Finally finished Stalker: SoC

[Perkel]

So...

Few days earlier i finally said fuck it this time i will finish it for sake of "teh backlog"

Game still have the same problems as at premiere (-bugs) enemies are sponges and you die from butterfly hitting you. Thing is gunplay definitely improves when you get better guns. Especially with something like Oborcan you can actually fight instead of filling sponge with bullets. Weapons generally feel weak in comparison to other shooters but later in game you get some neat stuff.

I must say early part of game is definitely the worst. And whole structure of game is based on essentially fetchquests and go kill/defend x which was simply boring for most part (in quest sense not in gameplay sense). Game is absolutely awesome in later zones. Especially in prypyad with those snipers and death squads close quarter gunfights under stormy weather.

Which points me to to surprising end statement.

Stalker stuff like artifact hunting or whole radiation thing was hurting actually game and i don't mean that it hurt game because it existed but because it was badly designed.

Artifacts were basically pick up shinny object which was brainless. Artifacts themselves didn't really do anything intersting and after you got endurance and -radiation you could basically forget that feature of game.
Radiation in this game is totaly broken and completely random. Go into toxic dump ? minor radiation. go near some random truck for a split second ? deadly dose of radiation. Anomalies ?
There are like 4 types in whole game and all of them are basically AOE attacks .
From mutes there are only 2 interesting that predator which i killed 6 times through whole game and those psi enemies which i met like 2 times. Rest of them are your standard mutes. So mutes aren't really that amazing either.

So what did the trick ? Level design, combat design and architecture (especially architecture) combined with shitty weather. They got that right and since level design and combat design go hand in hand it gave me ridiculous amount of fun.

Now story... all of people who think story in SoC is awesome can go somewhere else. I expected story to be at least mediacore considering how many people praise SoC but it is straight out shit. I got that i want to be rich ending but i know there are other ending and i saw "true" ones.

Whole story in game is basically non existent. You have some goal and twist doesn't really work because most of people would assume right who stalker was. Most of the actual story is before game starts.


Overall
Recomendation: play if you have nothing else to play and you want soemthing else. Just don't expect good game.

edit:

fuck whoever designed last battle with those monolith shitheads. Hell yeah 20 armored dudes in super radiation corridors. Glad i had like 30 antiradiation things and almost 20 medkits. Finished game with just one bandage left and no antirads or medkits.

 

[adddeed]

Game was ok. Nice atmosphere, but not much else to recommend really.

 

[Metro]

Stalker tried to do a lot of things well... too many such that they undermined each other. Other than setting/atmosphere the rest is very pedestrian.

 

[Silva]

What Metro said.

SoC is indeed mediocre as a game. What differentiates it is original setting and atmosphere. If you love these, it may make all crapness worth it.

CoP is much better. Play it with some gfx and difficulty improving mods and the experience is on par with System Shocks and Deus Ex. (I recommend Misery 1.2)

Also, you seem to have played SoC vanilla, which shows you're dumb or retard or both.

 

[Surf Solar]

Seems the zone claimed more from you than you think it would - I especially like mediacore, sounds like some new type of music genre.

 

[Explorerbc]

Gunplay was a bit weird for me too until I got that M4 or whatever the mercs use, and then some other goodies, and I also agree that radiation randomness was pretty annoying.

I only did the fetch quests for Sidorovich and a few unique ones later, I didn't touch the rest since they didn't offer anything except money anyway.

The story was not bad though in my opinion. They obviously lacked the badget to tell it in a better way, plus it is a pretty open game which makes it a bit harder to focus on it. You mostly have to read your PDA to understand what's going on and it still got a bit confusing at times. The real ending was a bit dissapointing though, but I guess all revelations usually can't live up to the anticipation their mystery has previously built. The Monolith endings, although a bit abrupt, probably fit better with the whole atmosphere.

 

[adddeed]

Actually I thought the story was really good.

