I've heard little about the game, before I got it, apart from the fact that it was delayed and had to do with mutants and guns. At first, the premise of having horridly deformed mutants, where in reality stuff like that is impossible, kinda turned me off at first. However, my friend managed to nab it at the store, and got hooked. When he let me borrow it, I've been playing it every day since. Its that fucking good.
The premise of the game is that it takes place in 2012, and it's setting is the Cheyrnoble Zone, after a fictional second explosion in 2008, causing all kinds of wierd-ass things to happen to the place, horrid mutation in animals, and generally distorting time and space as we know it. After actually playing the game, it seemed like a wild west sort of place, only with radiation, strange quasi-physical anomalies, and monsters. A stalker is someone who scavenges the zone, selling artifacts to scientists, shooting each other, robbing each other, ect. So your basiclly this stalker who's an amnesiac, and can't remember who he is. But anyway...
The game itself is utterly amazing, despite the less than top of the line graphics (however, the vast open areas and countless foilage might remind you of Farcry) and glitches, its still the best game I have ever played. Its gun physics are unmatched (taking things such as wind, gravity, air resistance, into account), and its gameplay, is utter awesome. You can walk around the entire length of the zone going back and fourth as you please. Plus you get quests, which give you items, such as food that repenishes health, medkits, ammo, guns, ect (did I mention a diablo style inventory?) or things called artifacts, created by the anomalies that I mentioned earlier. They can give you more health, at expense of losing some rupture defense, ect. So imagine if someone combined GTA, with Counterstrike, and Diablo 2, and you get Stalker. A few glitches though, "Get out of here stalker, get out of here stalker, get out of here stalker" gets repeated by this one guy if you stand in his warehouse, and a nasty crash in one of the areas after beating this mission, but otherwise definetly worthwhile. And the fact that the guy moves like a car when sprinting.
The game had like every weapon from M4's to G36's, to MP5's, to a whole plethora of eastern block guns. Plus the storyline was good too for the most part, if not a little predictable at times. Overall, it was a fun and entertaining expereience, even through i'm not done yet.
Oh and the game is long. I mean, like 100 hours long. I've had it for half the summer now.
My score for it is 9.5/10.
If you jump high enough you'll hurt your ankles when you land.
