Is S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl worth playing today?

stalker is one of those franchises which every so often lingers in the back of my mind after months or years of absence it was never a top seller and it wasn't as big as other nuclear disaster based games like fallout or metro but it was extraordinarily unique the string of three games by ukrainian developer gsc gameworld spanned their releases back to back from 2007 to 2009 before going completely dark until recently when stalker 2 was announced it's interesting because people i talk to about the franchise tend to either have nothing but love for it or have never even heard of the series i got into the games back in 2010 or so and remember them being a set of pretty exciting horror-driven first-person shooters with an array of unique enemies and environmental hazards at the same time i also remember that they did have a lot of problems as well even so the positives about the series have outdone the negatives to a degree that the stalker franchise has imprinted into my mind as something worth revisiting and reevaluating and with the recent news about stalker 2 i think it's high time that i checked out the first entry into the series to attempt to figure out if it's worth revisiting in 2020 if you haven't heard of the series and don't care about spoilers for the first game i encourage you to stick around and discover what makes it tick so before i jump into this thing i need to gloss over the structure for this video anyone who's watched my content before knows that i tend to stick to a very simple and straightforward method of evaluation i play the game and get my feedback on anything interesting which is happening while stalker suffers from a lack of focus in a lot of different categories which makes it painfully boring to describe at times this isn't a grand story packed lore focused expedition of collecting logs and learning about the world via speaking to side npcs it's very much a hey here's the main story and here's side stuff to distract you so for this video i'm going to break the game down into different categories and expand on them from there it's a brave new format for me and a pretty regular format for literally almost anyone else who talks about video games on youtube stalker is naturally pretty dark for the bulk of the game i know what it's like for someone trying to watch dark footage in direct light so i do crank the brightness up a bit to try to combat that but a lot of stalker's environment is purposefully bleak and dull which oddly enough enhances the immersion more than you might think and immersion is stalker's bread and butter there's something about this 13 year old game that makes you almost have to mentally prepare yourself to head out from safety and breathe a sigh of relief when you make it back after an expedition various stalkers gather around a campfire in this rainy bitter wasteland muttering russian phrases and playing guitars when you take it at face value this seems like a pretty standard hub of drifting soldier types hell a lot of them tend to say the same stuff to you but after facing what the outside world has to offer these tiny sources of security have a warm blanket effect which makes me want to sit down and relax for a brief respite but for this effect to even remotely exist there has to be something about the game which makes me want to waste my time chilling around a campfire and that would be well the rest of the map i mentioned its surface level bleakness before but there's a reason for stalker being billed as a horror game and it becomes overwhelmingly clear when you start heading out into the world of course there are enemies and various hazards in the environment which i'll get to in a bit but there's something unnerving just from the feeling of heading into the unknown in this wasteland to give an overview without getting too story intensive the zone that you're in is set in an alternate reality in which a second explosion at the chernobyl nuclear plant occurs but this time a lot of strange occurrences accompany the aftermath this means that this desolate landscape is packed with unknown horrors for you to stumble upon to such a large degree that even radiation isn't the biggest issue and it makes every step that you take very tense while you snap your camera over to every little noise that you pick up on a lot of the ambient noises in the game are tailored to make you look around and make sure that nothing's following you while you explore underground and lab sections are even worse with this tension as there's really not many places to run and hide hysteria tends to kick in quickly as the game almost constantly emits these low monster noises even when there's nothing nearby stalker does horror pretty well especially for a game that loads you up with tons of weapons to defend yourself with let's start with some general explanation on the difficulty i initially had this entire spiel about how master difficulty is the only difficulty you should be playing on because when i was glossing through some of the modding guides that i used they all made the claim that the publisher forced the developer to basically implement some easier difficulties and that because gsc didn't want to do that the easier difficulties turned both you and the enemies into bullet sponges which made the game a lot more frustrating these various people putting out guides on steam and discussing things on reddit with new players also said that bullets disappeared from existence much more on lower difficulties this is all completely fabricated that's been disproved quite a few times by various people via delving into the game's files and figuring out how the difficulties really work quite a lot of the community does tend to get up its own ass about master difficulty being the one and true only way to enjoy an experienced stalker but i really can't stand that kind of gatekeeping if you like playing uneasy do it man unfortunately i didn't figure all of this out about master difficulty until i was done recording i imagine it would have saved me some headaches down the line but it's all good this leads us to the quality of life and bug squashing mods which are readily available for the game if you search for them i'm obviously not going to add new content and replace all the mutants with big titty anime girls for this evaluation but i am going to be fixing some bugs installing some texture mods revamping a few of the systems and overhauling the weather system this makes the game probably the best that it can be without outright remaking it in a newer engine that said lag is still something i have to deal with quite a bit and something that you'll see in the video in more densely populated areas there were definitely some dedicated modders for the game though and i'm very grateful for the work that they've done the guide that i followed will be listed in the description if you want to up your game the bulk of the tutorial is spelled out in long bursts of text on screen which explain how reputation with factions work how the encumbrance system works and general controls the controls are no issue but the voiceless text on screen goes by pretty quickly when you're trying to digest