectiveness later on essentially you can only make a gun so good so they decided to start everyone at a level where the improvements they were making could be felt without having a shotgun loaded with slugs made so accurate it becomes your new long distance sniper rifle although that is still doable regardless of why they did it though this is often over exaggerated among stalker fans in my opinion don't get me wrong these weapons are noticeably less accurate and have far more bullet drop off than the last game but like i said i get what they were going for they really wanted you to work for your progress and the idea of having to devote a lot of time into a single weapon before it reaches its full potential is actually a step back towards the rpg mechanics gsc wanted to place in the game from day one obviously as a shooter it is not going to be very satisfying to have 9 shots out of a 12 round magazine miss your opponent and i get why people dislike that but if you devote a little time to a single gun you'll see these downsides basically disappear it goes without saying you can't ask people to accept a massive handicap from the start for no real tangible reason so there are a million mods out there that deal with this issue some restore soc levels of weapon stats while others go a step further and make changes that might be more true to life and since we're on that subject let's talk mods i'm using the arsenal overhaul mod which among a massive list of other things improves weapon accuracy damage output and ballistics it's possible there are better mods out there for this purpose but i've used this specific one for the last few cs playthroughs and i've really grown to love the changes it makes right off the bat you'll notice scoring a kill with the starting pistol is actually possible now which is always nice and on top of that the damage increase really makes combat in this game a butt tightening experience most enemies especially starting ones will die in just one to three shots and this gives the game an even further simulation feel combine this with the harder difficulties and you've got yourself one hell of a shooting game oh and by the way i think i've been unknowingly spreading disinformation for years apparently difficulty in stalker games does not work the way most of us thought it did mostly in terms of accuracy but the damage you receive from enemies does scale with it so what i said before still applies by getting back on topic with this mod paired with that difficulty not only are your guns realistically accurate and punishing but so are the enemies so you will die just as easy as nearly anyone you come up against making for this tight fisted combat that'll have you better utilizing cover and the lean function to make sure as little of your body is exposed as possible you'll be less likely to run into any combat scenario haphazardly now that you know you stand a very solid chance of dying in an open fire fight which does admittedly play into my preferred style for the game which is using a scoped rifle to do most of my killing at very very long ranges i'm not sure why but there's something very satisfying about only needing a shot or two to bring down even the most well-armed foe actually despite a lot of the previous references i've been making i'm not really into simulation games but in this one scenario i could certainly see why someone would be the action that comes from knowing one bad move could have you lost to the zone is pretty white knuckle there are two downsides though number one mutants pose way more of a threat at this higher difficulty but seem to be just as hard to put down so blind dogs and boars end up being some of the worst stuff you can come up against in the zone as they can take you down and a good three hits and might take several shots to end while they're zigzagging at very high speeds so while other stalkers will be amazingly fun to engage in combat with mutants are far more annoying which i know a lot of people like but personally the extreme difficulty seems fair when i have just as much of a shot at killing the enemy as he does me when those skills start to tip i start not having as good of a time and speaking of not having a good time my second issue is the fact that well since guns turn off pretty accurate and usable upgrades can sort of turn them into the firearm equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction for example i came across a really good m4 a few hours in and using it with iron sights felt just amazing i was reliably putting bandits down with one or two well placed shots but if i needed to i could go full auto and still reliably hit something after fully upgrading it though i no longer had to worry about little things like target distance i could put lead down range from one end of the map to the other and that did make the game feel a little unbalanced at least a little bit of course it's still fun sticking to cover and taking out bad guys from far away but i sort of enjoyed it when i wasn't so overpowered compared to my enemies on the plus side though further into the game everyone will have access to more badass weapons so the problem will eventually correct itself the only problem being how much i enjoy switching up my arsenal and trying new guns in these mods once i fully upgraded that m4 there was no need for any shotguns or sniper rifles because using them would mean willingly handicapping myself just to get some different looking muzzle flashes on my screen so once enemies have access to better weapons it becomes a variety issue and i sort of just get sick of seeing the same gun over and over again oh and by the way when they do get their hands on better firearms you'll really start to notice how prone npcs are to pushing you out of cover in a firefight and straight into the crossfire seriously this was the cause of like 50 of my deaths in the game and it never stopped being annoying i'm not quite sure why this happened so much more here than in the last game but it feels like there is a big empty space around other stalkers that seems to act as a boundary which means you'll also be getting body blocked pretty often which becomes a real issue in the flea market area in garbage once you're at the top of the structure loners walking back and forth on patrol will knock you off a walkways without a care in the world which can sometimes kill you another big gameplay inclusion this time around are the blowouts that can randomly take place as you're stalking out there in the zone just like the one depicted in the intro cut scene you might be minding your business and looting corpses when all the sudden a flash of light appears in the sky and the sound of an earthquake mixed with the tornado starts to rumble off in the distance when this happens you'll have a pretty short amount of time to find shelter before the emissions on top of you and luckily the game will replace whatever mission you're tracking at the time with the get to cover objective and point you towards the nearest safe haven i loved this aspect of the game it just gives you one more unpredictable thing about the zone that you have to stay prepared for and hiding out in some decrepit building made of sheet metal with holes in it while a radioactive storm takes place outside is really damn cool like i mentioned in the previous section there is a lot more story this time around which is a good thing but it seems like the focus shifted from the kind of side content we stalkers like to the more linear story based path each major quest giver in an area will mostly just give storyline quests or once required to join a specific faction and for people like me who enjoy staying a lone mercenary in a zone full of ideological groups well that can mean the free play nature of this game is not quite as strong as the last this isn't a massive deal but because of this i typically don't spend as much time on clear sky as i do the games that came before and after it on the plus side though you get the same massive map from soc along with a few more locations added for good measure which really helps this game feel less like a sequel and more like some kind of late 90s giant expansion pack there's definitely enough change here that it'll feel like a substantial addition to what you experienced last time but so much of it was built off of soc's foundation that it'll feel satisfyingly familiar as well and as we go forward that'll be a trend that continues as each release of a stalker game is essentially the first game plus more stuff you'll visit the same or similar locations fire the same or similar weapons join up and fight with the same factions and be terrified of the same mutants this makes things feel so much more familiar and consistent even if you're not as emotionally attached to the game as i am i'd imagine it'd be hard to beat shadow of chernobyl then start up clear sky and visit the cordon without at least getting a little nostalgic returning to locations like garbage or the acropolis underground between three separate entries in a series helps them feel like real places in a real world i can't really explain it but something about seeing these landmarks over and over again just drives home so much of what makes this series great and what makes this game great and it is in fact i would go as far as to say most people are wrong when they label clear sky as the weaker of the three titles i remember playing cs on launch and being completely enveloped by it but back then you could argue it was the only game in town as far as this stuff goes and i might have been blinded by nostalgia for the original and maybe there's some truth to that but getting back into cs for this video i found myself surprised at how much fun it is of course it does help massively that i don't have to worry about the pretty bad accuracy of the vanilla version and the changes this mod made to damage output certainly helps things but more than anything i just sort of realized this is shadow of chernobyl but more and if that's what you're looking for modded or not that is exactly what you'll find here it is a more substantial experience than soc with its faction war system more locations new weapon modding and the ever-present threat of a mission so if you played the hell out of the last game you won't need to worry about getting bored anytime soon plus the arsenal overhaul mod makes the game infinitely more enjoyable in my opinion i wouldn't necessarily say vanilla clear sky requires a mod to play today especially for people who already cleared its predecessor but it is going to make things a lot more fun and a lot easier for a first-timer in my opinion my chosen favorite arsenal overhaul is the go-to for people not familiar with the series but some might argue it changes a lot of the intent the developers had for this game and there's definitely some truth there it's hard for me to say which is going to be right for your first time because on one hand i didn't have such a hard time adapting to the accuracy in the base game but i also absolutely fell in love with the challenge this mod brings so i guess it's your call as far as that goes but just know that both vanilla and modded are great choices and offer different but equally satisfying gameplay experiences and i could go on and on about how true to life the gameplay tries to be or i could just point out that i was in a firefight at one point and shot a bandit as that bandit fell to the ground the dead man's grippy out on his weapon caused him to fill his fellow bandit full of holes if that doesn't get the point across for you i'm not sure i could say anything that would [Music] this game often gets a bum rap and while i do understand the frustration in some points it's just too damn fun for that to matter once again the real goal with starting this or any other stalker title up won't necessarily be to mechanically engage with the game itself but instead to spend a little more time in its location and on that front i can assure you clear sky is every bit as atmospheric and immersive as its predecessor now i know i tuned a lot of this part towards first timers but realistically this will be an entry for people who have already learned stalker's quirks make a played soc and if you have played the first game it is a damn near guarantee you'll like this one i may not be able to account for my own bias but i predict even if this does end up being the weaker entry in your opinion it'll still be one hell of a fun time though maybe fun isn't the right word but it'll make an impact that's for damn sure a lot of what i've said so far could be boiled down to stalker clear