Chernobylite 2021 science fiction video game

Polish science fiction

Chernobylite (2021, Poland)

2021Poland

Categories: alternate realityparanormal eventsalien speciessurvival science fiction2020s sci-fi

There were many "spiritual successors" of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, most of them did not even reach the alpha status, or were just mods of the original games. Chernobylite was advertised as another such project, even though it does not seem to have much to do with the original story. As Igor, a former employee of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, we return to, now 30 years after the disaster, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone looking for our partner, Tatyana. We sneak into the area with the help of two stalkers, trying to find out what happened to Tatyana when she disappeared just before the disaster in 1986.

As we begin our search of the zone, we have very little equipment, only a multipurpose scanner / detector, and we have to gather weapons, ammo, anything that could be useful in our goal - to prepare a second attempt to break into the power plant and search for data about Tatyana. It is a long-term plan, we have to gather the local herbs and mushrooms to cook a medicine, craft equipment out of the bits that we can find around. While the area is more or less empty, we can stumble upon military mercenaries, who try to keep stalkers like us from wandering around the area. Also, there are other surprises that we can find, some of which will be baffling at the beginning, but with the guidance of Tatyana (who shows up in our dreams and imagination) and former military, Olivier, we begin to explore the area and learn its reality.

The project started in an unusual way - the parts of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone were telemetrically scanned in order to recreate them in the game world. While the idea was rather good, the final effect is less than perfect. The locations actually look very good indeed, but there are only few of them and they are quite small. What is more, you cannot travel between them, which makes the game loop a bit awkward.

The atmosphere of walking through empty places aspire to the one you would know from the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, but never really land in the same spot. But the bigger problem is that Chernobylite is a mix of elements that do not really fit together. First of all, you improve your base (like building beds, desks, plants, tools), which is far from the bleak and gloomy world of Shadow of Chernobyl or Call of Pripyat and looks more like a Fallout 4 copycat that is for questionable reason taking place in the Exclusion Zone. The main story and some of the elements are somehow similar to Metro 2033 (f.e. seeing ghosts and flashbacks from your past, some of the creatures), crafting and gathering resources are taken from every single RPG game of recent years, the scanning area and detection warning from every single modern FPS game, setting up your workbenches from Fallout games, etc.

On the surface, Chernobylite is a bit like the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl or Call of Pripyat, but with some of the modern solutions (especially scanning) it is far from the spirit of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games. There is no eerie atmosphere, where you constantly feel in danger (you will get the warning sign when someone is looking at you, so often it is hard to be surprised by the enemies), there is no searching element of the game (since your scanner simply highlights everything that is worth to gather), there is not much FPS elements, there is no atmosphere of mystery, the main storyline is often rather sketchy... Yes, it is set in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, yes, there are ruined buildings around, yes, there are some weird phenomena in the area, yes, there are some bad people around, but all of it seems too calculated, too clean, too "middle of the road" elements for Chernobylite to be treated as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. spiritual successor.

And then there is the game loop - you set up missions for yourself and members of your team, you go into one of 5 or 6 areas, at any moment you return to your base using a magical portal, distribute food and build some equipment before heading to bed and starting the next day. There is no day and night cycle, you can only take missions during the day, you can only travel to a one part of the zone each day (even though they are just meters away from each other, and you have your magical thingy to teleport you). What is more, there are too few areas in the game, and you will be wandering through each of them several times, but for a slightly different reason each time, which makes the game very repetitive.

Overall, there is nothing really wrong with Chernobylite, it is a decent game, but at the same time there is nothing great about it. It just is what it is - a half-baked idea for a game to justify spending a lot of money on telemetric scanning of the zone.

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