what it's telling you fortunately this info does get beamed to your pda the game has a set of controls reminiscent of a less convoluted arma in that there are different firing modes for your weapons a crouch and low crouch system and a lean system this also means that you can do dumb like this like i touched on before all of these people which roam around are referred to as stalkers every stalker has a faction that they're assigned to as well as a ranking there are a lot of factions each with their own agenda ideals and hostilities towards other factions i'll give the rundown on them later in the story part of the video what i will tell you for now is that every stalker from every faction has a rank these rankings are pretty straightforward and span across four different grades rookie experienced veteran and expert where rookies have low end armor and weapons and are killed pretty easily experts are long survivors of the zone these ranks also usually reflect how far in or out of the zone the stalker is as rookies tend to stick to the outskirts and experts are found almost exclusively at the center every stalker you come across along with their faction affiliation and name can be found listed in your pda which is your main tool for information in this game it maps shows your status shows if there are other stalkers around you and list your missions and past dialogues what i found the most interesting though was the fact that using it doesn't pause your game in fact you can't do anything while your game is paused besides glare at whatever threat is coming your way and think about your life choices there's no pausing to check your inventory or heal or equip something different it's all real time which definitely adds an additional layer of stress to the game like i mentioned before most of the other stalkers don't tend to have a lot to say to you their demeanor shifts depending on how much favor you've carried with their faction but most the time they'll tell you about some rumor that's been going around of where to find loot or they'll have some side job for you to make some cash or something along those lines then they'll run out of stuff to tell you the dialogue is actually exceedingly dull after coming off of something like knights of the old republic but it's also a lot easier to ignore and carry on with what i want to do a finer detail that i enjoy is that they will get upset if you have your weapon drawn near them which makes a lot of sense but most of the time you kind of look for the higher ranked ones talk to them about jobs or rumors and then plot out your next big adventure and that's kind of what stalker is really about if you're expecting some grand elaborate side quests with lots of little neat characters which give you extensive background stories and interesting anecdotes about various characters and areas you're playing the wrong game if you're looking for a game where you can go i think i'm gonna go check out what that factory has and see if i can loot it then stalker has you covered in spades and that's probably going to be a turn off for a lot of people but it's a lot easier to digest if you know it going in because the start of this game is horribly slow there's not a lot of direction you're weak and start with weak gear and you have no knowledge of what exactly is going on or what you're going to need to be prepared for it actually took me by surprise with how slow shadow of chernobyl is but it's really one of those games that you need to stick with for it to get better and that's understandably not everyone's bag one of the more interesting aspects of the game is stealth it isn't a game where you get a little eyeball on screen to tell you if anything's seen you and that can be terrifying instead you get these little meters in the bottom left of your screen which lets you know how much noise you're making and how visible you are to enemies almost everything makes noise i mean everything changing and reloading weapons makes noise using a medkit makes noise walking slowly makes noise in addition to this stuff like hiding in bushes in darker areas reduces your visibility along with keeping your distance obviously this all sounds great right well it isn't unfortunately a lot of the stealth system is horribly stilted to the enemy advantage we're talking a regular rookie ranked soldier being able to spot you from across the map if they can see you when you reload a save your gun gets put away and then pulls back out automatically which makes noise the noises in general are able to alert pretty much any enemy even if it's something really tame and ordinarily soft in volume and once you break stealth with one threat pretty much any enemy in the immediate area knows exactly where you are and swarms your position the stealth system is a wonderful idea on the surface but god doesn't need more than just fine tuning as most regarded as irreparable even with modding there are a handful of mods which attempt to dumb down the omniscient ai to a level that doesn't make you feel like you're being hunted down by predator but the most straightforward solutions are either tweaking the game files to decrease their awareness of you or right-clicking the game and navigating down to the uninstall button to take it for a spin like i mentioned side jobs can be picked up from a plethora of different stalkers for extra money and supplies the side quests in this game are well they're basically what i just described money makers they're not elaborately written works of art and they aren't intriguing by any means they're fetch quests and kill things quests and range from hey a group of men got attacked by some wild dogs go kill them two there's an abandoned warehouse which is said to have a lot of good loot they're boring and they don't bring much to the table besides a means to pad the game with extra content and are better off being left alone as soon as you feel that you've made enough money to grab whatever gear that you want from the traders and move along with your life something else to note here is how small my character seems to be compared to every person in the game it's because the game's first person camera is lodged in my player model's chest so whenever i'm in first person it's like i'm role playing as tom cruise running around ukraine and blasting mutants fortunately i can shirk off this 5 foot 11 curse with my mods from earlier and also eliminate the absolutely horrendous head bobbing i can tell you right now that if i were judging this game solely off of unmodded technical issues and potential bugs this game would be an unadulterated show by 2020 standards hell maybe even by 2007 standards finally as far as the general mechanics goes there's a lack of any sort of sleeping or weight system which surprises me because it seems like it would be a perfect fit for this game when you start out you don't have access to night vision or anything of that sort besides a flashlight making nightstalking much more dangerous and unsavory but if you want to wait it out until morning you have to do just that wait it out it's an unfortunate lack of a feature which really seems like it could have easily been added and is implemented in later entries to some degree additionally