#Stalker call of pripyat review ign series#

20 seconds later, when the roar of my drum-fed shotgun has abated and the beast lies dead in the clinical glare of my night-vision, I've collected myself enough to rationalise the fact that it's just a dog.ДЄ mutated, highly aggressive dog with the ability to psychically project a pack of terrifying ghost buddies, yes, but a dog nonetheless. The sudden snarling of a pseudo-dog, barrelling from cover as I sneak across a pitch-black, anomaly-strewn bluff, is a typically pulse-thrashing moment. Even during the lulls in action, which are actually much more common than the desperately-fighting-for-your-life bits, there's always the ragged wind and the caws of the wheeling crows providing a unsettling auditory rug, ready to be whisked from underneath your sense of safety by the slightest hint of a grizzle, groan or gunshot.

It's never silent in the world of STALKER. The snuffling growls which sound like an angry, adenoidal walrus mating at the bottom of a well (another familiar Somerfield experience).

Mostly.ДЄnd that's where something else I don't usually really enjoy comes in: the unremitting terror. Even the most picturesque of sunsets comes tainted with the knowledge that, shiveringly, they mostly come out at night. Before long, murdering a total stranger with a hand grenade seems pragmatic rather than craven.

#Stalker call of pripyat review ign series#

Playing more than an hour or so of any of the games in the series is like spending a month in Somerfield. Crawling through a filthy, mutant-infested basement 20 metres below the surface of an irradiated Ukrainian wasteland, clutching a seen-better-days Kalashnikov while my Geiger counter rattles ominously, I stop to wonder why I actually enjoy STALKER so much.Д«ecause, for one thing, it's hideously bleak.