I only recently played this game despite the fact that it came out a couple of years ago and its age didn't really affect my experience at all, so it is still worth while to play now as it was when it first came out. Stalker is a shooter first with RPG elements in that it has an inventory and you do manage your characters stats with what armor and artifacts you equip. It is set in an open world known as the Zone which is the twisted remains of Chenobyl as the title suggests.
So to start the gameplay is very shooter focused, it is the standard shooting set-up in that you can shoot without looking down the sight but if you do you are gonna be more accurate but also more vulnerable. The guns are all very realistic (apart from one that you get late in the game) which adds a sense of reality to the game world and also they all feel how a gun might feel, in that they are not 100% accurate. This is not a result of RPG dice rolls making you artifically miss when you clearly made the shot, it is as a result of when you do look down the sight or crouch the gun doesn't become 100% accurate it will still miss. So this sounds like it might be annoying in a fire fight but it just makes each fight seem like a fight for your life and not once throughout the game did i feel that fighting a standard bandit was easy because if he gets some accurate shots on your head you are gonna go down, fast.
When it comes to the inventory, it isn't really fleashed out to well. There are a fair number of guns and armor pieces that you can equip, but there is always a clear upgrade. There isn't really alot of choice in that one piece of armor is clearly better then another so there isn't any reason to use the older one. The same applies to the guns in that there are 5 main archetypes of guns: Shotguns, Pistols, Rifles, Sniper Rifles and others. Where others are things like grenade lauchers where throughout the game i only ever found one of so it isn't really an archetype of its own. And within these there isn't much of a selection because again the problem that there is a clear upgrade for the one you have will lead to almost everyone using the same guns by the end of the game. Weapons and Armor aren't the only thing you find and pick up, you also collect ammo (of course), artifacts which basically allow you to increase your resistances to fire/electricity/radiation and so on, first aid kits, banadages, vodka, pieces of beasts and much more. So there is a lot to collect, which is nice but also sincerely aggrevating in that they put a weight limit which you reach very quickly. Now you can go over this by a small amount but it causes you be unable to sprint for as long. So this causes you to have to pass up on a lot of stuff and make it very difficult to collect stuff to sell, especially since ammo also has weight which is realistic but annoying as hell.
One thing i do like about the items is that all the weapons and armor have a condition which degrades as you use it. This means that you need to constantly equip new items so that does give you some motive to try out new weapons but usually you can just find a replacement for the weapon you had before.
What is really good about this game is the setting, the whole zone feels very desolate and sparse of life. But it is still full of things to do. The people are appropriatly gruff for the conditions they are living in and although the dialogue is somewhat weak it is still sufficiant to be immersive. The premise for the game is that people have been coming to the zone to scavange and loot the remains of Chernobyl and to mostly find these artifacts to sell on the black market. Amongst these people, factions have sprung up where each are all quite varied. You have your religious fanatics, the military, the scientists and multiple independant military groups. All of these have their own personnal rivals and allies and you can either ally with them or fight them depending on your preferences. But it does seem that you are pushed to join a group known as Duty so from what i saw there wasn't that much choice.
The game handles the story very well, and you always have a clear objective that will lead to furthering the story. But there are also a large amount of side quests that you can do, some of these are pre made, but a cool feature of the game is that from certain people side quests will be continously randomly generated. So if you need to buy more ammo before a big part of the story or you need new ammo you can go and do this to earn some more money and other things as well. There is also a arena which is enjoyable but nothing special.
I didn't play any of the multiplayer so i can't comment on that. But overall the game is fun and the feature set is good, but there are a lot of bugs but also some of the features aren't fully realised which is a shame otherwise this game would be excellent. The game is quite long, sadly it does have a clear ending and you can't go back and do some of the side quests available and continue to enjoy the world, although i am not sure how long that would last. So this game is fun and has a great atmosphere so pick it up on Steam for cheap and just enjoy it but don't expect a Fallout 3 or Oblivion it is just, as i said, Pretty Good.