 

[Surf Solar]

The story was allright as far as amnesiac stories go, I've seen far worse ones in videogames. True, the presentation could have been a bit better, but the locations, your missions and so on were much more fleshed out if you bothered to talk to other NPC about the ongoings in the zone.
What was far more important anyway that the emergent gameplay creates its own little stories as you play. You never know what happens when you stumble upon that outpost, who is in there etc. Also stories told through leveldesign, what happened to the guy whos corpse is splattered all over the room and so on.

Perhaps I played a different game, but enemies were never bullet sponges for me. And yes I played it vanilla. Early to midgame is actually where the game shines the most IMO - how one could not enjoy that is beyond me. Gunplay was excellent, very very lethal, going Rambo gets you killed, carefully placing your shots or predicting enemy flanking maneuvres lets you win the firefight. Not sure what's so bad about that? Plus it's IIRC one of the first shooters that incorporated bullet ballistics.

I think the game falls apart the moment you step out of the brain scorcher and go into Pripyat. What could have been another epic level to explore degrades into a shooting gallery with bullshit placment of enemies. But all the rest? Very good shooter. Can't wait to properly play CoP.

 

[Silva]

Oh come on Surf, story in SoC good ? It doesnt make any sense that a supposed uber intelligent counsciousness send a killer to kill himself by mistake, no matter how they try to justify it.

And mega-brain ? Really ? A MEGA-BRAIN composed of voluntary Russian eggheads as a villain ? Do you realize how anathema this shit is to the scarily believable setting they built around the exclusion zone and the soviet urban legends as they did ? It's like hiring Ursula Le Guin to build a uber believable world, and then hiring Joe Romero to destroy everything thereafter!. Its nuts!

There is a reason the devs opted to ignored all that stuff in CoP.

 

[Perkel]

The story was allright as far as amnesiac stories go, I've seen far worse ones in videogames. True, the presentation could have been a bit better, but the locations, your missions and so on were much more fleshed out if you bothered to talk to other NPC about the ongoings in the zone.
What was far more important anyway that the emergent gameplay creates its own little stories as you play. You never know what happens when you stumble upon that outpost, who is in there etc. Also stories told through leveldesign, what happened to the guy whos corpse is splattered all over the room and so on.

Perhaps I played a different game, but enemies were never bullet sponges for me. And yes I played it vanilla. Early to midgame is actually where the game shines the most IMO - how one could not enjoy that is beyond me. Gunplay was excellent, very very lethal, going Rambo gets you killed, carefully placing your shots or predicting enemy flanking maneuvres lets you win the firefight. Not sure what's so bad about that? Plus it's IIRC one of the first shooters that incorporated bullet ballistics.

I think the game falls apart the moment you step out of the brain scorcher and go into Pripyat. What could have been another epic level to explore degrades into a shooting gallery with bullshit placment of enemies. But all the rest? Very good shooter. Can't wait to properly play CoP.

You see story in SoC would be good without whole strelok thing, without multibrain and other shit. Just you and the zone and one of the "bad" endings.
True ending and strelok amnesia is what it made its worse not better.
Ending with monolith simply screwing you in various ways depending on your choices would be far better.

Enemies are bullet sponges even at end of game when you can easily pack two full mags of AP ammo into someone wearing good armor. Which is why later in game most of people just do headshots.

I don't agree on pripyat. It was awesome level and like i said because you didn't need to do anymore fetch quests or hunt for same artifacts you just need to focus on combat and in pripyat combat design was awesome.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Had to quit fairly early on because everything was so shit. A shame because I'm very interested in everything to do with Chernobyl.

I've heard Call of Pripyat is pretty good though, I've got that in my list of shame and will play it some day.

 

[Raapys]

Wtf is this shit? Stalker is awesome, don't be faggots. It's easily one of the very best shooters ever made.

And enemies being bullet sponges? You wot mate? They all died in a single hit last time I played it, with the exception of two different mutant types of which there are like 4-5 of in total in the game.

 

[Perkel]

Wtf is this shit? Stalker is awesome, don't be faggots. It's easily one of the very best shooters ever made.

And enemies being bullet sponges? You wot mate? They all died in a single hit last time I played it, with the exception of two different mutant types of which there are like 4-5 of in total in the game.