sky is everything the devs wish they could have implemented in shadow of chernobyl and nowhere is that more true than the game's presentation the last stalker game had a look all of its own but some aspects of it fell pretty far from what you could call a triple a production of course some parts of it could be described as amazing especially by me but still there was a lot of jank to look past to get to that stuff now clear sky definitely reuses 95 of its on-screen assets from the last game so don't go hoping they finally improved how dumb npcs look when turning around in place they did however completely revamp stalker's dynamic lighting system and it is a total transformation as far as the presentation goes this time around gse took advantage of the directx 10 api to serve up some incredibly convincing effects and i think the first thing anyone's likely to notice when going straight from soc to cs are the god rays and for those of you who never heard that term before it basically means the light from the sun can be broken up into several small volumetric light beams by trees buildings or really anything else i can tell you in all honesty i've been looking at this effect forever but when i get a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye while running through an area i always stop in my tracks to admire it the last stalker game really wowed me with this dynamic weather system and that's still going on in cs only this time around they have the graphical horsepower it takes to have that weather show a tangible visual effect on the environment the stalkers around you and everything else so if you're turning in a quest at cordon and a rainstorm starts you'll notice that everything around you actually looks realistically wet they also added this really nice effect that mimics water running down surfaces along with a trick that has the ground showing tiny droplets splashing with rain once you really kneel down and get a close look at this effect some of the magic does get lost but while you're creeping through some abandoned camp not really paying specific attention to these tricks and just letting them immerse you it's really wonderful and if it's a particularly bad storm you might get a look at some pretty wicked looking lightning that'll brighten up the whole area you're in in a convincing way these new directx 10 effects really turn this into a whole new experience and i am absolutely in love with how transformative it is to just throw some really convincing lighting into an already great looking stalker game on top of that there are new features like a depth of field effect while reloading something that does sort of look cool but can really get in the way when tracking targets in a fire fight luckily there is an option to disable this effect and after you've seen it a few times i'd recommend you do just that there's also a new heads-up display and while you know i typically get rid of these things right from the start come on this one looks really cool the arsenal overhaul mod lessens most of the on-screen nonsense but you will still have the mini-map on screen something that's great for tracking enemies and friendly strongholds coming under attack but i felt like i was navigating with my eyes on the lower left hand corner of the screen the whole time instead of looking where i was actually going i don't know maybe it's just me but if a game gives me an on-screen mini-map i just can't help but use it a majority of the time and at that point i feel like i could have just been playing a top-down twin stick shooter so overall i would say the new inclusions to clear sky deserve two big thumbs up that being said there are some pretty big downsides that go with this new tech first off and least of an issue is that scenes without a lot of dynamic light sources can sort of seem flat by comparison it seems to me all the fancy new stuff only apply to certain lighting sources and sadly the moon is not one of them now it's not like these areas look bad or anything it's still an impressive visual experience but you're gonna get spoiled by all the cool looking effects and you will notice their absence and the next issue is that these new tricks really do add to the game's unpredictable nature all kinds of new bugs were present at launch and a lot of them seem to be caused by the new api nowadays though i would say you're pretty safe starting it up i haven't personally played a full game on vanilla in a while but the last time i did it was stable as hell like i said before i'm using the arsenal overhaul mod for this playthrough and it seems to borrow a lot of its features from the sky reclamation project which makes it crazy stable i was able to get to the end of the game without experiencing even one crash which is not so common in this series let me assure you so the horror stories you've always heard about these games and bugginess is true to an extent but thanks to modern patches and mods it is nowhere near how it used to be sadly though there is one last downside and it is a doozy these new lighting effects can absolutely inhale system resources in the last video i complained about shadow of chernobyl being pretty taxing to run for what you were getting but in clear sky it is on a whole different level in fact at first i thought there was some kind of a memory leak problem that had performance degrading the longer the game stayed running but in reality there's just a time of day when you can expect frame rate dips in the early afternoon and morning the sun's light will have performance tanking and while the game does give you immense control over what you do and don't want to see the effect of the god rays on the environment is just too damn good to give up in my opinion i typically set the god rays and volumetric lights to their lowest setting and that does help a bit but i still end up sacrificing precious frames so yes this is a problem but it is sort of a problem of my own creation because i do have the ability to stop it but i just choose not to continuing with the improvements there have been small alterations to weapons and 2d assets from soc but the most noticeable for me are the menus and dialogue stuff these new assets are now made to be displayed in widescreen so no more ugly stretching which means i'm really happy oh and they added more death animations too so good news for people who are tired of the funny-looking ragdoll death from the first game and since most of what's on offer here in cs was taken from the last game that means skin still looks like everyone in the zone suffers from some kind of a subdermal fungal infection but i would say the new effects made possible by directx 10 along with the stunning environments will definitely make up for any of those kind of shortcomings well you asked for it drop him boys shortcomings like the odd transparency effect that happens off in the distance which still shows up no matter how far you have your vision distance set something that wouldn't bother me too much if the background elements didn't stay opaque which in simple terms means that some of the buildings off in the distance will start to turn transparent while the trees mountains and whatever's behind it won't and then of course you have the aforementioned performance that comes with these improvements which can definitely negatively affect your gameplay all that being said though i still think this is one hell of an impressive attempt at modernizing stalker in its x-ray engine in fact with all these new features and graphical effects being added just one year after the original release of soc this almost feels like a modern day remaster except for the fact that it was done right and wasn't completely botched this massive overhaul to stalker's look was a damn marvel at the time despite the fact that none of us could afford a machine that would run it well nowadays it's made a bit less impressive by clear skies follow-up which would take the same amazing graphics and even further improve on them but for the time this was a revolution it's the same amazing gameplay fans of the first game would be looking for but the developer used that first title as a platform on which they can build an even better visual experience on this series has always had these really funny quirks with how it renders skin deals with lights or handles geometry but despite the low points it was always a visual treat and clear sky is a perfect continuation of that trend in short it is exactly what a sequel should be the zone is becoming increasingly unstable alright so we started really strong with this series i mean no matter how you cut it stalker's shadow of chernobyl was one impressively deep package and any game coming out after it was gonna have to really try in order to meet that same series high point and if you've watched the entirety of this video it should probably go without saying but in my opinion that is exactly what clear sky did a lot of people tend to lump this game in as the lesser of the three and i don't know if i think that's fair this game offered stalker fans the exact same gameplay and visuals they fell in love with the first time around only this time plus a little more yes what they did with ballistics and accuracy was not a smart move but realistically you can mod that out of the game with just a little bit less effort than it took me to say this sentence sure you could argue it's pretty damn similar to the first game in a lot of ways but i think that's the tight rope the dev team was trying to walk they wanted to give us all these new improvements and all the original mechanics and systems they intended to include in the first game but more than anything they wanted to make sure it still felt like a stalker game and it most definitely does everything added here makes for a natural progression of what can be found in the original title it really does just feel like it's somehow becoming more stalker this entry may very well have been eclipsed by the release of the next game in the series but if we're gonna judge it based on its own merits i would say it scores much higher than a lot of people are willing to admit i mean think about it at the time we weren't looking for a flashy new experience with aaa tear graphics we stalker fans only had one wish give us just one more chance to immerse ourselves in the zone we wanted to see that world and its inhabitants again giving us just one more excuse to retrace our footsteps through miles of territory in an environment that we just flat out love being in now it's not like i'm discounting or trying to downplay just how inaccurate guns were in the game but even on launch there was a fix for this upgrade your weapons now realistically that's not the most user-friendly and intuitive approach to take with game design but think of the audience they were serving stalker as a series is about as far away from user friendliness or intuitiveness as you could possibly imagine like i said in the last video this is a series you have to teach yourself to play properly once again i would totally recommend something like arsenal overhaul if you are planning on tackling this one as it really changes the combat from something that's really challenging to something that's incredibly fun and really challenging in fact the new ballistics damage output and accuracy tweaks in this mod makes it one of my favorite gameplay experiences in the series no joke i was blown away at how much i enjoyed this playthrough and after all that praise i'm sure it doesn't need to be said but obviously i do recommend you guys install clear sky right now except if you haven't played a stalker game before as crazy as it sounds this refined experience just will not be appreciated properly by someone who doesn't have the context of how the series used to play and look before it i know this is gonna sound really dumb but to truly get everything you can out of these sequels you really have to have played what came before them it's counter-intuitive for sure i mean after hearing me praise this game as being everything the last one was but more you would figure the more fun refined title would be the one to recommend you know best foot forward and all but i really think a lot of what makes this game great would be lost on a newcomer i don't know maybe i'm out of line here or maybe my love for the series is causing me to unconsciously gatekeep it but if possible try to play these games in order then you can get a feel for what each one brought to the table and how each successive entry incrementally improved on the last truth be told i used to agree with the popular belief that this is the weaker