STALKER looked very promising and even came highly recommended by friends who also liked FEAR (the first FEAR, not the sad excuse of a game called FEAR 3) but I must say this game did not live up to expectations.

Without MODS (in my opinion no game should require a MOD to run.  A MOD is a Modification to a game, usually made by other players that can change anything about a game) this game is horrible.  The story seems interesting enough to want to follow and you do have a quest to find this Serlok person but no one even mentions it.  Instead the first mission you get is helping some guy get a flash drive.  Then he hands you a bunch of other quests miles away.  I finished the first quest on the easiest difficulty, but I had to take the three clumsy AI characters with me (they were basically meat shields) as I got up close to the enemy and took them down.  Although I had a pistol it was incredibly inaccurate.  Anyways, lets break down each category.

Graphics and Sound:
Graphics weren't that bad, and with some easy to install MOD's out there it can look better.  It did an OK job setting the mood for lonely and desolate but a lot of the spaces were just empty.  No clutter, just boxes that used to house enemies.  They could be worse though.

Sound was not great, but not terrible.  Most of the guns sounded pretty weak or just odd, almost muffled on some of them like they were all recorded in different studios at different times by different people.

Gameplay:
This is where this game failed.  The head bob immediately would make me sick, literally the motion on the screen was intense.  Was this guys neck a slinky?  It was terrible, luckily I found a MOD that got rid of it and could actually play the game.  The game has two duck modes, duck and duck more...odd, I would think duck more was prone but its not.  If you are in the duck position, you can go into the duck more position.  Maybe it was to fit into small holes who knows, but why add the entire mechanic when you could just make the holes slightly bigger?

Combat was tough, even at the minimum level.  I am no slouch when it comes to shooters but the gun in my hands was incredibly inaccurate while the shotgun in some bandits hands would manage to pick me off from 50 yards away.  I would even aim at enemies ten feet in front of me with iron sights and pull the trigger to only watch the bullets go all over the place.  It was frustrating how inaccurate I was versus how accurate the bad guys were.  I did manage to take out the first bandit camp, but they had handguns and shotguns, using the other NPC's as meat shields I was able to finish my objective.  I tried then to do a new mission and there were some guys standing in front of a tunnel with some assault rifles (already?) and they were deadly accurate and here I was with my pistol shooting 4-5 feet off target.

Inventory management was not that bad, odd interface though.  If you click once on an item it shows a description in the middle Payne, double click and it uses/equips the item.  Felt clunky.  I also remap my mouse keys to other functions and they stay active while in inventory.  Since I map them to move forward and backward when I was clicking in the inventory my character was moving around.  Also, even if you are in your inventory or on your PDA the world still goes on.  In this game that's not good, when you need to get into your inventory to switch up your weapon because you are out of ammo your screwed because while you try to navigate around, the enemy is coming for you.

Story:
They picked a creepy setting, and a creepy place, and a creepy back story.  I was not able to make it too far but all the quests I was able to do in my area had nothing to do with the story line.  They were all just "Go get me this" and "Go kill this guy" quests so I can become friends with the STALKER's that were in the small town.  Story could have used more pump from the beginning, but from what I have seen played in videos and from my friends the story does pick up you just have to hang in there and be willing to start from your latest save...a lot.

Technical:
The game worked so I can not complain.  The tutorial on my PDA was terrible though.  Dialogue was out of sync, started too soon and some of the pings showing me where things were, were actually off their mark.  Not to mention the guy who gives you the tutorial just keeps saying "You'll find out more about this later".  The stuff he tells me I could find out by just bringing up my PDA and observing the world for a few moments so it was a useless buggy tutorial.  I was not served with any major issues though, so it actually did run.

Recommended: No