Now tell me which mod you played because by the end of game you can put two whole magazines of AP ammo in those monolith dudes if you target body which means that you can't win without putting headshots left and right.

Had to quit fairly early on because everything was so shit. A shame because I'm very interested in everything to do with Chernobyl.

I've heard Call of Pripyat is pretty good though, I've got that in my list of shame and will play it some day.

I will start CoP soon because like you said it seems to be better than SoC mechanically.
Though i don't know if it stalker fans circlejerk or it is valid point.

 

[adddeed]

Wtf is this shit? Stalker is awesome, don't be faggots. It's easily one of the very best shooters ever made.

And enemies being bullet sponges? You wot mate? They all died in a single hit last time I played it, with the exception of two different mutant types of which there are like 4-5 of in total in the game.

Nah bro, its a competent shooter. Not one of the very best. It could've been much better.

 

[Raapys]

Now tell me which mod you played because by the end of game you can put two whole magazines of AP ammo in those monolith dudes if you target body which means that if can't win without putting headshots left and right.

Why would you go for anything but headshots though? They're wearing exoskeletons for heaven's sake. I'm p.sure I've gone through the game killing every single human-enemy with headshots, so why wouldn't you? It's one hit kill every single time, and very easy to pull off the moment you get a scoped weapon.

Nah bro, its a competent shooter. Not one of the very best. It could've been much better.

Can't wait to play the ones you'll now be listing which are noticeably better than the Stalker games.

 

[Surf Solar]

The story was allright as far as amnesiac stories go, I've seen far worse ones in videogames. True, the presentation could have been a bit better, but the locations, your missions and so on were much more fleshed out if you bothered to talk to other NPC about the ongoings in the zone.
What was far more important anyway that the emergent gameplay creates its own little stories as you play. You never know what happens when you stumble upon that outpost, who is in there etc. Also stories told through leveldesign, what happened to the guy whos corpse is splattered all over the room and so on.

Perhaps I played a different game, but enemies were never bullet sponges for me. And yes I played it vanilla. Early to midgame is actually where the game shines the most IMO - how one could not enjoy that is beyond me. Gunplay was excellent, very very lethal, going Rambo gets you killed, carefully placing your shots or predicting enemy flanking maneuvres lets you win the firefight. Not sure what's so bad about that? Plus it's IIRC one of the first shooters that incorporated bullet ballistics.

I think the game falls apart the moment you step out of the brain scorcher and go into Pripyat. What could have been another epic level to explore degrades into a shooting gallery with bullshit placment of enemies. But all the rest? Very good shooter. Can't wait to properly play CoP.

You see story in SoC would be good without whole strelok thing, without multibrain and other shit. Just you and the zone and one of the "bad" endings.
True ending and strelok amnesia is what it made its worse not better.
Ending with monolith simply screwing you in various ways depending on your choices would be far better.

Enemies are bullet sponges even at end of game when you can easily pack two full mags of AP ammo into someone wearing good armor. Which is why later in game most of people just do headshots.

I don't agree on pripyat. It was awesome level and like i said because you didn't need to do anymore fetch quests or hunt for same artifacts you just need to focus on combat and in pripyat combat design was awesome.

Then it makes me wonder why you even bothered to play Stalker onstead of simply yet another corridor shooter if that is what you like?

 

[TripJack]

Game still have the same problems as at premiere (-bugs) enemies are sponges and you die from butterfly hitting you.

until you get decent armor, then you're a sponge too

Wtf is this shit? Stalker is awesome, don't be faggots. It's easily one of the very best shooters ever made.

one of the very best shooters of the last 10 years maybe, but that's not saying a lot is it

Nah bro, its a competent shooter.

dunno about that, a competent shooter doesn't turn to utter dogshit at the end like SoC does

 

[Perkel]

Because people being saying teh SoC is best game eva ? much stalker, muh artifacts, awesome story and so on ?
SoC isn't bad game, but its greatest moments are those of corridor shooters but sadly most of things above are just bad.

Game simply feels unfinished.

