S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat Review: A Wasteland Paradise

Game: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat

Developer: GSC Game World

Genre: FPS, Open World, Survival

System: PC

Rated: M (Blood, Language, Use of Alcohol, Violence)

As you may know, I am a huge fan of Metro 2033. Some of you are probably tired of me constantly gushing about it over twitter. Anyway I recently decided to play the other video game series about a post-apocalyptic Russia ravaged with mutants and radiation, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. Specifically for this review I have played the 2nd game, Call of Pripyat.

Gameplay: As mentioned above, Call of Pripyat ditches the hub-based world of Shadow of Chernobyl for a much more open-ended map divided into three different sectors. This vastly reduces the amount of time the player spends in loading different areas and makes the experience much more enjoyable. The map isn’t that hard to traverse, and it usually won’t take you long to get from one end of a sector to the other.

Gunplay is satisfying, and each weapon handles differently from the next without actually feeling underpowered or overpowered. Guns tend to empty fast, so you’ll have to scavenge what you can from the dead, and having several weapons that use different rounds is always a good idea.

Another new addition Call of Pripyat brings is the ability to customize and improve certain aspects of your weapons and armor at local gunsmiths. These upgrades can vary from increasing how a weapon handles to how accurate or how fast it is to how much your armor protects against bullets or environmental hazards. If you want some of the better upgrades though, you’re going to have to look for toolkits. The toolkits aren’t particularly marked on the map, so you may have to ask around to find them all.

A good way of making money is looking for artifacts in anomalies. Artifacts, besides being worth a lot of money, provide bonuses like giving health regeneration or increasing your maximum weight limit but are also radioactive, so you will most likely want to find a firefly or bubble or other anti-radiation artifacts before you equip any other type of artifact. The process for finding artifacts is, at first, a game of hot and cold, and the artifacts are usually right by deadly anomalies. Eventually you get better detectors which make finding artifacts a heck of a lot easier, particularly if you do a certain side quest that nets you a detector which shows the locations of anomalies as well as artifacts

Story: The story in Call of Pripyat follows Alexander Degtyarev as he goes undercover as a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in order to investigate why five helicopters the military sent into the zone crashed without warning. The main story-line in and of itself isn’t particularly interesting, and the conclusion near the end was woefully unsatisfying. I did find finishing each side quest to be incredibly more satisfying. Listening to the epilogue at the end telling you how your decisions affected the zone will both make you proud that you helped Beard and the Stalkers out in Zaton instead of helping Sultan and make you despise yourself for not killing off that hive of Bloodsuckers when you had the chance.

Final Thoughts: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat is a fun game. Its story isn’t going to win any prizes and the conclusion near the end really was a disappointment, but the side quests and gunplay are good enough to more than make up for it. Even if you aren’t the type of person that has to finish every single quest before moving on with the main storyline, I can guarantee you will have finished a good majority of them by the end of the game.

9/10

Metro 2033 Review: Overlooked Brilliance

Game: Metro 2033

Genre: FPS, Survival Horror

Console played on: PC

Rating: M

Every once in a while a game will come along with enough guts and balls big enough to slip past my guard and steal my heart from right under my nose, (Don’t ask why it was there, Trust me you don’t want to know.) Metro 2033 is the latest member of those thieves’ heart burglars.

Visuals: Graphics wise, Metro 2033 is fairly pretty looking game (With the exception of a few character models here and there, and the fact that all of the characters tend not to blink that often) but, its aesthetics are what really make it a beautiful game. Everything in the game feels like the apocalypse swept in not too long ago and left the world (or at least your part of it) in shambles. Everything from the environments you go though (like the dark, gloomy and decaying metro system you travel most of your way and the bitter, icy-cold, nuclear winter on the surface), to the people you see in the metro station, to the weapons and items you use, have the feel of an apocalyptic depression to them and not in a gray-brownish kind of way.

Story: Metro 2033 is based off of the Russian book of the same name and while that is cool (And I suddenly have a hankering to read said book) it does leave the game with a few holes in explaining thing. For instance the game doesn’t really explain what the mutated monsters were before the apocalypse or why there’s a war going on in the metro  between Communists and Nazis, or even how the Nazis got there all of which I’m guessing was explained in the book.

Gameplay: Starting off the gunplay is very solid; most of the guns in the game feel good to fire (With the exception of Pheumatic weapons which I found to be pretty useless) I did find that regular Iron sights a lot better than the scopes (though that could just be me.) Depending on what difficulty you play it will be either plentiful or not.

 The enemies consist of your basic human (I’m fairly sure you’ve heard of them) Opponent to a somewhat wide variety of mutated monsters (By “somewhat” I mean most of them are a grayish color but they form into a bunch of different shapes.)

In the future, this is what librarians look like.

In the game your main source of currency is military grade bullets. You read that right bullets=money… Well kind of. “High grade” ammo is your money; dirt ammo (Basically the crappy quality ammo) is what you use on most enemies. When you get to friendly metro stations you can spend your money ammo on items (gas mask filters, throwing knife, grenades and medkits), Dirt ammo and better weapons. This gives the game some light RPGs elements in a way. Will you spend money on more dirt ammo? Maybe some throwing knifes, a better gun perhaps? Maybe just save it up for the next station. Who knows maybe you’ll find a better weapon later on.