title in the series but after this most recent game of clear sky i've really fallen in love with it and well here's hoping you will too and well i guess it's a good thing we're wrapping up now because it looks like an emission's approaching so we're gonna have to cut this artifact hunt a little short but we will be coming right back with a review of the absolute golden child of this franchise i hope i get to see all of you back here again when we do but until then happy hunting stalkers okay there's a way through here let's hope at least somewhere a little less deadly like we've covered previously the development of the first stalker title was one hell of a roller coaster gsc gameworld had these lofty ideas for what they wanted to implement but sadly spent a lot of their time just making sure the damn thing would work on launch day so when the time came to follow up on their success they essentially took some of the previously unfinished work they had done during soc's development and created a sequel out of it and in doing so helped cement the world they had created into the minds of us the fans sure we would be revisiting most of the locations from the first game but to be fair that's kind of what we wanted to do anyways so if you could call clear sky an expansion pack for shadow of chernobyl call a pripyat would be those two games combined there would be new guns new assets and new locations but essentially this is the world of stalker perfected of course that doesn't mean there are no flaws to be found this is still a stalker game after all it just means the devs finally got a shot at adding most of what was supposed to make it into that first title plus the kind of fine tuning you would expect from a sequel but some of you may be wondering would this new title solve some of the issues even hardened fans had with the shallow amount of plot delivered in the first two games well there's only one way to find out watch watch out control control controller okay so remember how shadow of chernobyl was light on narrative but heavy on environmental storytelling and how clear sky tried to remedy that well i think for this last entry the developers said well an impossibly thin story worked for us once maybe it'll work again call of pripyat starts off with a recap of not only the events of the last two games but the zone itself oh yeah and i should probably mention the mod i'm using for this playthrough sort of acts as this intro from the game so if you plan on using the arsenal overhaul mod and you've never played the game before maybe start up a new game in vanilla first just so you can see this cutscene i know it's not the most important thing in the world and it'll likely be information you already know anyways but it helps contextualize things and i kinda like it and getting back to that intro like i said before it tells us about the zone's origins first we have the chernobyl nuclear power plant meltdown causing the government to cordon off the area around the disaster dubbing it the exclusion zone and now that they have themselves 30 kilometers of real estate where the public isn't allowed to go and even if they were no one would want to be there anyways they begin filling the place with research labs and bunkers where all the things governments aren't supposed to do can be conducted in secret flash forward 40 years and a massive event takes place that sees all of the army and science personnel within the confines of the zone dying instantly after this second disaster scientific expeditions into the zone begin to witness inhuman monsters roaming the landscape likely those who were unlucky enough to be in the zone when it blew there's also reports of the environment being twisted and warped small pockets of space contain anomalies that can conjure flames or electricity out of nowhere or can crush a person with severely magnified gravity which is good enough reason to stay away forever if you ask me but there is a human component going on here that basically ensures no one ever will inside these reality bending anomalies people start finding small trinkets with what you might call odd properties to them perpetual energy factories balls of frozen fire and gravity defying objects all small enough to fit in your pocket these artifacts being such obvious scientific curiosities everyone from state-sponsored actors to private businesses are willing to pay top dollar for them which creates an economy of buyers middlemen sellers and the stalkers who venture into the zone to procure these balls of real-life material with more and more interest being drawn to the zone eventually people start testing its limits one such stalker is strelok who in the events of the first game was able to turn off the brain scorcher a giant antenna array that broadcasts some kind of brain scrambling signal that can turn a regular person into a drooling zombie in no time and acts as an impenetrable field keeping stalkers from getting to the power plant at the center of the zone after this barrier was eliminated the zone's many factions all made a run on the center at once leading to a massive war looking to capitalize on this the ukrainian government set up a secret mission that would see several helicopters infiltrating the zone and making a straight line for the center each one coming from a different angle these choppers were supposed to be equipped with anti-anomaly measures and the pilots had maps letting them know where the major anomalies they needed to avoid were and that operation lasted all of about five minutes before each helicopter suffered some kind of technical failure the government not being very happy about the millions of dollars of hardware they just scrapped suspected anyone and everyone everything from sabotage to all-out military attacks were considered but to get any real answers they were going to need boots on the ground so they sent in our protagonist major alexander degtirev he was inserted into the zone and given a false identity the goal being for him to pose as a normal everyday stalker and in doing so blend in enough to get some real info on what's going on the reasoning they are being pretty strong as your average stalker would like nothing less than to put several bullets into any soldier they come across and as such probably isn't going to tell them about any anti-military subterfuge they've been involved in and then the game just sort of starts and yeah maybe that was a long time to spend just talking about a game's intro but trust me there's a good reason for that after that intro is finished the amount of mainline story you come across in your playthrough is well it's almost laughable so you're the whole expert eh don't worry you can count on the boys to take the muties out nice and quick you take control of the major as he enters the swamps of zaton and your goal is to blend in at the local stalker post made from an old ship using that as a base of operations you venture out inspecting each of the downed helicopters finding out each one of them suffered some kind of a catastrophic failure after coming across a black box listing possible evacuation points you follow the clues to a surviving helicopter pilot and discover the evac will be going down inside the ghost town of pripyat getting there isn't going to be as easy as it sounds though even though the center is technically open now most of the people who know how to safely get there likely died in that first raid so we stumble across old documents that point towards a secret underground tunnel connecting pripyat and jupiter to get through it though we'll need a few buddies to watch our back and a suit with a closed cycle oxygen system because the military in their infinite wisdom flooded the tunnel with toxic gas before they abandoned it once through the underground passage our team gets jumped by a squad of soldiers forcing the major to come out of hiding and identifying himself as a member of the special forces he links up with the unit of survivors from the failed operation fairway and so far all the info he's been able to collect is stuff that could have just been assumed from the start each helicopter went down and there isn't evidence that they were attacked so chalking this all up as a loss major deck tyrev and the survivors of the mission decide to jump ship asap but before they do well you know what let's make sure we don't ruin this for everyone if you're looking to jump into this one blind make sure to either skip to the time stamp on screen click past the chapter mark spoilers or click the link in the description to make sure i don't mess up that first play through for you what do you think we're here for fun why so trigger happy can't you see that we're all friends here me and agent have been through a lot trust me on that okay so our little motley crew is ready to move out when they get a reading on something that's coming their way fast thinking it might be a monolith squad or a herd of mutants ready to take them out everyone digs in and prepares for an all-out fight and the amount of tension in this is so well done if you don't already know what's coming your mind starts trying to expect what the game's going to throw at you next which could be anything at this point well the moment finally comes and instead of some kind of a mutated horror we're joined by strela the main character of the first game and sort of the most important person in the zone my name is treylock [Music] you're the stalker who disabled the scorcher yes he lets everyone know about what he's been through in the last two games including the hot gossip on sea consciousness and the truth behind the zone's existence following from the good ending of soc strela informs the group that he kind of sort of shot up the only chance they ever had at controlling the zone and now that it's been unrestrained it's going to keep growing meaning soon it won't just be russia's problem in fact it won't be long till it's all of europe's problem and there's nothing that says it won't continue growing from there ah but some of the more astute among you might be wondering what the hell became of the whole figure out what [ __ ] on the secret military plans storyline well strelak puts a pin in that too and it's likely the most anticlimactic wrap-up you've ever seen in your life the reasons are obvious drillock explains to these hardened soldiers something even the most green stalker already knows about anomalies move around after emissions so the anomaly charts they had were long outdated before a single chopper even left the tarmac now on one hand yes it is cool to see how the military deals with something most people who've spent even a little bit of time in the zone consider to be novice level info but we've just spent 30 or so hours on the edge of our seat waiting till we find out what happened to these choppers and the conclusion to what was built up to be some great mystery ended up being what most stalker fans would have immediately thought of as a solution but then disregarded because it was too simple if you cut out everything in between the beginning intro and this dialogue cut scene it would go something like hey listen you've got to figure out what happened to these helicopters they all crashed and it definitely was not anomalies it was anomalies but now that we have the spoilers out of the way let's link up with the rest of the group and tie this all together we must inform the hq of this as soon as possible contact my commanders right after the emission all right without spoiling anything i'll just say the conclusion to the operation fairway catastrophe is far from satisfying on the plus side there is a very late game revelation that will dull the sting a bit but it's totally unrelated to the story's main thread that being said there is a lot about this ending i really liked my issue is more how they strung me along for the entire run time of the game only to wrap up the one and only story we've had so far in a single dialogue box then the remaining 20 minutes or so of the game is devoted to a new plot thread introduced so close to the end that you don't have more than two conversations about it till you've seen the credits it seems to me this was yet another aspect of the stalker series that was meant to be much bigger and more detailed but had to be trimmed down due to either budget issues engine issues or maybe both so you might assume me [ __ ] on the one and only driving narrative is a negative and it definitely is but just like before you'll be given a lot of smaller side stories to work your way through and again like before a lot of these could have served as an even