STALKER – Call of Boredom

Two or three years ago, I was deeply impressed by STALKER: Shadows of Chernobyl. The whole scenery, the shocking moments, the story. I did not touch Clear Sky as many reviews gave the game a very bad rank (crashes, bugs). With Call of Pripyat, I shortly want to say some words to the third part.

We’re Major Degtyarev, investigator of the ukrainian secret service. Five helicopters crashed in the “zone” for no obvious reason. It’s our task to find the reason.

You are deployed close to the Skardowsk, a ship wreck that is now home of Stalkers and bandits. You have 5 points on the map for each helicopter to investigate. I went to all those 5 points and then they wanted me to find a way to Pripyat – I had a look into a walkthrough: WTF?! PRIPYAT IS THE LAST CHAPTER? After three or four hours. Ok, I obviously did something wrong. I started a new game and used this walkthrough to figure out what I was doing wrong.

Call of Pripyat has an open world divided into three maps, the problem or my misunderstanding is the following:

In CoP, side quests are essential for nearly anything, the only realiable source for money, new weapons and armour. In SoC, side quests were rather script-generated stuff following some pattern. That’s why I ignored most of them (only doing 5 or so), trusting in the main quest to be interesting.

the worst way to fight a controller

Another point: there is an open world now, but as it is regularly really empty, you don’t want to spend all the time running around for finding… nothing. Here and there, there’re some mutant dogs and sometimes you’ll discover a secret. But as you need a certain type of scanner for finding artifacts, you normally don’t find them at once. And most of those that you find have such a high contaminating effect that you better sell them. This leads to my reception that most of the – very authentic – places look very interesting at first, but they turn out to be very boring. Which makes you more and more ignoring them. In some cases, you might miss quests that way – but mostly, you don’t.

In SoC, you always felt very threatened, remeber when you enter the Agroprom sewers, the rotating light in the darkness at the beginning, the bandits. Suddenly a bloodsucker or something appearing behind you (the controller). So every time you enter a lab, you do not have a good feeling at all.
In CoP, there were two shocking moments at all, one bloodsucker and one controller appeared somewhere close to the Jupiter complex where I didn’t expect them. Burers, the new type of mutants, will anounce them self by objects flying around long before you actually see them. Their linear strength will even make the fight boring (shooting, cover, shooting, cover, …).

In CoP, you have lots of ammo for the AK-74, a very bright flashlight, a nightvision and only a few internal areas. For the most time you are moving around the swamps shooting dogs.

The arena, stalkers playing guitar around the fire close to abandoned buildings, the brain melter level, the voice at Chernobyl at the very end… highlights of SoC.

Nothing at all here. Some cutscenes of the major telling you what’s going on, meeting Strelok in Pripyat and … credits :O

What did I just miss? Ah, the reason for the crashes: the anomalies move!1!! Ok, some parts such as the tunnel from Jupiter to Pripyat ARE good, or the short lab-map of X8.

zombies - they have bread

Let me summarize: Listen to the main theme of SoC and then compare it to the one of CoP… oh, wait, there is none. Yeah, that’s what can characterize the difference between SoC and CoP.

If you do not buy the game, there’s nothing you might miss. I finished it to not feel having wasted 25h of playing CoP.

By the way: would you eat zombie bread?