while the health system is a bit complex on the surface it's actually just a standard health system with more sources of damage attached you take damage from bullets mutant claws and bites anomalies falling etc but a lot of those can cause bleeding as well which means that you'll either need to wait for the bleeding to stop or patch your wounds if it gets too severe beyond that there's a hunger system in which you have to eat or suffer a slow and constant health drain and a stamina cut and then there's a radiation system which does the exact same kind of thing except the issue there is that you have to rely on listening to your pda's geiger counter to realize that you're getting fried otherwise you can pull it up and check it while you're getting microwaved to go yep i'm getting microwaved just seems like it should have been on the hud also and i think that's one of the bigger letdowns with the game exploration-wise sure you can go wherever you want except sometimes certain groups keep you out if you haven't progressed through the story enough buzz off stalker we don't let every loser go through buzz off stalker we don't let every loser go through buzz off stalker we don't let every loser go through and even then if you want to take a shortcut straight to your objective blankets of anomalies or radiation litters your path a lot of the time making you take these weird zigzag motions across the map with there being no fast travel it's kind of a pain in the ass when the game wants you to go back to the start to turn in a quest that you completed halfway across the map and it makes me not even want to turn in those quests the gun play at the beginning of the game when you have just a pistol is bad very bad i remember not using a pistol very often and i'm quickly remembering why as my bullets seem to have almost no effect on enemies this gets much better later when you begin collecting rifles but it's pretty sad that the game sticks you with a pistol at the beginning and expects you to have fun with it often times enemies will home in on your location as mentioned before but they also cluster a lot and this causes them to kind of jank out and makes it easy to hide behind an object and use it to ring around the rosie until you can effectively sneaky tricky them [Music] additionally your weapons all have a durability bar to them as does your armor the big thing about weapon condition is that the lower a weapon's durability gets the more bullets start to spray instead of shooting where you're aiming this becomes incredibly frustrating if you don't swap out your weapons regularly as your headshots begin missing and your gun starts to jam more frequently armor on the other hand is more straightforward in that it just protects you less the more damage it takes if you ask pretty much any veteran of stalker how you should fight they usually advise to always aim down your sights and never hip fire it makes sense when you think about it but for some reason my down sight bullets never seem to hit what i'm aiming at unless it's center of mass i try for headshots all the time and i can never seem to get them if i'm too far off it may be something like bullet drop but at the same time hip firing almost always has me landing more shots overall for whatever reason i know my accuracy in shooters is usually dog but there's something even more harrowing about stalker's combat that prevents me from gunning people down at least before i start picking up scoped weapons in addition to this i mentioned that the game has an arma-like kind of control scheme which is good for the game what it lacks is the ability to lock your leaning for example when you lean down to the right you have to hold the button down you can't just double tap it to remain tilted that way it isn't the biggest issue in the world but it does have me using my thumb in a weird way to peek and move right at the same time some of the first hazards that you see on the horizon are these odd little riffs in the air like someone is shooting bullets into a localized windstorm this is one of the many hazards in stalker known as anomalies i absolutely love the concept of anomalies they're basically these super jarring environmental hazards which almost always have a negative effect on the player more often than not they're pretty difficult to see in the day if you're just running around and sometimes impossible to see at night all of them have a trigger which causes them to activate and they range from ow that hurt to i'm dead and they also have some pretty amusing names there are gravitational anomalies like the springboard whirly gig and vortex which all have different radii and danger levels springboards shoot out a blast of energy which hurts the player and tend to pop up all over the place which makes them particularly annoying during firefights whirly gigs toss their victims into the air before exploding usually dismembering their bodies with its sheer force and vortexes have large radii which when activated pull the victim into their center before constricting their body into a samus ball and eviscerating them with an explosion of energy all of these have their own telltale looks and sounds and can be activated in different ways then there's the flame anomalies burner and comet the burners are these patches of cracked land with a hazy transparent steam shooting from them and they're harder to make out during the day when activated they shoot large pillars of fire out at you the comet which only appears once in this game is a mobile version which zips about rapidly and is extraordinarily powerful compared to the already powerful burner the electro anomaly is a cousin of the burner and more or less does the exact same thing except with electricity instead of fire as does the fruit punch anomaly with corrosive damage and then finally the least dangerous anomaly known as burnt fuzz supposedly reacts to quick motion from living beings by releasing projectile spores at the victim i've tried activating it a lot but it either doesn't work or it just doesn't hurt me enough through my armor even if it did work it can easily be avoided by moving slowly all of these anomalies have their own power levels and are known to phase out of existence and appear into existence after some time has passed some anomalies are survivable if their power is low enough some are a death sentence most of them have a set of artifacts which they can produce if they interact with certain objects bodies are exposed to the right conditions these artifacts can be worn on your armor while providing positive effects in exchange for negative ones or they can be sold off for low to high profit depending on their rarity and effect anomalies are a fantastic game changer which really steps the game up in a very positive direction and i think stalker would be nowhere near as good without them beyond anomalies we have the enemies of course other stalkers are pretty run of the mill and very based on their rank but mutants are where the game shines a little more if you can look past most of their god-awful names you've got pretty easy to deal with and fairly common enemies like these stevie wonder dogs which tend to run past me a lot of the time you also got mutated pigs which