(I Live For The Zone) S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Heart of Chornobyl

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It's been years since I last played a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game. Years before I played Shadow of Chernobyl, then Clear Sky, and finally Pripyat. My first foray into the post-apocalyptic open world title, and it was me stealing things as a Slavic. Since then, I've learned to differentiate Ukraine from Russia.

And find out about a book called Roadside Picnic, leading me to look up on so much of the allure and mysticism of the Slavic wasteland media, then a TV series comes out about the Chernobyl disaster, and well, here we are now. This game has influenced so many before it, it was a shame that the studio who made it just disappeared for a decade.

You have to consider the sheer willpower needed to make such a game, from a studio that has been dealing with a conflict from Russia for almost 3 years now. Some people died making this, so I'll take my time respectively talking about it. And why I really think it's a good return to form.

Return to form to putting it mildly, however. It runs terrible, numerous patches have come out since, and while the game is mostly stable, it runs absolutely terrible at times. This isn't exclusive to anything outside Nvidia. It's just baffling at times, leaving me to wait longer. Not to mention the ten-minute waiting for compiling shaders to massive performance issues.

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So here we are, a point man who was living the life in the mainland (Ukraine) before an artifact landing on his new apartment, nearly destroying it. A former marine specialist who is forced to go back to the zone in order to get his life. Sadly, none of that matters to me.

Neither does his main quest either, I'm just here for the zone experience, baby. But this main narrative acts as a guiding hand towards all the regions of the map to explore, just because there's a world that is traversable, doesn't really mean you should. You'll start to learn why just within this tutorial section, immediately thrown into spring action against the worst.

If you've never met a Bloodsucker, pray you don't or that you have high damage weapons and a shotgun good enough to kill it. It's camouflaged, with little visibility, requiring one to adapt by waiting for it on water or looking at the terrain to trace its steps. This one does serious hurt.

Tis the STALKER way, this game is not for beginners, definitely not for your casual audience either. I have to cross around radioactive puddles, to get an artifact which only pops once the detector finds it. Gunplay is similar to prior games, you have high recoil weapons unless you got them upgraded. Weapon reloading takes time, you can cancel them, but that sadly happens a lot.

Peaking is useful, which is needed to look around where enemies are, they do not hold back shooting at you. Especially close encounters. The eerie tension of my character slowly pumping up healing items or bandaging from a cut is pure palpable tension in the midst of a heated battle. It's a matter of attrition, till it isn't. The real enemies are supposed to be human enemies, that's because they are pretty trickier to kill. Due to their tactics, and high fire rate. Also, they dodge bullets.

Though it depends, you could also say the horror and suspense element is kind of toned down compared to the originals. But I would argue it's modernized to the point that everything feels different, compared to the older trilogy games. Especially the visuals.

Near photorealistic recreations of the zones, the sound design creates gun echo in the most complex way and manages to make the environment so eerie and terrifying, and it's bad enough to carrying loot while a freaking storm is raging. Lightning hits here and there. I've seen someone from base camp getting hit, no one is safe from this thing. Again, welcome to the zone.

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A lot of the errands and quests revolve around going in foot to various locations, abandoned building structures like factories, military bases, big anomaly points, and worse of all, spooky forests filled with mutants and anomalies. You think you could beat the last part? HAHAHA!

This game destroyed me so many times, within the first 10 hrs, of course half of that is because of the performance issues, and some weird gameplay inadequacies. I have battled telepathic invincible creatures throwing objects at me, costing me several magazines of rounds to takedown, most of my farming involved finding loot and killing guys. Praying they're not damaged weapons.

Economy is very dynamic, as in it varies on who's willing to pay the high price. The first town, Zalissya has a number of people I can trade with. In fact, trading is possible with almost everyone. Some has infinite currency, but rather a lot of price discrepancies. This pretty much told me that I should take some of my weapons to areas that will really need them, willing to pay top coupons. But the biggest money earners, are the artifacts. Hence, using detectors.

Also, not every encounter should involve me riddling them with bullets, unless I know for a fact that I can benefit like finding an artifact somewhere or kill enough raiders to loot their base or them carrying useful items. Mutants, of course, are the ones you save bullets for.

You can change type of bullets too, especially ones that can penetrate past enemy armor. This is good for me, in case I know there's a strong one nearby. A simple press of the tap menu, means I can switch between these munitions on the fly. Same for gun add-ons, I can add those or remove them if I want. Guns can also be upgraded visiting the right person.

Not everything is great about having weapons around, for one, it is stupidly easy to be overencumbered, unless I earned enough to upgrade for increased capacity or reduce the weight of my inventory. If not, stamina drains easily, and I get stuck waiting for stamina to regenerate slowly. This part baffles me too, you have a hunger system, and yet stamina goes out too fast?

What's even worse? Gun degradation, yes your gun will get stuck requiring me to press reload to unjam or wait to unclog the barrel. Also, guns marked red do not sell. They can be repaired, but like I said, there's so many, it's worth fixing those that can be sold for more.

Easy is not synonymous with the entire experience with the game. But part of it becomes eventually easier when things are at reach, I've crossed the lesser zone and reached north, when a journalist left me a shotgun to use. A multi-round one, was getting sick of using boomsticks.

There's no level XP grinding, this isn't an RPG. Everything to do with me is all related to gear. How much currency I can farm is based on what I've pulled from the zone. But if you care about exploring the world, there are hours worth of stuff to do. Interesting stories extending to the lore of the prior Stalker games. Including in regard to cultist clans, military groups, bandits, etc.

Both the good and bad, if you can ah, deal with the weird voice acting as well. But I did, maybe I was too busy surviving the hellhole this place is. Turns out there's memory leaking problems as well, leading to all the terrible stuttering. I'd suggest waitomg for a few more patches.

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