better main storyline if given a little more love and care don't get me wrong i like the idea of a mystery revolving around finding out what happened to the military choppers that crashed but investigating missing stalkers only to find out a hemoglobin addict is to blame well that's much more interesting [Music] if i may be so bold i think maybe gsc gameworld might be misunderstanding their audience here a bit they did a brilliant job of setting up the zone in the first game and we love being here but i think the best way to move forward is to not focus so much on the zone as the driving plot but instead use it as a backdrop for really interesting stuff to take place in this is a place where criminals on the run from the law drug addicts and pioneering explorers all congregate and there is likely to be much more human drama here than the zone could ever produce and if you ask me much of the appeal here is how little we know about the exclusion zone and i do get the desire to further flesh it out but i think each time you do you risk stripping away a little bit of what makes it so interesting and unique so giving the story here a grade is going to be a little hard on one end we have what i would call a great setup and a well-cultivated mystery but on the other in my opinion is a very unsatisfying conclusion to that mystery so it's far from all bad but not quite good either at the risk of being even more of a broken record than i already am the main story in a stalker game is always just a thin thread used to pull you through what is an incredible setting it is totally possible to ignore the main story in one of these games and still have a fulfilling and satisfying experience a point made all the more clear when you see how many stalker mods remove any and all story beats only to replace them with smaller side stories and a more free play focus something you can actually get with call of pripyat in vanilla form by the way the free play part not the missing story part at the end of the game you're asked if you want to stay in the zone or leave it if you choose to stay you can essentially play the game forever artifacts are often reset after emissions which gives you a theoretically infinite resource to farm and you will never be so overpowered or so well equipped that a wandering pack of snorks or a single pissed off stalker won't be able to do you win i think it says a lot about the stalker fandom that the introduction of this free play feature would work its way into a massive amount of high quality mods for all three games i think that shows what we want here isn't more curated and finely honed stories although to be honest we might not hate you for giving us more the boss is over there go talk to him but instead a small reason to continue to exist here in a video game world that is unlike anything the medium has ever seen before so again i can't really pass judgment on the story here it's a little more complicated than that but i will try to condense this into something at least resembling an opinion stalker caller pripyat in my opinion started off strong with a story that seemed like it would clue us into some of the zone's secrets but when it eventually does it most of your time with the game will have been spent simply living in its world and not interacting with its story so while i can totally understand being scared off by the initial statement that the story here has a less than satisfying conclusion just know that is very much par for the course here and unlike most video games the main story is not going to be what keeps you here damn i guess that dumbass quote from john carmack is finally applicable so let's rework it a little bit story in a stalker game is like story in a porno it's expected to be there but it's not exactly why you're there in the first place let's try to get by them without making any noise the first stalker game set the standard and when it came time to follow that up the developers aimed to include all the stuff they originally wanted to see in that maiden voyage sadly stalker fans weren't quite so accepting when clear sky came out and to be fair it's understandable why much of what clear sky did at launch despite being taken from actual work done on the first title felt very half-baked so the big question is what direction did they take with the third and at the time of writing final entry in the series in front of gsc game world laid two paths heading to the left would have them going back to their roots and further improving the foundation of shadow of chernobyl the right would see them fleshing out some of the more innovative ideas seen in clear sky so which one did they choose well they just sort of ran straight forward in between the two so you managed to drag your ass over here bravo stalker call of pripyat could be seen as the series greatest hits a combination of all the things that worked for both releases living inside one game in fact this combination of elements would be so well accepted that most big mods for soc and cs would basically be made up of fan made attempts at including call of pripyat's mechanics and there's a lot to cover here so i'm gonna have to treat you like you're already well versed in this series if not i should have a link to my videos covering the previous stalker games here in the upper right hand corner or in the description so if you start to feel lost go ahead and enroll yourself in chernobyl university to get your master's degree in stocking stop right there don't you move one thing that won't be so clear from the start but will eventually show itself is the fact that cop is a much more confined game as far as the setting goes of course we're still inside the chernobyl exclusion zone but as stalkers we're kind of used to being able to visit several locations within it on our journey this time around our adventure will be limited to just three areas you start off in the swampy zatan then move on to jupiter and eventually the titular dead city pripyat now at first this does sound like a downgrade after all the last two games feature 10 and 11 unique locations respectively on top of that what made both of those earlier titles so appealing is the thought that revisiting old familiar stomping grounds was sort of baked into the development of a stalker game like i mentioned in my clear sky video a lot of what i appreciated about it was the fact that it let me relive my memories in a lot of these locations i mean honestly how many of you guys watched the stalker 2 trailer and audibly screamed yourselves when they showed footage of corden or what looked like the great swamps at least for me this was always one of the most unique and interesting parts of the franchise taking that into consideration it would be easy to see this as a big downside and maybe it is at least partly but on the plus side these three new locations are absolutely massive in scale it's kind of hard to say for sure but i would imagine three of the smaller spots in previous games like say corden garbage and rostock could easily fit inside of zatan alone so you'll get that same stalker experience visiting all kinds of abandoned villages and anomaly fields only you won't have to sit through any loading screens to get to most of them actually something i never really noticed until sitting down to get my thoughts together for this script is the fact that there aren't any traditional exits or entrances leading from one zone to the other like we're used to in the series instead you can find guides who will lead you in and out of your current area which isn't exactly bad or good just something i thought was interesting but getting back to my original point these are some incredibly big plots of land to explore all three of these new maps are massive and each one is jam-packed with places to go and interesting things to see so i would estimate you won't be missing out on much if any potential content when going from those earlier games to this one but i think the big draw with the more compartmentalized design of those games is being able to drastically change the sort of environment you're in at a moment's notice if you happen to be tired of the behemoth mounds of scrap and garbage and want a little more color in your life you could always go to the red forest or hop on over to the army warehouses having a good number of zones broken up by loading screens meant the devs could have a lot more freedom with making each one unique as far as color palette and scenery goes and yeah that is something you'll miss out on with cop i don't want to come off as overly negative about this though like i said these are massive areas and they really do have an incredible amount of content squeezed into them all three zones have a million landmarks to visit and loot and several huge anomaly fields for artifact hunting mutants still stick to environments they're more tuned to like bloodsuckers preferring swampy spots for some reason or boar sticking to more open fields and you'll definitely have to keep an eye on ruined buildings or anything else that might give natural cover to bandits or monolith fighters so navigating these large areas should feel exactly like you're used to these being such huge playable settings the developers made the well-appreciated decision to include a guide role to the stalkers who randomly traversed the zone so if you want to let's say visit the boiler anomaly but you're being dragged down by more than a hundred pounds of ammo and gear looted from a mutant versus stalker fight that you may or may not have decided to stay out of well you can just find a gathering of stalkers and pay someone a small fare basically to fast travel you there oh and one tiny thing i thought was really cool is the fact that the same group of stalkers that offer to fast travel you to somewhere will load in with you at that location and then they'll start running back to wherever they were headed in the first place it's a small touch but one that i really appreciated okay so i've been blabbing about the game setting this whole time i'm sure a few of you are wondering how it actually feels to play the game and once again that is sort of a complicated issue we await your orders oh monolith on the plus side the upgrade system from clear sky is back which is awesome for two reasons not only is it really fun tuning a gun towards your play style but that gives you even more incentive to explore since the tools required for more advanced upgrades will need to be found before a technician can perform them i'm also incredibly happy to say that these guys learned from their last release and made sure guns were still usable before you put thousands of dollars into their upgrades which translates into you're not going to have to worry about spending a good 30 rounds of 556 at point-blank range before you actually hit something in front of you this time around they seem to have included a nice balance to things by making sure really powerful weapons also came with some kind of a downside like much more kick or lowered magazine capacity and if you'll remember one of my complaints in the last video was that some mods and trying to combat that problem by making guns pretty accurate from the start well they ended up making the upgraded forms of those guns pretty damn overpowered and at the risk of sounding like a total hypocrite i kind of missed that which leads into a bit of criticism see the gun play in cola pripyat while still being fun and very satisfying just didn't hit those same highs that clear sky did now in total honesty i'm talking about the gunplay resulting from applying the arsenal overhaul mod to clear sky so you would assume it's not exactly an apples to apples comparison but i'm actually using a version of arsenal overhaul for cop as well i was so damn impressed with how much this mods tweaks to gun damage and accuracy added to clear sky's gameplay that i immediately pulled the trigger on using that same mod but tuned for its sequel and i just feel like something's not quite the same here guns are certainly more powerful than vanilla call of pripyat but they're just not on that same level of lethality that i saw in cs about a week ago even at the highest difficulty i just wasn't getting that same feeling from popping out of cover and sending two well-placed shots to some bandit's chest and seeing him collapse to the floor it seems like it's taking more shots to down enemies and that's not the worst thing in the world but i sort of prefer the more simulation-like gameplay that came from knowing i was never more than one or two bullets away from seeing this screen i was able to get my hands on a