Written by Jeff Buckland, 3/2/2007
It's been a long five-plus years, but GSC Game World's much-delayed first person shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl has finally gone gold. The post-meltdown Chernobyl atmosphere is combined with a little bit of sci-fi to create a slightly odd, yet realistic atmosphere of an urban wasteland where fighting for survival is tantamount. The game will be in stores soon, and I've gotten a chance to try out the game's online versus modes.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s online play will work pretty similar to many games in the past - there's a built-in server browser letting you choose your game or sort by ping, number of players, and the like. After setting up various detail and control options, a quick hop over to the "Network Game" mode from the main menu brings me up a server list, and it's time to jump right in. This multiplayer beta has two maps included to try, and both a free-for-all deathmatch mode and team-based Artifact capture mode are included.
Both modes include a system a little like Counter-Strike where killing enemies and capturing artifacts will net you cash which you can use to buy weapons and other gear. From a wide range of pistols and submachine guns to grenades, shotguns, rifles, sniper weapons, heavy weapons like rocket launchers, and scope attachments for some guns, it's all here. Then there's the armor, binoculars, and a few other gadgets, and finally, there's even different ammo with different properties you can buy. Most of this stuff is relatively cheap so you'll usually at least be able to buy a shotgun or submachine gun just about every time you die and respawn. But if you stack up a nice rifle with a few gadgets and some body armor, you'll need to know how to use it and actually kill people fairly often in order to keep being able to buy it when someone does sneak up on you and gets you.
In free-for-all modes, you will get to switch your weapon purchases around while you're dead - and when you spawn, you'll have the stuff you chose and some money missing from your stash. In the teamplay modes, each team has a preparation area where you are invincible and you buy your weapons there. These areas are usually pretty isolated from the rest of the map, so while you can kill people from the immunity of the starting areas, usually the only people you see are trying to do some kind of tricky spawn-camping. Invincibility in an online game is always an iffy prospect, but here the system works well.
The actual goal of the teamplay-based mode is to capture artifacts for your team. Here's where the sci-fi comes in, as sometimes on the map these strange whirlwind anomalies will appear, which can stun you for a while, but some unique lighting and sounds are thrown in to make them a little spookier. These artifacts will spawn around the map, and either team can pick them up and bring them to their base to score a point for the team. It's a pretty simple system, but with the complexity of the maps and the number of weapon and item configurations you can pick from, you'll find that killing the enemy is probably still your primary goal - the artifact captures are still important, and you'll do those, but rarely did I see someone just trying to capture artifacts repeatedly without firing a shot.
The two maps included in this beta both follow a similar style of half-constructed buildings, burned out structures, and derelict vehicles that will never run again. It's not all drab and gray, though, as an impressively realistic day-night cycle gives unique lighting while the odd bit of rain and storms will also roll through from time to time. The atmosphere really does bring up the post-apocalypse visuals of games like Fallout and movies like Mad Max, but the Russian setting definitely makes this one unique.
The frame rates in the multiplayer modes are not the most stable I've seen, but the game's detail options are pretty robust so you should be able to find a detail level to your liking. The minimum requirements aren't nearly as steep as some have speculated, requiring only a low-end Athlon XP or P4. Anything equal or better to a Radeon 9600 or GeForce 5700 are supported, although a somewhat steep 1GB RAM is the minimum - still, this is pretty good considering many recent games' requirements. The Recommended system is quite a bit more steep, so if you're serious about S.T.A.L.K.E.R., try and get to at least a 7000-level GeForce or ATI X1000-level video card, 3GHz+ CPU, and possible 2GB RAM.
While the bigger draw for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is probably in the open-ended single player game with its semi-persistent world and large environments, so far the multiplayer modes seem pretty solid as well. The purchase system for the guns and gear will add a lot of depth to a team's tactics, and the maps are designed to make sure that those choices are meaningful ones as well. THQ has announced that the game will be in North American stores on March 20th with a reasonable $39.99 price tag.