are somehow even less dangerous than the dogs then you got carnivorous and cannibalistic bores you get the idea you got your pseudo-dogs which are pretty dangerous and tough though i think the most interesting bit about them is the fact that they tend to lead the packs of blind dogs around and when they're killed the blind dogs tend to scatter and flee there are these packs of rats simply known as rodents which act the way that you expect them to for as much as i praised anomalies for their unique names it's kind of hard to look past names like rodent and boar hey nikolai i am glad to see you have make the man face dog and am excited to see the progress on small rodent and regular bore ah this is not man-faced dog andre this is simply the limitation of our graphics engine ah okay that makes sense then we will call it a blind dog because dog with face like that probably cannot see [Music] the game does step it up more after these run-of-the-mill enemies though with things like side dogs which can affect your mind and make you see many illusory dogs attacking you at the same time and causing you to have to determine which is the real aggressor then there are these poltergeists which are these floating half-bodied creatures which toss at you they suck to deal with they aren't scary they're just really annoying because they just whip barrels and boxes and whatever's around at you until you find their barely visible luigi's mansion ass bodies and blast them snorks have easily my favorite name in the game an attack by lunging clawing and i i guess kicking you [Music] controllers are these bloated strange looking humanoids which attack your mind instead of your health they screamed this loud ass scream and launch the most ear piercing psychic beam attack which annihilates you if you get hit by it once or twice i hate them more for the sound they make than anything else though if you take enough mental damage you'll die outright and you can't recover your mental energy with any sort of kit or medicine which makes recovery slow the best thing that you can do is try to get up on them and either stab or shoot them to death because they try to waddle away instead of attack you when you get close most of the time and then finally we have the most jarring mutants the bloodsuckers and the pseudogiants i hate these things as a player and love them as a concept the bloodsucker is this long disgusting zombie-like creature with the ability to go invisible and remain completely soundless to the player while they stalk them when cloaked their eyes glow as their body shimmers ever so slightly in the light this is also when they're at their weakest and when i try my best to kill them before panic firing when uncloaked they move extremely quickly across the map and are nearly impossible to hit if you're me and have the accuracy of a denny's parking lot the pseudo giants on the other hand i have no issue hitting these massive flesh bags they're these big dumb lumbering cousins of the left or dead tanks which can be outmaneuvered relatively easily i just have to endure the heart attack as i pray that they fall before i run out of bullets if they do come charging at me on the ground alright let's talk about why there's all these dots between the letters of stalker the acronym stands for scavengers trespassers adventurers loners explorers and robbers it's really dumb and it doesn't matter i just wanted to tell you about it anyways so the opening cut scene actually doesn't look horrendous i mean yeah it's super dated but it does look like some love went into it for sure your character is driving this truck full of corpses as fast as he can through a torrential downpour suddenly a big old zeus bolt of lightning comes crashing down like a final fantasy summon and blast your makeshift meat wagon into a small ravine or a large ditch depending on your perspective on life the next day some guy comes scrambling down the mountain to loot the bodies and still finds you alive he's pretty happy about that and tells you what everyone wants to hear after being rescued let's go and see what value cedrovich will put on your head enter the meat man he's ready to buy a corpse but as it turns out this one hasn't expired yet he's pretty stoked about that and immediately checks your body for something they both refer to as the mark well the mark is the name of the game which is lame as hell also my pda has a single objective for me kill the strelok well as it turns out no one knows who or what that is not even my character as he wakes up with amnesia so here we are a nameless memoryless character who now works for this guy here the tutorial consists of sidorovich walking you through how to use your pda and all the little things that it can do then you're told to retrieve a flash drive with some valuable info from a stalker who recently disappeared as your first task to repay this guy for quote unquote saving you making it readily apparent that you're definitely in his debt so i take care of that and when i make it back i receive information about potentially opening a path to the center of the area that this game takes place in known as the zone the zone center is supposed to be ripe with artifacts worth lots of money which is what our trader friend is primarily interested in conveniently enough this strelok guy has also relocated himself to the center so it's a win-win if i can make it there so now my main goals are to try and snag some info about how to bypass the craziness which is apparently keeping out most people from entering the center and tracking down my boy strelok before i get to that it's probably best to break down the factions of the game and what they fight for your character is initially part of the loner faction which as the name suggests tend to keep to themselves they live off the land try to make money and wage war against the bandit faction the bandits on the other hand are the antithesis of the loners they steal from kill and raid other factions with reckless abandon which has caused pretty much every other faction to hate them besides the freedom faction freedom fights for exactly what their namesake exudes they believe the zone to be a place where everybody can be who they want to be and that no one should take ownership of the area their relaxed and carefree demeanor clashes heavily with the duty faction which seeks to destroy the zone and its blight upon the world they actively hunt mutants and kill off all who oppose them with an iron fist this is the opposite of how the ecologists feel which are a band of scientists who are absolutely fascinated with the zone's existence viewing it as a scientific blessing then there's the ukrainian military which has a strong shoot-on-site presence towards all outsiders they tend to be the second nemesis alongside bandits for the first chunk of the game the second chunk's nemesis comes in the form of the monolith faction which is a group of brainwashed cultists who stop at nothing not even their own wounds to kill their enemies and protect the secret of the zone we'll touch more on them later siding with the factions which are able to be sided with tend to open up new merchants to buy faction-specific armors and the like though you can usually find