pump action shotgun that gave me that one shot one kill sort of feeling which was nice but man i would have loved to have seen that in the rest of my arsenal going back and taking a look at the download for arsenal overhaul i noticed that they included some optional changes in a separate folder for stuff like stalkers all speaking russian or trader balances but there was also a realistic damage folder that i must have just skipped over so if you do install this mod i would 100 recommend using that add-on also as a fun little aside aomod on cop replaces the main menu music with a theme song from one of my all-time favorite horror movies the thing which is just a nice bonus for a mod i was gonna recommend anyways and since i'm obviously unable to stop comparing this game to clear sky hopefully you guys remember that title's approach to gameplay including a pretty robust faction war system that would have you taking part in a whole lot of big fire fights with more than 10 stalkers on each side something i thought went absolutely perfectly with arsenal overhaul's rework damage and accuracy models and sadly color pripyat ditches the multi-person skirmishes along with a focus on interacting with the zone's factions something i would flat out call a downside now i know it was a bit annoying being called to some small outpost to help them deal with like two blind dogs but i really enjoyed having clear-cut territories for each faction to inhabit and sort of being able to control who was where really though it's those massive 20 man shootouts that did it for me feeling like you're just a small contributor in a larger battle was really cool and i feel like the wide open areas and cop were just itching to have a few of those taking place in them you will come across groups of maybe three stalkers shooting it out with rivals or mutants and sure that is still awesome to see but it really just does not compare the emissions from clear sky are back and somehow even more terrifying not because they're more frequent or because the bigger landscape might mean you're further from cover a lot of the time although both of those things are still true but because the ai system alive seems to be set to maximum randomness in this game some of these things may be explainable by mods or me just hitting a weird string of luck with a life but i had a lot of odd stuff happen in this playthrough at one point i walked into the stalker outpost in zaton to see a man's body just floating through the air and once i loaded into yanov station and for some reason two bandits and a snork had developed some sort of friendship and were just hanging out with each other now that is funny because bandits and mutants are not allowed anywhere near the station but also when the two bandits saw me they ran outside and developed some sort of an infatuation with me and would shoot at me through the walls every time i was visible i also had mutants attacked me and some npcs during a scripted cutscene on more than one occasion so factoring random blowouts into the mix makes things real damn interesting at one point and a mission hit right as i was taking part in a side quest that had me and a group of other stalkers pitted against a controller inside of a tunnel so not only was my team being brainwashed into seeing me as an enemy but i couldn't move around to avoid their gunfire or the controller's long-range attacks because leaving the small room i was in would mean instant death via supernatural radiation tornado and if it wasn't clear by the tone of my voice these were not complaints here i have always enjoyed the zone's random nature and while in any other game stuff like this would rightly be called a downside in this series it's at least a part of the reason why we love it so much continuing with the compliments i really liked being able to explore pripyat here the whole area has this amazingly creepy feeling to it with all kinds of mysteries everywhere you look and the addition of seeing a city left abandoned for decades really adds to that the side missions outside of the main story path and cop might be some of the most interesting in the series but it feels like there's less of them and on that note i cleared cop in less time than i typically spend on these games i'd wager that's due to there being a little less story to get through here but the lesson number of areas probably plays a role as well of course when i mention a shorter run time it's more in terms of a first playthrough most of us series vets typically rush through the stories of these games so that we can unlock every location and at that point the real game starts which translates into a potentially infinite series of runs for artifacts so that you can sell them for ammo which will be spent of course on the next artifact run fending off fellow stalkers and mutants now it's been a while since i free played cop like that but i don't remember it being noticeably less long than the other entries in the series how i judge that is i keep a game going for as long as i can until i get disinterested which usually hits the 100 hour mark no matter which game i'm playing so i guess take that for what it is a totally subjective measurement of content that only an idiot or a stalker fan would use one of my favorite aspects about any stalker game is how you end up playing it so differently than you would any other fps you don't rush into danger in these games you find yourself very carefully approaching possible threats here and out of instinct you'll likely be making most of that approach while moving from cover to cover you'll start being able to tell when an enemy is packing real long range heat based solely on the sound of their gun fire and you definitely won't be running out of that cover without leaning around to make sure the coast is clear or if you do it'll be a mistake you won't make again well i have really good news for you all of that is most definitely back and it is just as much fun as it's ever been so at least gsc seems to really understand the core of what players want out of these games of course shooting in a stalker game can sort of be overemphasized when you watch reviews like this on youtube in attempting to make a video that's entertaining to watch we content creators will probably end up using a lot of footage of us engaging in really fun gun fights or blowing snorks away but realistically you'll probably spend more than half of the game with your gun holstered which is great by the way getting from one area to another and spending tens of minutes just enjoying the scenery or even longer than that in your inventory trying to keep things organized is amazing it just doesn't make for the best video watching experience might say clear sky definitely has the biggest action focus as far as firefights are concerned out of the three but even then it's not even a majority of what you'll be doing i say that for two reasons first off to assure you that that is still part of this entry and second as a warning i really don't want to set someone up for disappointment if they install one of these games on my recommendation and find themselves playing something a lot more slow paced and methodical than what they saw on my video like i keep saying these are games that demand you learn how to play them and just running around like you would in fps blindly shooting just does not cut it here or in the rare occasion it does trust me it will not work for very long i don't think a lot of first person shooters out there require the player to scout fights beforehand manually select fire modes for their guns depending on how far away the enemy is or take care of a bleeding moon to keep from losing more health this is a very unique experience and i doubt very much many titles would even come close to replicating it outside of this series itself and the game specifically trying to emulate this series but i think this little anecdote will do a much better job describing this game's depth than i ever could at one point in call of pripyat you'll find one of the downshoppers you're looking for only it crashed in an area surrounded by a minefield now you could certainly just save scum your way to the other side by quick saving every time you move an inch without being blown sky high trust me i've done it but you could also pull out the bolts you throw to track the boundaries of anomalies and toss them to see where each mine is based on the sound it makes when it hits the ground the game never once tells you to do this or even hints that it's possible it sort of just counts on you thinking in real life terms and that's what makes stalker so damn special so even if i focus on negatives here in this video think of them more as tiny bumps across what is an otherwise smooth surface the core of a stalker game is most definitely here and while i do like some of the mechanics seen in other titles this is without a doubt an amazing experience in its own right i bring up the stuff i don't like because the rest is just all the positives i've spent three videos listing at this point stalker is a series that's carved a small space out for itself and across all three entries you'll find all of the things that makes the series special as a whole there are small and large differences in how each approaches that core experience but they all get to the same destination the point i'm taking a very long time to make here is that grading a single stalker game is really hard there's sort of a package deal and i love that package and yes yes you do have my express permission to use that quote out of context if stalker sounds like a fun concept to you you'll likely enjoy all three games but if it doesn't there's not going to be a single entry in the series that'll change your mind over another if you do want to tackle cop which i 100 recommend you do i'd suggest something like arsenal overhaul mod with the optional gun damage component for a first time playthrough and then maybe something like gunslinger or misery for a totally different but equally fun experience but hey even if you want to go full vanilla caulipripiat is an amazingly atmospheric game that'll just suck you into its world like its two predecessors it can be tough to get into but once you've spent the time learning its tricks it will reward you with gameplay i truly believe you can't find anywhere else so if you can get your hands on call of pripyat most consider it to be the best game in the series and it is really damn hard to argue with them no matter how it stacks up in the franchise though it is very much deserving of a playthrough and if everything i've just said has failed at getting you interested may i direct your attention to mutated abominations running full speed through a minefield enjoy if you've been watching this series from the beginning you might have noticed a trend each stalker sequel basically rearranges all the previous game's assets and adds to them just enough to straddle that thin line that separates full-blown sequel and early 2000s expansion pack and it doesn't take a genius to divine that gsc game world would have the same approach to call a pripyat of course that's not some kind of underhanded jab once again this game was released just a year after its predecessor and more importantly we stalker fans are okay with this method not only does it give us a chance to see familiar locations guns lighting tricks and ui elements but it also helps contribute to the zone feeling like a shared universe across all three games a lot of games that continue past a few entries tend to look for that mascot type of element they can repeat in order to ensure people always associate each release with the last but by this point in the series stalker had embedded its entire visual presentation into our minds now in any other context i know this would sound like a downside but you really have to play these games one after the other to experience the effect it has on you it really is something else like i've already mentioned i'm using the arsenal overhaul mod to get footage for this video and i am happy to say it leaves almost everything that isn't a gun model scope suppressor or sound effect unchanged which means what you're looking at right now is basically what i saw on release day except with much better firearms to mess around with more returning motifs include the typical look for the more recognizable factions in the zone they may have added some new armor types or maybe not really i can't tell but regardless you will always know whether or not it's duty authoritarians or hippie ass freedomers coming at you from across the map here's to a good day's