Throughout the game you will also find certain levels that can be completed in a more stealthy way (Most particularly during the “Front Line” mission) and there are routs past enemies but I felt like there’s nothing really to distinguish as the “Stealthy way” to complete said mission and I tended to only find them after I had already killed a bunch of guards.

One thing I absolutely loved was the well thought out items that you use throughout the game. For instance, you want to check your current objectives you press the objectives key and it brings out a note-book and lighter. By pressing the right mouse button/360 trigger you look at your current objectives and by pressing the left button/trigger you flip your lighter on in order to see it better.

Are you about to go to surface? Not without your trusty gasmask you won’t! During surface missions the gasmask provides some extra tension as you keep track of your gauge, filters and how much damage your gasmask takes. Now I never actually ran out of filters since there is always a dead body around I could loot for them and there’s usually a spare gasmask around to replace your damaged one but, I still had the feeling of “am I going to make it to the end?” whenever I went to the surface.

One item I especially liked was the watch. Your watch is kind of the Swiss army knife of the metro. When you put your gas mask on it tells you how much air you have (though I found this to be flawed since it always seemed to be in the red even when I put in new filters to my mask), It comes with three LED lights (Red, yellow and green) which act like the light crystal from Thief and tells you how hidden you are and Last but not least, it tells time. Not in game time but actually time (or you know what ever time you set your computer’s/360’s time to) seriously, it actually acts like a real watch!

Checkpoints could have, no,should have been done frequently. At times I would find myself begging for another one to appear before I got myself killed (Which I knew would be very soon). That’s one of my mains flaws against the game outside of it killing off most of the characters before I got to know them more.

Final Thoughts: Metro 2033 has impressed me, which, isn’t an entirely easy thing to do. The game has its flaws such as: it could do with some more frequent checkpoints and the main storyline had a few holes when it comes to explaining some things but it’s the best example, I’ve seen, of elements in game telling a much grander story than the story in game.

9.50/10

Is It Time To Evolve? (A Look At Genre In Games And It's Relation To How Games Are Perceived)

I am a huge supporter of the idea that video games, a media that was created as an electronic toy, is quickly evolving into an artful medium (I'm not going to go down the road of the whole Video games are/aren't art dicussion, because it's done to death.) The focus on atmosphere, story, and other experential elements is increasing greatly this generation of games, and with that arises several problems that have existed since the inception of video games. The problem I am speaking of today is this: Video games aren't defined into genres by the experiences they offer, or the themes that they deal with in the game, they are defined by gameplay mechanics. They aren't categorized by the experience you have with the game, necessarily, they are categorized based upon the vernacular (game mechanics) that game developers use to transfer ideas and stories.

In the early years of video games, the setting up of genres based upon gameplay mechanics made more than enough sense. After all, not only was the technology behind video games extremely primitive, games were toys. Even the people who spent time developing games were keenly aware that what they were making was nothing more than a toy, a piece of entertainment. A basketball isn't advertised as an object that you can create great stories with, because it's just a toy. It has only one intended function; no one promises you anything more than something you can play basketball with. The same principle applies to early games. In Super Mario Bros. you were performing a series of platforming challenges to accomplish a goal. That's all. No doubt, it has fantastic design and is an all-time classic, but it's very apparent that this game exists solely have fun.

And for a while, this idea of defining games based upon their mechanics worked fine. Even very sophisticated games, like Final Fantasy or Deus Ex, still were very refined versions of a basic style of game. The complexity of games until around this generation was still limited to something that could (usually) be comfortably described using this system of genres. However, in many cases, this is no longer true.

I'll do something I'm a big fan of. I'll use BioShock, because it's a very good example of a game that succeeds on a mechanical and artistic level. Now, if you wanted to, you could still identify this game as a first-person-shooter; a game where you use guns to defeat enemies in a first-person perspective. However, defining this game like that does it a huge disservice, one I find almost offensive. Because Call of Duty is a first-person-shooter, as well. Defining Call of Duty and BioShock as "similar" games, is like saying a more recent Stephen King novel and Edgar Allen Poe short stories are similar. Call of Duty is NOTHING like BioShock, beyond the very shallow comparison that both are games that require you to shoot at people in a first-person-perspective. The whole purpose of BioShock is that it's a unique experience in a dark, compelling world. It's an intense, philosophically charged game that has so little in common with COD it's like night and day. So why are they both classified as the same type of game? Because of that old, outdated idea that video games are toys that exist only to provide basic experiences of say, shooting a guy and jumping from one platform to another. It's that mentality that causes games to be looked down upon. How could you accept a medium at all as a form of personal expression (or of, *sigh* aaaarrrt if you must) when it's defined by mechanics, not experiences?

I'm not saying that games need to have higher meaning than being fun just to fit them into a different genre system.I love shallow experiences where I can just shoot bad guys and not worry about heavy-handed experiences as much as the next video game blogger. All I'm saying is that, maybe, it's time for us to look past a game's mechanics alone to determine what kind of experience a game truly is, and put it in a genre accordingly.