these armors elsewhere in the game as well so i decided to remain as neutral as i possibly could with everyone along the way to this info you run through several encounters with various factions of this game you've got some military guards which have blocked off the main road in if you want to go through come up and we'll have a chat if not i suggest you take off before we get angry [Music] you've got some bandits which are really fond of hanging out in your anomalies and raiding random duty or loner faction members and then eventually you wind up in the middle of a military raid on a guy who has your information your questlines tend to continuously involve you helping out someone nearby who needs your backup against a group of enemies usually bandits when you help them out they tell you where the next person is who may have your information it's a pretty boring system from a lore slash world building perspective but it's what i've come to expect anyways after taking down these idiots who cluster at the door this guy is hiding in the guy directs me down into the sewer system and life is just god-awful down here like this is one of the points of the game where i'm almost always on the edge of panic trying my best just to power through the area while taking out military stalkers a bloodsucker and running the away from a controller who pops out well turns out that i didn't talk to the info guy from earlier properly because we were in the middle of a military assault and i didn't want to die and so he didn't tell me where strelok's secret stash was underground so now i have to make my way back down into the tunnels and find the stash with a controller on the loose amazing fortunately the area on the other side of the tunnels is right on top of one of my two objectives so i grab the zone center info and then head back to the tunnel guy talk to him properly head back down into the tunnels where everything is still dead for a few days besides that controller which makes my screen turn blue and sound like i'm in a windstorm grab strelok's flash drive and then head back out now it's off to the 100 rads bar a safe haven located in duty territory it's one of the few civilized hubs in the game and it features the bar itself a place to sign up and become a member of the duty faction and a fighting arena interestingly enough i feel like the fighting arena is kind of out of place in a game that's set in the middle of a mutant-filled wasteland of less than a thousand people or something along those lines but uh yeah i guess that's a thing probably just one of those things that the devs thought would be cool to have it's too bad that it broke for me and i couldn't get it to stop spawning me outside of the map after i won so what do you get when you find documents that were derived from talking to a guy who leads you to another guy who leads you to another guy documents which lead to a quest to find more documents of course the next set of documents that are supposed to crack the case of getting to the center of the zone are located in some underground lab which is in a place known as the dark valley of course i need another key to get in which involves killing bandits and uh alright so the story is not advancing too quickly here let's cut to after we return with the new documents and hope that they actually have the answers this time [Music] the elden ring [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] again so yeah running through this place and taking out a pyro geist has me experiencing some of my memories being restored not sure exactly what's happening but the imagery is cool after this the military starts actively raiding the place to try to get the documents that i just picked up i'm pretty beefy at this stage and my aim has gotten better so it's no issue like i said combat gets much better as you continue on anyways trader joe from the beginning of the game wants me to come back to him and tells me that the way back to the garbage and by extension the bar is closed off but it's not there's just more military guarding it no issue at all there i just blow past them and instead choose to go back to the bar to turn in these documents that i found well again and what can only be described as the epitome of great quest design stalker directs you to go to another lab but hey you gotta find out where it is by talking to some scientists and wait for it escort mission holy it's like they took all the bad quest ideas they could muster and lump them back to back i mean realistically the game came out in 2007 and a lot of this stuff wasn't driven into the ground quite as hard as the industry pounded it into their games later this is only further evidenced by the existence of zombie soldiers which start popping up after this there's not really much of a difference between regular soldiers and the zombified ones beyond the fact that the zombies don't use cover or anything and they don't flinch when you shoot them the slightly more interesting bit is how they came to be zombies this is explained when you reach the scientist base out here in this region apparently before this whole place went to after the second explosion there was this thing located in the next lab area known as get this the brain scorcher at this point i'm more amused with the naming in this game than disappointed so yeah apparently whatever it is melts people's brains when they get too close to it thus turning them into zombies radical this means that i can't get into the lab unless i have some super secret device that hasn't been invented but wait there's a prototype we just gotta charge it this means more escort mission realistically the guy could die and i just have to do his job instead but you get cool for keeping him alive fortunately the escort isn't too far and when i make it back i receive my anti-mine melt helmet supposedly even with it my time will be limited in the lab until i'm able to shut the brain scorcher down well slogging through this absolute nightmare of zombies and snorks makes me wish that i had bought more shotgun ammo at this stage of the game i had no idea that not refreshing my weapon caused my headshots to whiff more frequently and i was becoming extraordinarily annoyed additionally whenever there's a non-human-like enemy which crouches and lunges in a game you can bet your ass that i am not hitting its head i had discounted the shotgun until now and well now i wish i had brought more shells with me for these waves of snorks either way i do eventually make it into the lab charge through it shut down the mine melt and witness another cutscene this time our boy strelok is a little more defined he seems to have been someone obsessed with the zone's countless oddities and mutations and he was warned not to keep venturing out because it would be his end well sure enough he does almost die as he comes back to his doctor-type friend looking all up he gets patched up and decides to push even further north this time to the center of the zone i would say that the mystery is enticing but i'm honestly not playing this game for the story when i blast out of this hell it seems like the military has decided to gun down everything at the facility which is great because i left everything alive there and