You'll also need to monitor radiation levels and bring scraps of food on your journey to keep Alex in fighting shape, since it really doesn't take very long for a skittering mutant to claw the life from you. Eventually, guns you've ignored will deteriorate and start to jam with such frequency that there's no point in using them anymore. Call of Pripyat is a game where a sense of realism is crucial to the overall tone of the world, and as such that means your armor can break down and weapons degrade with use.
Even by implementing these upgrades, you'll still need to keep an eye on your gear's condition.
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That's because the modification system built into Clear Sky has been imported here, meaning if you talk to specific NPCs and give them what they want, they'll offer services that can do things like upgrade the reliability of your weapon, improve its accuracy, or boost the defensive parameters of your armor. Talking to NPCs, taking on quests, and hunting down and trading artifacts for cash are your best options for upgrades, which in Call of Pripyat is a more interesting process than in the original.Ī+well-built+upgrade+system+for+weapons+and+armor. Like Shadow of Chernobyl, when you start out, you're going to be incredibly vulnerable to the dangers present in the Zone. There's no leveling or experience point systems, however, so the power of your character is more directly determined by the kinds of equipment you're carrying around. The game is structured like a role-playing title, with primary missions and quest rewards and a trading system where you'll repair guns, buy ammunition and medical supplies, wrap cuts with bandages, and upgrade your gear the further you go. As you comb the grounds in search of the damaged military vehicles and their crew members, you'll pass through three large areas comprised of toxic marshes, desiccated fields, decaying industrial facilities and urban wastes, all of which have their own set of side quests and feature plenty of scares and entertaining challenges. Everyone was curious as to what kind of power beat at the setting's center, and after watching Call of Pripyat's opening cutscene it's clear the military didn't have a lot of success finding an answer. In this game you play as Alex Degtyarev, a new character and part of a military mission to discover what happened to a number of helicopters sent into The Zone following the climactic events of the first title. The mysterious circumstances surrounding the propagation and sustainment of the Zone have also created several subgroups within the area, including factions that want to wipe it off the planet entirely and those that think its uniqueness alone justifies a need to preserve it.
As a result, groups of these stalkers bunch together in whatever safe areas they can find, such as in rusted husks of beached ships, abandoned train stations, and the crumbling remains of Pripyat. Despite the fact that this land sounds entirely inhospitable, it draws fortune seekers in search of curios called artifacts that tend to spawn right in the middle of the anomalous traps.
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Frightening and powerful creatures dwell in isolated underground testing labs and caverns, the landscape is full of dangerous traps that spout fire from the ground and trigger damaging windstorms, and every once in a while an emission blasts across the land wiping out anything silly enough to neglect shelter.
The game is set in the Zone, a tract of land surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in which all life has been corrupted and twisted into hideous and deadly forms. To get the timeline all straightened out, Call of Pripyat is the second title to follow Shadow of Chernobyl and takes place after the events of the first. It also, thankfully, isn't nearly as buggy. It's not quite the revelatory experience Shadow of Chernobyl was, but it hits all the right notes for fans of the original and anyone else who values mood in their games and finds entertainment in being scared out of their socks. While the follow-up prequel, Clear Sky, was a bit of a disappointment in how it trimmed out a bunch of elements that helped Stalker stand out, Call of Pripyat ditches a lot of the changes made and returns to the series' roots. Sure, it was rough around the edges, but no other game out there offered such an intoxicating mix of horror and bleak beauty like Stalker and the irradiated wastes of its setting. That the original Shadow of Chernobyl was actually completed and released to the public at all after a seemingly endless string of delays was a bit of a surprise. As a franchise, GSC Game World's Stalker has come a long way.