After about five hours of gameplay, my thoughts on it.

Graphics

STALKER is very very pretty, there's no denying this. I could also run it at max settings at an acceptable framerate with my rig:

AMD Athlon X2 4200+
eVGA Nvidia GeForce 7800GT
2x1GB Corsair ValueRAM (dual channel)

Nothing overclocked. There are screens online comparing high settings to low settings; both look fantastic. However, the first-person view suffers from traditional FPS view: "hey guys, let's hold the gun right next to our cheek. That's definitely a good idea." Not only is it impractical in real life (not a big deal), but it shows off less of the great gun models (is a big deal). Oh well. Textures and character models are good looking, pretty much what you'd expect of a game like this.

There is one major graphical glitch I've encountered, though. Not sure if it's my rig or what, but when it rains, the rain comes down in sheets. Literally, you see flashes of translucent white stuff instead of needles. It's very distracting and very difficult to see in. Maybe it'll be fixed in the first patch, I don't know.

Sound

Sound is acceptable. The guns don't have "power", unfortunately. For an example of what I consider "power", just fire the shotgun in Doom. That is a powerful gun, and you can feel it when shooting. Pew pew pew does not make for awesome shootouts.

Gameplay

For anybody who's played Half-Life or Counter Strike, combat will seem immediately familiar. There are -huge- firefights, which can involve upwards of 8 people on each side. It's difficult to explain, but I'm sure anybody who's played large amounts of FPSs can understand that the X-Ray engine just "feels" like a Source game.

Traversing the wild is fun. There's an active ecology involving the mutants and other STALKERs, so you might run across a group of bandits fighting off a pack of pseudodogs, or bandits fighting allied STALKERS, or even bandits fighting each other. I was once on the way to kill someone for a mission when that someone decided to try to cross a military-held barricade. I didn't even have to spend a bullet, until the army saw me.

The bad thing about it is the weight limit: 50 kilos. Your normal survival equipment (guns, food, alcohol, energy drinks, bandages, etc) will take anywhere from 30 to 40 kilos, leaving you with 19 (as you can hold up to 59, but at a large penalty to your stamina) to carry loot with. Yeah, a handgun is only .7 kilos and sells for 200 RU, but it's still ridiculously small carry weight.

This brings me to two more things: traders and stamina. There's a trader in the very beginning who gives you your first missions and buys your crap. I have not found another trader like him yet, and I'm two areas away by now (Agropom Research Institute, for those who've played). This has caused me to only loot ammunition and medkits, to save on weight. Kind of a pain. As for stamina, you can run as long as you have it. The more weight you have, the faster it goes down. That's about it; pretty typical of the genre.

Lastly, it's tough. Don't expect to take a squad of soldiers head-on without getting ripped to shreds, unless you're playing on the lowest difficulty. Strategy and planning attacks is a pretty important part of the game. Getting caught in the middle of a firefight is almost certain death; the Zone is very unforgiving.

The last feature of the game is "anomalies", radiation-induced strangeness found in the Zone. They are all dangerous, and they leave behind "artifacts", rocks you can clip onto your belt for a bonus in one area and a demerit in another. For example, adding ambient radiation for increased protection against bullets.

All in all, it's a fluid, stable experience, easy to pick up for anybody who's played an FPS before, and easy to learn for those who haven't.

Atmosphere

The atmosphere in this game is excellent. I love it. It's very Fallout-ish, that of civilization eking out a living in a ruined land, but also not: it's only the Zone that's ruined; the rest of the world is supposedly fine. Consequently, the inhabitants of the Zone are all there by choice, for whatever reason they have. This leads to an awful lot of combat.

Bullets are plentiful, which might seem odd in such an environment until you remember that it's just the Zone. People go in and out of it to trade, military are shipped in regularly, and so on. It's not a Mad Max isolated environment.

I think what I love most about it is the NPCs will lapse into Russian while speaking. Sexy.

STALKER is definitely a winner, and I'm sure after a patch or two it'll fix up any issues I have with it. I look forward to them.

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I agree 100%. STALKER: Shadow' is just completely and utterly awesome.

So far. I'm only about four hours in, compared to your mighty five. Something just might happen within fifty minutes of gameplay that'll make me despise it.

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