decided that i would loot the place later except even after that everything is still alive so i don't know what the choppers were shooting at but yeehaw i guess so i'm unsure if i missed something here but the main brain scorcher wasn't what i just shut down i'm now to actually head to the next place to shut it off but first a little sidetracking back to the start of the game where i turn in a few quests and inquire about the doctor's whereabouts i'm sorely missing the non-existent fast travel feature at this point as i run back and forth across the map this doctor was the guy who helped strelach out in my flashback which realistically probably means that i am strelok all things considered come on man wake up have you lost your memory or something well guess that explains that so basically this doctor guy tells me all this about how i was right about some stuff involving monolith and something called the sarcophagus which apparently no one has ever come back alive from my goal is to now head into pripyat for some stash there in addition to shutting off the brain scorcher i'm just most confused about him standing over me like this the whole damn time [Music] so the next place i gotta run to is the army warehouse area this place is packed with quests that you can pick up from both freedom and duty factions they usually wind up with you choosing a side and becoming the enemy of one of the two though it isn't impossible to remain neutral with both and still get quests from each it's a cool area in its own right but it's nothing to write home about from a storytelling perspective we'll move on to the red forest instead as i approach the red forest border i get a taste of the enemies to come in the form of a monolith soldier raid as i hinted at before monolith soldiers are absolute bastards to deal with and are among some of the most well-armed and well-armored foes that you'll have to face their fanaticism makes it so that they rarely flinch when hit with bullets which really sucks to deal with at times well the red forest is complete and total hell there's no other way to describe it monolith soldiers litter the road taking shots at you pockets of extreme radiation exist seemingly randomly and have me constantly trying to manage my rad levels as i approach the lab these ghostly entities charge at me and spook the out of me i didn't realize until way too many bullets had been wasted that they don't actually hurt me because shooting them causes them to disappear i died so many times getting into the lab that when i did wind up in it i had almost zero weapon left in my main guns wonderful fortunately this place is pretty deserted save three bloodsuckers which i can deal with using my low damage gun i also find ammo for my main guns which is beautiful because after i shut the brain scorcher off i get raided by oh i don't know 24 monolith soldiers before this though i pass out again and see a little more into strelok's memories there seems to be some kind of blue glowing stone which he was reaching for at some point but i've got no idea what it is only that my objective updates to reach the aforementioned sarcophagus sneaking out of here actually is some of the most fun i've had in the game with soldiers if running and gunning is more your speed as it usually is mine i imagine this entire area is going to be hell for you but as it stands you can get away with crouching and hiding from enemies to pick them off one by one as i bust out of this lab it seems that everybody and their mother has figured out that the brain scorcher is down and are now homing in on the center of the zone namely pripyat and the chernobyl power plant this means that the military is here with their choppers to attempt to actually kill something this time which is both good for wiping out remaining monolith soldiers and shitty because now there's military soldiers as i press in towards pripyat i'm greeted by a squad of super heavy armored loaners who offer to escort me to the center of the city these guys are pretty bad ass and although two-thirds of them drop by the end of their escort they definitely take out more than their fair share of monolith troopers after clearing out the secret stash here and finally upgrading my armor i make my final push towards the chernobyl power plant well i got a wee bit tired of killing every soldier moving up killing more and repeating so i kind of just sprinted all the way through this area which made it sound like this i do gotta say that the sky lighting up in this crazy red hue is awesome looking but yeah i made it through this in no time flat so this is basically the final area for the first ending of the game if you didn't do the optional stuff leading up to this this is kind of the default ending and it really sucks at least by itself it does first off you run through this fest of dark irradiated hell packed with monolith soldiers because the devs forgot they designed more than one enemy the whole time this voice gently caresses your eardrums with russian i haven't played enough of the game to learn what it's saying yet but it sure does have some words for you [Music] [Music] then you get the option of heading to the wish granter which is said to grant the wishes of any who make it to it doctor warned you earlier if you completed the mission to find him that the wish granter is simply a false idol which was created in the sarcophagus to lure greedy stalkers to it so my guy walks up holds his hands out and asks for immortality unfortunately doctor was right and this is one of those monkeys paw genies which does indeed grant my wish by turning me into a statue that's it the end thanks for playing like i said by itself the ending sucks but when you realize that there are parameters in which your wish changes it becomes much more interesting this encompasses stuff like wishing for the zone to disappear if your character's reputation is excellent and you have less than fifty thousand russian fun bucks this wish is granted by making you blind another one is wishing for you to be rich in this one gold coins begin showering you until you die the reality is that the building collapsed on your character the trippiest endings of all are wishing for humanity to be controlled and wishing to rule the world when you wish for humanity to be controlled or destroyed as the original russian cutscene says your mind gets flooded with information a la full metal alchemist the pictures shown are that of death and nuclear explosions and desolate landscapes and the like as your character stands in complete darkness floating in the void and then finally when you wish to rule the world your character violently gets yanked up into the air before being absorbed by the wish granter that last one is a little easier to explain when we find a little more out from the true endings of the game after charging through yet another area of monolith and destroying these small reactor type things i get greeted by a hologram this hologram basically explains almost everything about the game's elements and how the zone was created so after the first chernobyl incident scientists moved in and started doing all sorts of wacky this desolate area was perfect for conducting experiments in a place where no one