This is a new shooter game that features a silent and mysterious protagonist, much like Half-Life’s Gordon Freeman. You play as the Marked One, a heavily armed scavenger suffering from amnesia and stuck inside the exclusion zone surrounding the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, Ukraine. Yes, the same nuclear plant that exploded in 1986 and, in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s fiction, again in 1989, creating a radioactive hotspot brimming with mutants, heavily armed rival factions, and all sorts of weird, paranormal activity. Your task: Figure out who you are and what’s going on at the core of the zone.

At its heart, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a first-person survival game that blends action with role-playing. In this game, you are restricted to a straight path and are taken for a tightly controlled and scripted ride. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s huge environment and open-ended gameplay make it more like a role-playing game, as you can go where you want and do what you want if you’re willing to live with the consequences.

The game’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) is impressive, both in and out of combat. In combat, enemies are cunning when given enough room to move around. Human enemies hunt you intelligently, using cover and the terrain to their advantage.

There are all sorts of human characters in the game, from lone stalkers out on their own to various factions that you can ally with or battle against. Then there are strange animals that inhabit the zone to the more deadly kind of mutated humanoid.

There’s a main story that you can follow through the game but you are free to take on other missions and explore the world on your own. The game feels quite alive too. As you make your way through the different areas you will meet other Stalkers — survivors, travelling around and selling stuff they find in the wilderness — and soldiers along with mutated wildlife.

But here the comparisons stop with Half-Life. You decide whether you want to be on good or bad terms with people or not, but there’s no real development of the character. In the beginning you only have access to low calibre weapons but as you make your way through the game you gain access to more potent equipment and artefacts found in the ruins throughout the zones.

So all said and done you are ready to go and buy S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Don’t worry about the graphics. They are simply mindblowing.

Minimum system requirements: Supported OS: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP (only), Processor: 1 GHz processor, 2 GHz required for video cards without hardware T&L), RAM: 256 MB (512 MB recommended), Video Card:64 MB DirectX 8.1-compliant video card, Sound Card: DirectX 8.1-compliant sound device, DirectX Version: DirectX 8.1, CD-ROM: Any Hard Drive Space:1.4 GB