• Publisher: THQ
  • Release Date: Mar 20, 2007
Metascore

Generally favorable reviews - based on 44 Critics What's this?

User Score

Generally favorable reviews- based on 704 Ratings

  • Summary: The player will become a stalker, a guy who earns money from shoveling embers out of infernal oven of Chernobyl Zone. Returning from the radioactivity-blazing Zone, he will sell anomalous formations to underground dealers and scientists in research camps on the Zone border. With the money procured, the player will purchase equipment, weapons and protective suits allowing him to reach previously inaccessible areas. This is a role-playing game without growing experience of your character, without changing characteristics and levels. We want the player to develop his real mastery, moreover Stalker is an FPS/RPG game and much depends on his ability to fight. [GSC Game World] Expand
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 37 out of 44
  2. Negative: 0 out of 44
  1. Broken. Absolutely and utterly broken. Not the game, oh no, it's my fragile nerves that have been shattered. Adrenalin is still coursing through my veins as I type, and what's more, I absolutely love it. STALKER is a thoroughly affecting game, and it's got me by the short hairs. [Apr 2007, p.56]
  2. Installing and playing through S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was like discovering and opening a long-forgotten Christmas present. [June 2007, p.54]
  3. It's got some quirks, but S.T.A.L.K.E.R. delivers a dynamic and impressive first-person gameplay experience you won't soon forget.
  4. Not a fast-paced shooter, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. appeals to a deeper sense of survival, in which players scrounge for valuables and information in a world gone twisted.

See all 44 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Negative: 35 out of 227
  1. Denys
    10
    I'm proud of this game! I'm proud to be Ukrainian as the creators of Stalker are! Remarkable game, worth the story to be continued....
  2. MarkP
    8
    I think this is a great game. It's not perfect, but it's good. One person has mentioned a poor tutorial and this I agree with. The in-game help when starting should be more thorough. But the world where the player lives in is incredible. The movments of the mutant animals and just the feeling of being in a wastleand is so realistic. Currently, I have not finished the game, but night has fallen and I'm too scared to continue so I've headed back to camp. I'm not sure what to do now. My only ral gripe is a better tutorial especially when it comes to using the PDA and getting through the missions. Expand
  3. JohnH.
    7
    The game is quest based rather than linear. You pick up quests, loot, trade and upgrade you gear much like a RPG. You move freely around the lands and you can explore on your own loading only at level borders. Some quests will take you to underground bunkers or houses and here the game looks more like a classic FPS. The AI's are fairly good, they take cover behind corners and aim well. The atmosphere of the game is good and scary. I would picture it as a Mad Max scenario in a radio active Ukraine with unknown mutant horrors lurking. However, it's not a realistic shooter as some others suggested. For realism I would play OFP, ArmA or the more linear Red Orchestra. What bothers me with the shooting is that it almost takes a full clip of 30 rounds to kill one enemy using a fair AK. The one handed guns are useless for anything but critters, you need to get very close and put a few rounds in between the eyes for any effect. I would rather use a real life slingshoot or a stick and expect better results than that. Perhaps weapons and ammo will get better later on. The grenades are good and at this point it's my only efficient weapon to down anything quick. The game engine have some major flaws. I experience crashes, even blue screens while playing. Initially I couldn't exit to desktop without a blue screen and system reboot. I removed all sound hardware acceleration, EAX and now it's better but I still have issues with random blue screens crashes in nVidia DLL's. If you want to play this game you better search the community FAQ's on how to minimize crashes and don't forget to quicksave often. The game is mercyless, death or a system crash comes fast. Despite the major flaws I really enjoy S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Expand
  4. SweetKitty
    1
    I really agree with the other low reviews. This game is extremely underdeveloped, and I felt as though I was testing a draft. I happened to only play it for 30 minutes and that truly was enough to rate this game. Overall, it's dull and uninspiring. There is no music in the background, and music, of course, is crucial for any game to be fun (that's just fundamentals people). And one guy plays a guitar around a campfire, which is nothing special. The game is also empty, and I mean quite literally. Most buildings have no details inside; there's just slabs of concrete and some boxies (which really gives a bad image of Chernobyl), and no one has anything interesting to say. Everyone just wants to kill everything else. Gang anarchy! That's new. The character walks like a gangster wobbling side to side, which gets annoying after awhile, not to mention I got a headache a few minutes into the game. There's also very little voice acting and too much text messaging, which is mostly fluff and garbage anyways. I had to force myself to read some of the dialogue once I started playing. By now, there really is no excuse for no voice acting. We're in the 21 first century people (even if there was voice acting, the quality of the text was poor). The story is also very superficial and ambiguous; I really don't get what's going on, which is probably because there is no tuturial whatsoever. I just started walking around, and low and behold, 5 dogs pounced on me out of nowhere., and then flashes of radiation randomly killed me. What? Ummm. . . okay. Perhaps some kind of warning could have been helpful? The inventory management is also very poor and clumsy; I felt moving items was really a chore. But what I truly hated about this game was the simple fact that it's way too serious and there's no humor or wit at all. Fallout 3 feels much the same way with the open world (at least in theory) but at least it has some genuine humor and music along with the bloody shooting and gore. In this game, you just go around shooting things, and you really don't know why; there was nothing that compelled me to move forward. No music, no dialogue, no interesting people or plotline, no detailed environments or buildings. There is nothing intriguing or revealing. You just join some arbitrary gang and start killing other gangs. So what? Doom was great with that kind of senseless violence. (I know some die-hard fans may be unhappy with my review, but this is what I truly felt while playing the game. I'm honest here. I played so many shooters and I really see nothing worthwhile in this one. It's one of the worst ones I've ever played. The only thing that stopped me from giving it a 0 was that it ran smoothly on my computer). Expand

See all 227 User Reviews

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