would think to look this led to seven scientists linking their consciousnesses into one super consciousness henceforth known as c consciousness i'm gonna be so tired of saying consciousness by the end of this there exists in this game a physical manifestation of real life scientist vladimir varnodsky's philosophy called the new sphere or noah sphere or i'm going to say news fair the new sphere is basically the idea that as life affects and transforms lifeless matter humans affect and transform the direction of life so in the game the new sphere very much is a real and physical entity much like the atmosphere see consciousness's main goal was to correct humanity by altering the new sphere to no longer contain emotions like greed and anger and anything else considered a flaw by them unfortunately or maybe fortunately the experiment failed and the creation of the zone was the result of course the new sphere wasn't c consciousness's only area of experimentation there's the wish granter which is said to be used as a defense to lure those who are greedy enough to make it all the way to the power plant it also explains that last ending that i touched on by implying that c consciousness rules the world already and that by merging with the wish granter you're becoming a part of them and of course these guys also dabbled in mind control and brainwashing which is how the monolith soldiers came about it's also how i came about as strelok basically when the first excursion into the heart of the zone was performed by strelok he was stopped and turned into an agent of c-consciousness due to a flaw in the group's system the end result wound up with strelok being ordered to kill himself and then being released as a brainwashed agent now i'm with the whole idea that these guys basically take capable soldiers and brainwash them to do their bidding and protect their labs but what i'm not getting is why they didn't outright kill strelok i mean even with the idea that he was good enough to get as far as he did might as well use him to their advantage it just seems far too dangerous and on top of that as cool as the idea of the wish granter is it just seems kind of well dumb i mean let's think this through there are several layers of protection that the average stalker needs to go through to get to the wish granter i mean the brain scorcher outright kept almost everyone away from it by itself the odds of a person making it through all of that just to trust that this legendary myth will grant any wish like a genie is so ridiculously low it just seems like a giant waste of time that probably could have been spent creating something like i don't know heat seeking turrets which line the outer walls of the labs either way after all of this you get another ending if you choose to take it this ending has us joining c consciousness to supposedly make the world a better place there's not much more to it besides you going under and the doctor talking to his dog about you which kind of sucks all things considered i guess i would have just liked to see how exactly strelok changed the world or if he even did so let's talk about the final and true ending to this game declining the offer to join c consciousness teleports you back outside where you have to face a gauntlet of monolith soldiers as you run through 15 different teleport anomalies to get to the very end at the end of it all strelok faces down the tubes filled with people pulls out his ak and guns them all down this is the canon ending as is portrayed in the sequel while i wound up liking the combined idea of the monkey's paw endings i think this is probably the best one in terms of how things should be all in all i can't say that i'm unimpressed by the story behind this game i mean don't get me wrong there's a lot of to slog through and i couldn't have cared less until i got to the end but i did enjoy the idea behind the wish granter and see consciousness as a whole it's just too bad that all of this story is shoved into maybe the last hour or two of gameplay i'd say that's really where stalker's story suffers most because you can only string along the player with this opening cut scene and the idea that we're following some strelok guy for so long and the way that the story is paced is horrendously slow and doesn't move anywhere for a long while if the side quests were interesting enough to supplement the main storyline it would boost the game's ideas to new heights unfortunately the love was really put into the biggest part and the rest fell by the wayside stalker is an intensely atmospheric game packed to the brim with oddities and nightmare fuel it's exceedingly rare that an open world first person shooter would bring any sort of intensity to the table but stalker manages that and then some with its environment and ambient sounds alone that said the game is abhorrently slow both in gameplay and storytelling at the beginning and it really doesn't start to pick up steam until the midway point i could easily see someone picking up this game playing it for two hours and deciding that they don't want to play it anymore but i could also just as easily see someone being enticed by this strange setting in a strange world there are loads and loads of technical issues of uninteresting plot lines and poor design decisions the game is by no means perfect not even for 2007. you have to appreciate the sheer effort that was put into the game with some of its physics its mechanics and its main story ideas for sure and it's really too bad that a lot of those are hampered by the sheer scope that this practically indie developer tried to breathe into existence but after all of this exposition and explanation the question remains is stalker shadow of chernobyl worth playing today yes but with a caveat if you tell a friend who's never even remotely heard of this game hey play this then you're a bad friend because this game needs to come with almost a warning tag something that tells people you'll probably enjoy this eventually if you're a big fan of environment driven horror fps games but it's going to take some tweaking some getting used to and quite a bit of patience this is another franchise which could benefit very heavily from a remake but with stalker 2 coming along i'm unsure if that'll happen still i did have a lot more fun than i thought i was going to have hell i was outright regretting pouring my first day's worth of work into this video until i forced myself onward but it does get better and it was worth the experience to me thanks for watching i actually thought this was going to be a shorter video but it kind of turned into this when the game opened up more and more i've got a pretty good idea about what i'll be hitting next and i think it might be fun for more of you out there who enjoy my usual topics but until then i've got shirts for sale like this vivec one and this doom slash oblivion mashup plus a few other neat designs if you're interested i've also got a twitch where i stream every here and there i've got a twitter where i tweet out new videos and occasionally pictures of my dog or something i've got a discord where people hang out and talk about whatever's on their mind at the moment and i've got a patreon and that's it have a good one

