S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl

A game thought to bear the same fate as duke nukem forever, prove the world wrong by their soviet game developer by releasing this game 7 years later.A game very similar to oblivion, which is a FPS/RPG hybrid with large environments to explore and freedom to ignore the main quest if you choose to.Set at a not so distant future in chernobyl where a second fictional nuclear explosion take place after the real ,one and only nuclear meltdown tragedy in the world.Straight after the second nuke, monliath appeared with a ever expending zone whoch is polluted by radiation ,anomalies and mutants.
The game is extremely challenging even at middle difficulties, your humanoid enemy come in platoons of cleverly controlled AI flanking you into a corner,rape you,killed you, then rape your corpse again.Mutant beasts charge with classic lame AI but they are made tougher and faster to compensate their mindlessness.Especially at the start of the game where you only have a pistol and a knife having to fight the soviet army carrying rifles is a pain in the ass.You would probably ending up hiding for cover and pop your poor little lump of meat out to fire back and hide back into the shadow again.This continue mostly throughout the game unless you have indoors fire fight where the AI start getting screw up.In corridors of very confine space, the AI will start rushing to choke points blindly when you switch on your flash light which is rather sad since 7 years could only train those elite soviet conscript how to fight properly in outdoors and spacious indoors only.
Going to the graphical side,HDR,parallex mapping,high sampling dynamic shadows, the list goes on.However you could see inconsistency in the graphics quality probably due to the engine being upgraded several times during the long 7 years to keep up with the technological advancement.HDr isnt use to the full potential,parallex mapping make texture look crappy,the vegetation look worst then oblivion's but the flash light and rain is the best you ever seen before directx10 games start appearing.Some graphic bug where changing graphics setting would cause artefact giving me false alarm of my gpu overheating.Some graphic settings isnt working,like antialiasing and shadow quality.My aging 7900gt at 590mhz can handle 1280x960 with max setting with fps drop to around 22 occasionaly.Surprisingly, the game is playable ecen with such horrendous frame rate, and since changing most graphics setting does not seems to be working, i probably would ignore it till a patch roll out for it.
Overall, this is a great game that shouldnt be miss.But 7 years of development?This is not i m expecting.

Nicest sky award(period)


You will start loving lightning...


You sure HDR is applied anyway other den the sky??!!