Chernobylite black stalker full#

This was the route I took to get away from what I like to call a ‘nope zombie’. (This was unfortunate timing, but led to a comical pile of NAR corpses when they each came to investigate the noise – their AI isn’t the most intelligent when it comes to hunting you.) Chernobylite does give you a nice range of options to go over trouble, rather than through it.

Chernobylite black stalker full#

The mysterious black stalker appears and pops two shots into you while you’re stuck in an animation and prompts a string of swearing before you regain control and let off a full AK-47 magazine to delete him. Monsters that can just appear keep you on your toes, scanning around and behind whenever you’re moving indoors. Perambulating zombie-like creatures make you keep careful watch for openings and patches of radiation stop you just giving them a wide berth. In later levels, when you’ve been introduced to strange encounters of the glowing green variety, stealth becomes a little trickier. Add to that the creepy dolls and items that move of their own accord and the tension’s so thick it’s a wonder your character can move. Chernobylite’ s audio does a great job at setting atmosphere in general – tense music picks out spookier locations and a chorus of ‘is something in here with me?’ noises accompany your travels. The yellow arc that expands to show someone’s about to notice you is now paired with an audio cue, making it a little more obvious when you’re about to get in trouble and adding to the atmosphere. I actually think they’ve pulled off the stealth mechanics pretty well, with some of that polish coming out of recent updates. Perhaps I was just so scared of running into anything that I was overcautious, but I often managed to clear all the goodies from a map (back before the numbers were reduced to sensible levels) without running into trouble. That’s the plan, after all – getting involved in a shoot-out with the NAR isn’t a great idea – but it makes for surprisingly quiet runs. You teleport into your mission (via what I like to think of as a radioactive Upside-Down) with all your gear ready to get in and out with the goods. The UI on this screen can still be a bit clunky – navigating through menus via the keyboard is sadly more reliable than using the mouse. They can’t complete story missions for you, after all. Each team member has a percentage chance to complete certain types of mission depending on their strength, so it’s best to send yourself on the missions they’re unlikely to succeed at.

At the slightly more urgent end you get the story missions, which you unlock as you go along. Common missions that reoccur quite often (often enough that I couldn’t tell the difference – a little more variety here would have been welcome) are food, medicine and ammunition drops, but you have a chance to come across other supplies and clues during these missions, which tend to be available for a couple of days. Missions vary daily and provide access to a different range of resources depending on their type. Each day, you get to choose a mission per team member. At least, not until you’d found more clues. The necessity of a heist isn’t immediately obvious at the beginning of the game – you know there will be one, because you have it written on a whiteboard, but it’s not something you would have guessed you needed yet. The base acts as the hub for your investigations, playing host to a set of facts, clues and other lore items you can make use of in your eventual heist. Once you follow the introduction to your base, you fall into Chernobylite’s core gameplay loop: choose a mission go on a mission return to the base build, craft, chat and train. Not only did the new opening present a satisfying introduction to Chernobylite’s background, but also an impressive selection of pipes. This is a welcome change, and it presents an intriguing introduction to the story that will follow. Instead of a video introduction leading straight into the geometric spaces in between realities, Chernobylite now opens with Igor’s journey into the belly of the power plant to unearth the truth about his missing fiancé. The most obvious of these changes is in the game’s opening. It has been… a while since my first foray into the radioactive undergrowth of Cherobylite’s Pripyat, but here we stand again, a month from release, staring with raised eyebrows at a still-growing relative and saying ‘My, haven’t you grown!’.Ĭhernobylite has had quite a few major updates since the demo – so many in recent months, in fact, that I may have had to start new games thrice over in the process of checking them out.