work this time around they didn't reuse any locations from the previous two games a fact that truly does sadden me but on the bright side these new areas look amazing well i guess pripyat does sort of count as a reused location but this is a completely different part of the city than we saw in either of the last games so technically i'm still correct which means i can go to sleep tonight not hating myself each of these new areas are pretty jam-packed with content like villages warped landscapes or abandoned factories but there's enough empty space in between them to make sure it doesn't feel like a video game level but instead a real place you might get a look at when pointing google earth that some disheveled abandoned town in eastern europe veterans will probably recognize the same models and textures for trees and grass which is fine because these were okay enough looking anyways but they did add new 2d elements like icons for story missions artifacts and the rare new firearm along with some ui elements that i really enjoyed i think i might have liked zaton the most out of the three new spots because it had the most cool stuff to look at and explore but trust me there is stiff competition as far as that goes that might also be because of the stalker base zadovsk which is a very cool visual with its rusted skeleton sticking out making it eerily similar to some big animal like a whale being left on some beach shore to rot under the sun the anomaly fields in this area are just too damn cool with that trademark almost alien landscape sort of look to them the coolest being a huge scar left in the earth by what i'm not sure but it irradiates psychic energy and getting near it without serious protection will have you hallucinating until your brain basically melts in your head right next to the scar there's a huge nearly collapsed bridge and this is another example of the incredible environmental storytelling you can find around every corner in the zone there are tens of abandoned military vehicles on this bridge and i don't really know what the hell they're doing there we do know the military did have a strong presence in the zone before the second disaster and might have been wiped out while crossing the bridge but the military is also well known for mounting failed assaults on strategic targets in this world case in point the catalyst for this game's story now sure there's probably some kind of dialogue or journal entry that'll explain this but i love just hypothesizing about it and letting my brain go crazy with the mystery of it all now i have been complimenting zatan a lot but that's not to say the area around jupiter or pripyat isn't as impressive but i think there's something about zaton that just makes it a little more memorable to me okay so admittedly it's been all upside so far but there is one really perplexing and well disappointing aspect of cop's presentation to consider remember my clear sky video where i talked about the lighting and god rays being amazing to look at but really chewing up system resources well it seems like the developers decided the best way to fix that issue is to basically take those features away alright so that might be a little hyperbolic but these features have been well nerfed at the very least even in the early hours of the day when the sun's at its most attractive angle lighting in outside locations just looks disappointingly flat there aren't many dynamic shadows to marvel at anymore and the god rays might as well not exist now like i said i most definitely did complain about how much these tricks ate into my fps last time but i sort of expected them to maybe tighten the effects up or make them more efficient to run on higher end hardware i didn't think they would essentially remove them even when i set god rays to their highest setting i still don't get anywhere near clear sky's medium setting that volumetric dynamic lighting reflecting off the zone really added to clear sky's impressive look and now that they've been either severely crippled or outright removed you really start to see just how much work they were doing now call a pripyat is still a good looking game for its time but thanks to its killer looking volumetric light sources and reflections clear sky looks near on par with a modern game a point that gets driven home pretty damn hard in cop when a storm starts up and you get to see short flashes of some amazing dynamic shadows and reflections when lightning strikes i've got to assume the guys at gsc game world just weren't able to patch the holes in their last lighting system because i really doubt anyone on the team looked at how flat this game can seem sometimes and thought it was an overall improvement in a strictly visual sense this is a pretty crushing blow for someone like me who both loves the stalker games and is interested in graphical effects but if i'm being honest one of the other reasons it sticks out so hard is that it's just about the only flaw i can think of call a pripyat minus my obsessive lighting complaints looks incredible sure there are things you may not like about its visual presentation but those are problems that have been with the series from the start so maybe it's not really feasible to get mad that this game looks how it does when it's the third entry in a series of games that all basically look just like this stalker as a series may look amazing given its small development team but it's really easy to forget it was a fairly budget title even when it was at its most successful it still would have been considered a financial failure by big corporations like capcom or ea and if you ask me that not only helps mask a lot of my complaints but amplifies the impressiveness of what was accomplished here this series went off the beaten path in a lot of ways but i would argue its presentation is the most outside of the box element in its arsenal you really didn't have games that looked like this back then and even now when you do find a title that has a similar style it's very likely one of the many stalker clones found on the indie market so yes i would have definitely preferred the previous entries lighting but other than that this is the same visually jaw dropping package you can expect from any game in this franchise sure there are all kinds of problems you could point out but that feels a little counterproductive flat out these guys were able to accomplish some incredible things here and as a nerd who appreciates a good-looking game i'd like to offer a little tip of the hat to a group of dreamers who took a shot at the aaa games industry and actually ended up landing a punishing gut punch on it well fellow stalkers i hope you had fun on this deadly little field trip to the zone this series very well may be one of the most influential game franchises that never had a chance to see mainstream success stalker is an intellectual property somehow managed to elevate itself far above mere video game status by inspiring a loyal following of fans who don't just play its games stalkers all over the world get together and abandon factories or empty fields to relive the adventures they had in the zone out here in the real world and yeah maybe that's just larping but doesn't it seem way more cool when everyone wears a gas mask and carries a russian assault rifle these people also researched the chernobyl nuclear disaster and many of them have visited the site themselves based solely on a lower budget video game series released in the early 2000s thanks to its inspiration coming from an already immensely interesting narrative world stalker manages to build a complete experience that is far more than just the sum of all of its disparate parts what you just witnessed over the course of the last three videos is a landmark event in the games medium i'm sure a good deal of you may have never even heard of these games before coming here but i can almost guarantee you that something you play today was influenced by them if you ask me this right here is something you flat out cannot get outside of these games a level of immersion and ambiance that is without question unrivaled still to this day and yes i know that sounds like fanboy talk and sure i most definitely blindly worship at the altar of the stalker fandom but i am also someone who actively looks for gaming experiences that pull me into fictional worlds with every game i put my hands on outside of a select few genres my end goal is to fall face first into the very setting my character inhabits i aim to lose myself in some fantasy landscape using the sight sounds and atmosphere coming through my screen and speakers as a guide to further get me there and in following that very ambition i never and i mean never have gotten closer to a game world than i have right here in the zone when you play these games and start to lose yourself in them i swear you could squint your eyes just a bit and find yourself there these games are truly something else and i severely hope that i've turned at least a few of you into new additions to this cult there's something there cover me stalker shadow of chernobyl set a standard that as of yet has never been surpassed clear sky took that foundation and built onto it several more experimental expansions and then cola pripyat took the most successful elements from the two and married them into one incredible package if you get just one message from this retrospective make it this you owe it to yourself to experience one of if not the most atmospheric immersive engaging and flat-out jaw-dropping pieces of media ever created and trust me i know that sounds crazy to say i mean think about the ridiculousness of some odd little ukrainian video game being the best of anything but i can assure you with 100 certainty that is still very much true so please go find one of these games on sale for 5 to 10 bucks on some key reseller or hell just hop on over to your favorite bittorrent tracker and start downloading some disk images some of you might not be able to look past the sometimes dated visuals are actively combative mechanics but for those of you who break through that barrier you're gonna find yourself in a whole new world and from that point on believe me when i say no one will be able to stop you from consuming every single piece of soccer related media in existence thanks so much for following me down this irradiated path guys it's been a real adventure sadly though that adventure has come to an end but who knows we may very well cross paths again perhaps sooner than you think and if we do i think you'll find that it'll be in some eerily similar circumstances good hunting stalkers [Music] stalker anomaly is and i'm not going to mince words here [ __ ] amazing what you're looking at is the original intent gsc gameworld had when starting this franchise but thanks to budget time and other concerns they never quite achieved but i'm sure at least a few of you are wondering what the hell does that mean basically this mod is a combination of every location item npc mechanic and concept ever seen in an officially released stalker title wrapped into one package with a whole lot of additions in fact there's so much new to talk about here this might end up being a pretty short video because my only options are to either cover every single tweak this mod has made and resign myself to the process of making an eight and a half hour video or gloss over some things and make sure i still have a wife after this project anomaly is set just a little bit after the official events in the stalker timeline in round about 2018. so that means strelok has already made his way to the center three times and as a result we have a very different zone from a veteran's perspective you take on the role of well whatever you want really the idea is for you to formulate your own reasons for coming here it seems like the only thing the team behind anomaly are providing you with is a bunch of stuff to do once you figure all that out you can start a new game belonging to literally any faction you want which only causes one small conflict since clear sky was supposed to have been totally wiped out after the events of the second game of course those guys do pride themselves on keeping their existence hidden so that doesn't exactly require a lot of suspension of disbelief to accept when you do decide on the faction you want to join you have an absolutely staggering amount of options to figure out before you pop out your first detector and go artifact hunting my favorite and the one i recommend you go for is story mode which has three separate quest lines to check out and i would love to tell you how much content