They made bunch of features but they didn't expand them. Whole anomalies, artifacts, mutants radiation and so on is literally a joke. 4 or 5 mutant types from which only 2 are actual interesting ones, 4-5 types of anomalies that are essentially aoe attacks that sometimes move, inconsistent crazy radiation, basically 5 types of artifacts with couple of "levels" each that are basically useless in long run, artifact hunting that is literally look for shinny object and pick it up, story which is B tier movie crap, and shit ton of fetch quests oh and faction system that is simple as fuck.

Stalker in concept is awesome game. Hunt for artifacts, sell for fat bucks to buy better gear, watch out for dem anomalies, pick sides of conflict and try to unravel what is a zone and what is happening in it but when you actually do it it is fucking bad.

Which leaves us with corridor shooter stuff like combat design (AI of enemy !!!!), level design and so on and in this case SoC rocks.

I finished game with "being rich" ending and i though story was awesome. But then i read about true ending and holy fuck it changed story from being good to shit in seconds. I mean why ? It felt awesome to get bad ending as it was kind of culmination of stalker life in zone and made actually sense for theme of game.


edit:

artifact hunting is basically smithing in skyrim. Mindless shit which supposed to be deep and interesting.

 

[Perkel]

Game still have the same problems as at premiere (-bugs) enemies are sponges and you die from butterfly hitting you.

until you get decent armor, then you're a sponge too

that only depends how close you are to enemy. I was wearing exo suit same stuff basically what monolith dudes rocked and they would shred me in split seconds at close range where i had do fucking run away and do pick a boo shooting hunting for helmet because apperently two full mags of ap ammo to body is not enough.

I forgot to add to my review.

SoC have awesome shotguns. Spas shotgun is fucking fantastic.

 

[adddeed]

Can't wait to play the ones you'll now be listing which are noticeably better than the Stalker games.

Lots really. No need to list them. As I said, the game could've been much much better, but they left it unfinished.

 

[Raapys]

Can't wait to play the ones you'll now be listing which are noticeably better than the Stalker games.

Lots really. No need to list them. As I said, the game could've been much much better, but they left it unfinished.

How can I rip apart your favorite shooters if you won't tell me what they are?

 

[Perkel]

Why would you go for anything but headshots though? They're wearing exoskeletons for heaven's sake. I'm p.sure I've gone through the game killing every single human-enemy with headshots, so why wouldn't you? It's one hit kill every single time, and very easy to pull off the moment you get a scoped weapon.

At end game headshots aren't option but default way of playing game. That is the problem. I love combat design especially AI of enemies but enemies being sponges that can be killed mostly by headshots is bit bad.

Which exactly is problem at the end when you need to fight with shit ton of dudes in radiated corridors scuming AI f5f9 for any chance to put headshot instead of doing a lot more tactical things like suppression or sipping away dudes by hiting legs and such stuff.

 

[Surf Solar]

Game still have the same problems as at premiere (-bugs) enemies are sponges and you die from butterfly hitting you.

until you get decent armor, then you're a sponge too

that only depends how close you are to enemy. I was wearing exo suit same stuff basically what monolith dudes rocked and they would shred me in split seconds at close range where i had do fucking run away and do pick a boo shooting hunting for helmet because apperently two full mags of ap ammo to body is not enough.

I forgot to add to my review.

SoC have awesome shotguns. Spas shotgun is fucking fantastic.

You do realize you are supposed to duck behind cover in firefights instead of standing in the open?

 

[Perkel]

Can't wait to play the ones you'll now be listing which are noticeably better than the Stalker games.

Lots really. No need to list them. As I said, the game could've been much much better, but they left it unfinished.

Hadrly there are any better shooters from combat design perspective if we are talking about SP.


Though i did not play yet COP which is supposed to be better.

You do realize you are supposed to duck behind cover in firefights instead of standing in the open?

duh. It it possible to even finish game without that considering how fragile you are ? My point was about player vs enemy armor not about style of play.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Yeah, cover is your friend. I mean, I suppose you can go without it, but you better have a ton of medical supplies.
And I mean that literally.