S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat Trailer Takes a Tour

The phrase "under used" potential gets thrown around alot in PC gaming, but I dont think that there is one game that deserves it more than stalker. I hate to be the bad apple here, but, for me, stalker was very underwhelming. I realize that a key part of the game's atmosphere was to provide a creepy void of human activity.. Problem is that there was also a void of anything to keep you interested or engaged. Wandering around Stalker's roads for hours on end got boring pretty quickly.. Their portrayal of life in the zone wasn't very compelling either. I didn't see any beds at those camps.. Where did they sleep? Where did they store their extra ammo? Also, they were completely exposed to the Zone's harsh conditions. After so many years, you would have thought that the zone's inhabitants would have been able to build some sort of makeshift structures to protect them from other people as well as those anomalies.

Then there was the dialogue. Instead of spoken dialogue, the game used huge, obtrusive (and static) I might add menus to convey the dialogue.. In text form.. Come on.. What is this.. the early 90s? If the game was going to throw a huge dialogue box over our field of view.. Why not at least make it visually interesting..? Make it animated and give it a cold war era industrial look.

On top of that, the combat wasn't all too impressive.. The AI was.. well almost nonexistent (I really hate to sound like such a pessimist, but there is no other word to describe it) and the enemies didn't react very interestingly to being hit... It looked alot like they were robots.. The game did give you a huge selection fo weapons and items though.


To me the game's biggest strengths would be it's premised and the graphics (which were marvelous.)