that equals out to but for reasons we'll discuss later i've yet to even see the ending of the first one despite dedicating some serious time to it over the last two weeks if you're feeling like adding a bit of roguelike to your stalker experience you can start up a game in azazel mode which has you inhabiting a random stalker's body every time you die the cool part being this will be an actual stalker that exists in your game so there's a non-zero chance you might have already come across this person and now you have to pick your progress back up with all of their gear i would only recommend this game mode for absolute psychopaths which basically means anyone who's put more than 100 hours into a stalker game there's a survival mode which will have zombies spawning in at increasing intervals the goal being to see how long you can make it until the zombie horde eventually takes out everything and every one there's also an option that applies to all of those modes that has parts of the zone only opening up once you've physically found a route there or talk to someone who has then there's the warfare option that'll have the zones factions acting a little more dynamically and with a bit more freedom than usual that means strongholds can be taken over at any point and you can play a role in who owns what if you want to this mode makes the hectic randomness of the zone even more insane a feat i used to think was impossible and speaking of sanity if you have little to no value for your own you can enable iron man mode which will delete all of your saves upon death honestly i get irrationally pissed off just thinking about the idea of checking this box there's also a campfire mode which is a mechanic fresh out of the souls titles in this mode you won't be able to save your game unless you come across an area where a campfire can be lit you know those people who like to dress up in leather whip each other and stick hooks in their back well this is the stalker equivalent of that then there's the aptly titled agony mode which only lets you save your game when you're not injured irradiated in combat and most importantly not in the middle of an emission so there's no doubt you've got a lot to consider here when starting a new game but personally i would recommend if this is your first time don't mess with any of these minus the story mode trust me on that before you start you can select a portrait and your starting area obviously that's going to be decided by your chosen faction and you guys know me i'm a loner through and through so i always choose cordon because i am a slave to nostalgia here in the middle of the screen you'll see what the game begrudgingly gives you for free as far as your inventory goes and next to it are the items you can add to that inventory each gun box of ammo and med pack has a point value assigned to it and you have a very finite pool of points to spend so choose wisely and for those of you who have noticed yes i am using a mod on top of this mod and yes we will most definitely talk about that in due time once you properly geared up you'll spawn in at your chosen location and the hunt for whatever you're looking for begins if you chose to start at cordon like i did there's a sort of newbie initiation quest line and it's something i would recommend you go through even if you're already well versed in the stalker series because it'll give you some tips on the new mechanics plus and most importantly the quest giver will hand over a good amount of ammo for your chosen weapons and an artifact container an item that fits so well into these games i'm almost positive it was a planned feature in the originals as most of us already know artifacts created in the zone tend to retain varying levels of radiation but for whatever reason that radiation only ever affected you when that artifact was equipped well this game takes that idea just a little bit further into realism by having those artifacts irradiate you while they're just sitting in your inventory so you get one of these lead-lined boxes which will keep them from burning a hole through your pack or more importantly you there's also smaller versions of these boxes that'll let you negate a single artifact's radiation while still equipping it to your belt and i think that's a great little microcosm of what you can expect to find in this game everything that was just given to you in the series proper now has to be fought for tooth and nail thought it was kind of hard dealing with all the dangers of the zone on top of needing to eat in the originals well now you need to make sure you get enough sleep and drink enough water as well was finding artifacts fun before well now you need to make sure your detector has an up-to-date database of artifacts in it otherwise you could be standing on top of one and you would never know anomalies are now one or two hit instant kills unless you've got some amazing resistance built into your gear and the fire fights jesus don't even get me started on these fire fights like i've said about a million times before in the original stalker games i always approach combat from a long distance perspective i like taking pot shots from afar thus lowering my chances of getting caught by a stray bullet but here an anomaly it doesn't really matter how you approach a shootout if you're not utilizing cover properly or exposing yourself too much to line up a shot you'll be dead before you're even able to figure out who it was that shot you i know this sounds like some kind of hyperbole or exaggeration but no joke early on in a run of anomaly i found it was actually a welcome upside when i would die to what seems like random gunfire but could actually see the person who killed me and i think this is a good time to mention why this might look so different for people used to vanilla anomaly i'm practicing a little mod seption by using provac's weapon overhaul something that i feel really elevates the gun play in this game to something that's mostly fun but sometimes totally unfair on top of that it changes the game's look by adding new environmental effects character models and a nearly infinite list of alterations in some ways these can be downsides for purists like the 3d models look very different and they increase the overall contrast of the game and added some odd shading around those 3d models but the second you start hearing the crackle of far off gunfire or get into one of those fights yourself you will be glad you applied it i promise from the start run-of-the-mill bandits and mercs will have the same access to high-power weaponry that you do and they will not be afraid to use it so any fight you find yourself in will become a genuine life or death scenario with this add-on shootouts become this amazing white-knuckle experience and it'll only take you one or two deaths coming from some unseen enemy till you start really learning the value of good cover and checking your surroundings often like you'd imagine given the name this weapon overhaul comes with a [ __ ] ton of new firearms to try out but to be honest at this point it's a bit ridiculous i mean yeah it is cool having so many choices but realistically there's maybe five or six guns that are worth using in each category if that don't get me wrong i really do respect the painstaking dedication they had towards making these pews more true to life but i don't think it was necessary to include nearly every bolt action rifle put into production during world wars 1 and 2. on top of that it seems like some of these guns maybe were taken from other projects or worked on by other people sometimes i would come across a great weapon and put an acog scope on it but it would act differently than the last few guns i tried it on which is a little hard to explain so let me try some firearms use your more traditional method of looking down a scope by blacking out the rest of your view but some of them only slightly zoom into the scope's view while blurring your peripheral sight which would be pretty easy enough to get used to if it was consistent within the game but i often found that the same scope would act differently depending on what gun i mounted it to on top of that some scopes will render your view at a different frame rate than what you're running the game at and like you'd imagine going from 100 fps to around 30 with a click of a mouse button can be really disorienting it may be hard to tell since this video is going to be compressed down to 60fps anyways but trust me it is jarring as hell this caused me to pass up a great rifle or shotgun a few times because i knew i'd either have to get used to tracking a target at a severely compromised frame rate or just rely on iron sights for very long range shots neither being a good option in the zone oh and some guns won't work with some scopes so for example you might find an eotech led scope will render its reticle outside of its 3d model when attached to certain weapons which really sucks but is kind of to be expected for an add-on released by a bunch of people who aren't getting paid i also found that some guns use very low frame rate animations so reloading and running with your gun out might seem very choppy this messed me up because i kept thinking the game itself was slowing down then i'd move my mouse around to change my view and everything would be fine which yes is very disorienting but realistically this only happens with a very small percentage of the weapons on offer here so that's okay and again a bunch of people not getting paid here continuing with the downsides mutants in this mod are an absolute force of nature the boars in cordon can kill you in one or two hits which wouldn't be so much of a big deal if that wasn't the starting point most people will find themselves in in the very beginning of the game even when you tweak the trader economy and the options it's gonna be a good long while so you can afford armor that'll stand up to that kind of abuse and even when you do it's gonna cost you a majority of your cash every time you take a hit from these [ __ ] since you're gonna need to find a technician to service your tattered armor i mean don't get me wrong a round of five five six flying through the air will have a similar effect but at least bandits aren't out here breaking the land speed record and jumping at me from 20 feet away thanks to this i had to tweak the game to almost never spawn mutants which is a real shame because dealing with mutants is sort of a key part of this series to be honest though it seems to me the real focus with most stalker mods is to further emphasize the human on human violence and let the mutants act as mobile anomalies just hazards you'll need to avoid most the time if possible i'd love to try out an add-on one day that balanced the mutants so that fighting them would be just as satisfying as shooting it out with npcs and speaking of npcs i loved how they took the radio call outs from clear sky and made them into the stalker equivalent of twitter every little thing that goes down in the area you're in will likely be noticed by someone and they'll radio everyone else on an open channel if it's worth talking about so if you're in the middle of a shootout you might see other stalkers saying they heard rifle fire near the cement factory or something like that they always include a location and sometimes they'll even accurately identify what kind of weapon you're using just from the sound it makes the cool thing is they do this for everyone not just you which can come in real handy before you get your hands on an upgraded pda that tracks groups of stalkers so in the early game if you hear about monolith fighters shooting it out with a squad of duty members you can either steer clear of that area or just wait a bit and try to loot the corpses that is of course if someone hasn't already beat you to the punch but i imagine some of you guys caught that last part where i said i tweaked the game in the options and yes that is one of the absolute best features anomaly has to offer you know other than the whole it being free thing if you go into the options menu you'll find some kind of modifier for just about any system or mechanic you could think of everything from how much money your loot sells for to how tall the grass is hell you can even control the moon cycles or how often you see cloudy weather almost every part of the game can be messed with here and if i were you i'd start a new game fiddled with the options till you find a sweet spot that works for you then start over for a serious run and i say that because that's exactly what i had to do on my first try i got to the agraprom underground