Channel: The Salt Factory

Views: 1,030,418

Keywords: Stalker, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Shadow of Chernobyl, Analysis, review, evaluation, mods, tweaks, worth playing, should I play, Strelok, Sidorovich, Doctor, Anomalies, Anomaly, Gravitational, Springboard, Whirligig, Vortex, Burner, Comet, Fruit Punch, Electro, Burnt Fuzz, Flesh, Blind dog, Bloodsucker, Pseudodog, Pseudogiant, Psy-dog, Snork, Rodent, Rats, Hamsters, Military, Duty, Loners, Freedom, Ecologists, Monolith, Wish Granter, Bandits, C-Conciousness, Chernobyl, Cheeki Breeki, Power plant, Pripyat, The Bar, Brain Scorcher

Id: R2S63yBb0OA

Length: 48min 33sec (2913 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/plscome2brazil]

Yes it is.

[u/n988]

duh

[u/CorruptedSheep]

Wth is this 48 minutes. All that needs to be said is yes

[u/nickyboy2004300]

Yes bro my favorite game ever beats fallout and metro I have like 100 sum hours on cs and like 90 on soc I recommend this game

[u/BogatyrAlexey]

The longest "yes" I've seen so far

[u/[deleted]]

I really thought the game was supposed to be played on master. Pretty eye opening.