Retrospective Review: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl



S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl is a Ukrainian post-apocalyptic open-world shooter taking place in the Chernobyl nuclear exclusion zone in 2012 following a nonspecific “second” Chernobyl disaster that altered the very fabric of reality in the zone.

I was originally interested in this game following its release due to its rave playerbase following lauding the open-world elements, realism, and style. Unfortunately I never got around to buying a copy, and it seemed the game was in danger of terminal “maybe some day” aspirations. This changed when I won a contest for a free copy via Steam; one can imagine how much I’d be looking forward to playing a very dark and unique shooter.

If I had only known…

The game starts out with you, the protagonist, being unceremoniously hauled into a shop in the middle of the Zone after falling out of an exploding truck full of corpses and suffering a case of laser-guided amnesia. Herein we meet Sidorovich for the first time, an overweight middle-aged man wolfing down a hunk of chicken with all of the sense of decorum of a starving badger. You’d better start liking him, however, as you’re basically going to be reporting back to him every five minutes for the first part of the game, and it seems he’s absolutely the only person in the Zone that was actually born with a personality. So you’d better get used to him bitching at you every time you accidentally open the trade window with him and don’t actually sell anything.



After a few failingly inspirational words about life in the Zone, Sidorovich hands you a pistol that clearly pre-dates car seatbelts and turns you loose into the Cordon, a “lighter” part of the outer borders of the Zone. The first things you’ll notice is a group of inept gun-wielding Stalkers sleeping anywhere but the houses that they’re camping right next to, and the distant voice of a generally bored/angry Ukrainian military officer talking about how much his job sucks over a loudspeaker. Armed with barely enough ammo for an Amish drive-by, the generic Arc words “Find Strelok. Kill Strelok.”, and some advice to find information by helping a bunch of random Stalkers raid a bandit hideout, you’ll end up, well… getting shot within five minutes, if you somehow manage to avoid walking into the painfully obvious anomalies that’ll rip your skeleton out of your arse, the oddly carnivorous giant boars, or the clearly epileptic packs of neurotic blind dogs running everywhere.

Once you actually get around to fighting bandits, you’ll find your weapons are about as accurate as the keyboard you’ll undoubtedly be throwing across the room; if you manage to actually hit an enemy at spitting distance with the crap weapons you have and only burn through one magazine in the process, you’ve done very well. This is something that I found to be consistently aggravating, as the game has been praised for its realistic bullet physics. Apparently, reality means that everything about using a gun is impossible, that every bullet has a three-digit minute of arc, and Imperial Storm Troopers would actually be some of the best marksmen in the world. This is even more annoying when you realise that your enemies are managing to cave your head in with a sawn-off shotgun whilst side strafing and firing from the hip when you’re helplessly crouching to aim and praying that your bullets won’t fly off into oblivion.

At one point I found myself desperately attempting to rush enemies with my knife out in a desperate bid to hit something for once. Aside from making it easier to get blown apart, the knife is somehow even less accurate in its effective range than the damned guns! Somehow your enemies seem to rely on some kind of d20-system reflex check to not get slashed with a knife even though you’re close enough to start counting the ’s nose hairs.

This is the very first combat situation in the game. It is a hellish, nerve-wracking experience that’ll have you sobbing at the sheer futility of trying to survive.

Alright, so looking around the web recently using trusty ole Google, I found a number of websites whose design really caught my eye. Upon visiting the sites, I noted the ease of difficulty of navigating their site, the overall quality of information provided, and how useful their features proved to be in improving the experience. Since I put all this effort into dissecting the page, I felt it'd be appropriate to write down the experience and share it with other potential web developers. ;D I'll only comment on three though, for now.

Awesome JS Development
This site welcomes users with a night-time view of the outskirts of a city with a large, super-hero-looking robot with the promise that the site is 'Awesome' visibly across the page. The scene made for an interesting site, so of course I clicked - However, I feel this may also be partial to the act I'm a male consumer and dark palates & super-heroes/robots is an innate attraction. Who knows?

Anyway, I began the endeavor by playing with the conspicuous buttons at the bottom of the visible page (before scrolling), which were relatively inviting with a large bubble-like popup explaining the correlating process involved. Apparently these buttons explain the process they take in JavaScript development. The overall site, beyond this small section at the top of the page was rather plain, using a black-on-white palate which tended to maintain the comic feel of the entire site. I felt the site grew labor-some to read once I left the first page and didn't feel inclined to actually read the content, due to the robust formatting and font-sizing. It may simply be a preference of mine, but I dislike pages where scrolling seems to be half of the content, in addition to whatever the writer may have put on the page.

Drupal Conference
My next visit was enticed by a design similar to that of our own Goten's method of pixel art along with bright colors (albeit I favor blues). Opening the site, I was worried about the design falling too closely into the recent upsurge of popular web design companies recycling templates and basically following each other in an attempt of avoiding re-inventing the wheel, but from my experience this site managed to make it work for them.

Although I've always tried to shy away from excessive use of images in designing excessively reliant on images for every aspect of the page, this website utilized a relatively stunning array of imagery to clearly and effective display the information without cluttering the scene with distracting sites and over stimulation (I feel the color scheme helped this). Other than the background image, the only thing I would say knocks this down is the position of the news feed and further information at the bottom of the page.

Florida Flourish
So this site is pretty much nothing short of amazing. Original, eye-catching, and aesthetic, this page would certainly keep my amused if I had nothing better to do than play with features. The creators certainly seem to know their stuff in designing. I didn't find anything wrong with it.. so maybe I'm simply being blinded by it being a Florida-based site ( ).

Anyway, if you would like to get your site some recognition with the community or a review from me or another villager, leave a comment! If you disagree with any of my opinions then let me know what you thought of these sites. It doesn't really matter, but could lead for an interesting read!

I found this the other day.

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I would like to point out this is basically the place that trolls have in the LOTRO community. Well, the ones that are actually players, anyway. The big fat ones with clubs are actually better-received, even though all you're trying to do is kill them...