and found myself completely out of ammo and healing supplies but too far from a merchant or technician who could help me with that of course i later found out you can fast travel just by right-clicking on a landmark you've already discovered so we'll just call that a few hours of my life i'll never get back if you do end up in some kind of an unwinnable situation there is a debug menu that'll let you further modify things by spawning in items or npcs activating god mode start or stopping storms changing the time of day and just about every other single thing you could imagine so don't let my horror stories get you too discouraged because you do have a nuclear option if you need to use it i say that because well there's no getting around it this is a massively difficult game even on the easiest setting but the devs seem to have put a lot of effort into letting you control just how hard it hits you and i think that's an important point this mod was specifically made to be incredibly challenging remember how i told you you need to learn how to play the stalker series well if this was a school setting stalker would be 4th grade science and anomaly would be some kind of college level microbiology course knowing how stalker works will certainly help you but in the end you'll need to learn anomalies ins and outs before it really opens up to you about four or five hours in i finally found my groove and figured out how to do well and at that point i literally could not put this game down as i write this i might have a good 60 or 70 hours invested and like i said before most of that didn't even go into completing the story quest i've just been exploring the zone and immersing myself in this world i think i really started falling in love with anomaly once i stopped trying to play stalker and just let myself learn all the new systems and mechanics it brings to the table so yes expect to have your ass beat into the ground if you're not used to these kind of games like myself but trust me when i say you will eventually get to a point where you couldn't stop playing anomaly even if you tried and speaking of stalker if you're a veteran to the series you might be wondering what's here that i haven't seen before and the answer to that is an absolute [ __ ] ton any map seen in any release of stalker so far has been stitched together for anomaly but there's a butt ton more some of these i was already able to explore in my previous favorite stalker full conversion mod call of chernobyl but others are brand new to me these new areas are killer to check out and the level of detail-driven design feels about on par with what was officially released but if i'm being honest i was actually more of a fan of the alterations made to the maps i was already familiar with all over the place you'll see slight additions or outright changes to your favorite landscapes for example yantar is covered in vegetation that helps it not feel so empty around the research base and the great swamps from clear sky are almost unrecognizable in the very best kind of way the water looks amazing and the plant life is lush and ominous at the same time one of the atmosphere-driven mods i'm using changes how the zone's trees and bushes act with them swaying all over and i'll admit this looks incredible to me it adds to the living breathing feeling i get from this setting but i am frequently taken out of that experience when they continue to sway around even when there's no breeze at all on the plus side though running through a wooded area at night during a storm is so damn cool it's worth suffering a little bit of jank speaking of nighttime most stalkers know that their reticle will turn red when mousing over any threats which used to be a great mechanic for cheesing the game see back in vanilla you could just move your reticle around in the darkness and pop some poor bandit before he even knew you were there because you didn't need a flashlight to see him well an anomaly your reticle darkens with the environment so that tactic no longer works and i think that shows that the people who made this were true stalkers through and through speaking of which the guys behind this mod also added traitors and technicians in strategic outposts all over the zone which does help with the sometimes extreme difficulty of getting from point a to b and when you use those technicians you might also notice a new mechanic that'll let you collect crafting components in order to upgrade your firearms instead of paying an arm and a leg for someone to do it for you i didn't mess with this too much myself but this feels like it fits right in with the stalker mindset so i am a fan the same thing goes for repairing gear which means you'll come across a lot of junk items on a run if you're like me and don't engage with these new additions so much on the plus side though all of these items sell for enough of a prize that it's worth carting them around so problem solved truth be told though i'm a little hesitant to keep talking about new tweaks added to anomaly because i really don't know much about them in general everything i've told you so far has been learned through exploration and intuition and i sort of want to keep it that way there are a million and one new mechanics and elements to mess with and me not knowing much about them sort of mirrors that feeling that got me interested in this series in the first place i truly love not knowing where the hell i was what i was doing or how the hell i would go about doing it and i think i might have ruined a bit of that for myself by obsessively seeking out information on everything even remotely related to stalker as it is now anomaly gives me that same mysterious feeling and i really don't want to speed up that feeling wearing off i'm sure eventually i'll wrap my head around most of these things but when i do it'll be because i figured it out myself and not because i spent a few nights looking through wiki pages although if i'm being honest it's really hard to fight the urge not to do that for example every once in a while there's this crazy loud crash and the area lights up like some kind of a localized lightning storm in the dead center whether that be 80 feet in the air or on the ground right in front of you a sphere of light appears and i'll be damned if i even have a clue as to what that is or what it does this being a stalker game i just sort of assumed it would lead to a violent death so anytime one of these things show up i book it in the opposite direction and speaking of getting the hell out of there there's also a new type of a mission in the form of a side storm i have no idea what it is or where it comes from but i'm sure we can all assume the origin is some sort of cosmic horror beyond our comprehension or maybe some busted experimental soviet tech you know either or all right look guys like i told you at the start i'm either gonna have to cut this one short or spend the next few years of my life producing this one video and in the spirit of giving you a first experience similar to mine i'll stop explaining things here so instead let's move on to my recommendation and that's a complicated matter first off on the simple side of things if you were a stalker fan you owe it to yourself to get this thing right now more than likely you're already going to have anomaly installed but if not trust me you want to get that way real quick this is what i would like to call the true stalker experience not necessarily because it's any better than the originals but because it stays so true to them the spirit and intent behind these games remains unaltered even when such wide changes are applied so if you've ever picked up a stalker game and thought yourself damn i wish i could get more of that this mod right here is what you were wishing for as for the newcomers of the audience which i sort of expect to be a majority of you i would still recommend jumping in but do so knowing full well that this game will fight you nearly every step of the way until you figure it out this game is unintuitive punishingly difficult and almost malicious with how it treats you but when you get over that initial learning curve you'll find one of the most rewarding and immersive gaming experiences you can possibly have i know it's kind of dumb saying something like that when none of us can really predict how much the medium will improve with time but i truly can't imagine a scenario where something delivers this much content in such a massively satisfying way i know i've said this before in this retrospective but this is really something special sure anomaly itself is a marvel of programming genius and i couldn't even imagine the tons of digital duct tape it took to get the x-ray engine acting this stably but it wouldn't exist if there weren't three amazing video games for it to use as a foundation if stalker is the most immersive game in existence and i very much think it is stalker anomaly is the most immersive game in existence plus one it's everything you like about stalker along with anything you might have ever wished for while playing it of course there are some serious downsides to consider as well like i keep bitching about this game will knock your teeth out if you let it progress in the zone is slow to make and you're always just a single report of gunfire away from losing that progress on top of that then this should go without saying but it can be very buggy i ran into a story mission very early on that refused to mark itself as completed and i'm not sure if the next story mission i had on my pda was for the same quest line or one of the other two well i guess it's a good thing i'll likely be playing this game till the day i die anyways other than the aforementioned issues though this is a hefty download on its own and when you factor in the mammoth provac weapon overhaul and a single atmospheric mod you're looking at an install folder that weighs in at a staggering 95 gigs but to temper that problem and really any issue we've had so far both anomaly and provax overhaul are totally free i genuinely have no idea how gsc gameworld hasn't already taken down this project for essentially redistributing their creative work but let's thank our lucky stars they haven't because without a shred of doubt in my mind this is the stalker concept perfected that being said i'll include a link to anomaly in the description along with provac's weapon add-on which i also very much recommend trust me this combination is something you need to see for yourself before you truly understand how amazing it is sure watching footage from online content creators can give you a glimpse at what's on offer here but i can assure you it is only a single digit percentage of the experience you could be having to put it succinctly stalker anomaly has consumed my life these last few weeks and i think there's a good chance it'll have the same effect on you if it seems far too difficult for you at first don't worry that's normal but don't be too afraid to start tweaking it to your likings in the options menu it's what i did and i don't think any stalker worth his weight in artifacts would look down on you for ensuring you have as good a time with this game as you possibly can so please stop listening to my rambling and get your ass over to mod db right now you owe it to yourself to experience the perfect distillation of everything we love about these games and with that i'm gonna need to hit the road we're headed to moscow next i just hope nothing crazy like i don't know a global nuclear war happens by the time we get there so here's hoping i see all of you safely make it to the other side of the exclusion zone good hunting stalkers [Music] hey fellow crazy people thanks so much for letting me vent about how much i love this series for about four videos now if these incoherent rants are your kind of content i have my patreon linked here on screen support from viewers is how i keep all this afloat and i would more than appreciate any kind of help you're willing to give of course there's also the youtube membership program and the equally valuable liking comments as well i'm where i am today because of people both past and present who were kind enough to lend me their help and i'll tell you i'm nowhere near done expressing myself with these videos yet so a big thanks to all of you for just stopping in for this weird ride and everyone who's ever helped me out i'll see you guys later much love

Channel: Avalanche Reviews

Views: 3,243,952

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Id: Cdnr6NCbneQ

Length: 181min 32sec (10892 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 30 2021