S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
Playtime: 23.6 Hours
Finished 06 April 2025.Played through Shadow of Chernobyl with Autumn Aurora 2.1 and no other significant mods. I played on Master difficulty, which was actually amplified much further this time around because AA2.1 actually boosts enemy capabilities & combat lethality very significantly. It also adds in a number of features from the later games to remove a lot of the jank of vanilla SoC (ex. can't repair gear, artifacts just lying on the ground) to make the feel of the games much more consistent throughout.
As far as my playthrough goes, I think I did most of the significant sidequests (ex. Cordon military camp infiltration, Mercenary defense, Bloodsucker village, etc.). I sided with Duty in the main faction war, as access to the Bar is very useful and their gear is better, and got the True ending. This involves grabbing the "hidden" Decoder in the Pripyat hotel stash room, finding and entering the secret lab in the Sarcophagus instead of heading to the Wish Granter, and rejecting the C-Consciousness's offer to join them.
One final note: The voice acting throughout the entire game was only in Russian, seemingly enforced by the AA2.1 mod. I tried taking out the relevant files but that just resulted in constant game crashes (maybe I could've started a new game?), so I just kept them like that for the entire game. The problem is that some NPCs, especially the C-Consciousness at the end of the game, speak with no subtitles or dialogue box so I literally can't understand what they're saying. I've thankfully seen playthroughs of this game before so I wasn't too lost in the dark, but it would have been a bummer if I played this blind.
The background is the exterior of the CNPP by the way - Autumn Aurora completely breaks the map somehow LMAO. Had to delete the modded level assets to get it to look normal; a couple of the screenshots might look slightly lower-quality because of it.
My opinion of this game largely reflects my opinion of Clear Sky, its prequel. Most of the maps are very similar, and though the storyline has its differences, the overall path that Strelok and Scar take throughout their respective journies through the Zone aren't too far off from one another. While Clear Sky adds the Swamp as an additional starter area, the Cordon and Garbage are basically the same. The good ol' Eurojank feeling is alive and well in this game - even moreso than in CS, actually, when considering that my experience with this game is with some extensively-modded gameplay from Autumn Aurora. I have seen what the vanilla game was like so I'm not completely unfamiliar with it, but my actual firsthand experience with this game was only with this modded playthrough, so my comments mostly reflect that.
The majority of the game taking place in the semi-open world is fantastic. Even moreso than CS, this game is extremely atmospheric, a bit haunting, with danger lurking around every corner yet rarely overwhelming. AA2.1 turns off the NPC counter and enemy location markers on the minimap so you actually have to pay attention to what's going on in front of you, and the lack of faction & squad markers (unlike CS) makes you completely blind to enemy troop movements. I remember it being super easy to avoid or initiate contact with enemy and friendly contacts in CS, so this was a very appreciated difference - I was caught by surprise more than once in this game. Enemy squads still spawn on occasion, but as the faction war operates on a very small scale in this game (almost exclusively between Freedom/Duty), you don't have annoying PDA messages about conquests/defeats every 5 minutes. I still think it's stupid how you can clear the Bandits out of the Garbage in CS, only for them to regain their original positions after just another half hour - in this game, the Loners actually take over the train station for good.
Shadow of Chernobyl also leans very heavily into a creepier atmosphere - I feel like almost half of the main storyline requires trips to underground locations: Agroprom, Lab X-18, Lab X-16, Lab X-19. This is where the paranormal enemies - Burers, Bloodsuckers, Poltergeists, Controllers, Pseudogiants - come into play. I believe AA2.1 increased their numbers, but even in vanilla the creepy noises and enemy encounters are super memorable, moreso than whatever I can remember from Clear Sky. Artifacts and anomalies are also a very fun and rewarding diversion in SoC as well (particularly with the AA2.1 detectors). I'd actually say they're probably a little too rewarding - not only do you have something like 15 or 18 artifact slots (regardless of armor type), their effects are boosted to absolutely ridiculous levels in this game. Massive radiation drain, endurance boosting, self-regeneration, etc. are all basically free to dump on your armor since the game pretty much gives them out like candy. I remember an area where I found probably 10-20 Teardrop artifacts just lying on the ground, something that would be unheard of in CS or CoP. The one thing I never did find, though, was the Carry Weight boost artifacts that were so common and useful in CS.
To talk a bit more about the general state of equipment and items in this game, a lot of it (especially armors) felt somewhat pointless to consistently upgrade, as the artifacts provide more valuable boosts in many cases. Weapons-wise the situation is very similar to Clear Sky overall, but I think weapon usage was skewed a bit too heavily towards the Soviet cartridges; NATO weapons are of course available, but given that every encounter with the military or Monolith involves a clown car of enemies, it's inevitable that you'll always run out of NATO cartridges and end up with a surplus of AK rounds, which I found a bit disappointing. Thankfully, AA2.1 adds repair kits and vendors back into the game, so degraded NATO weapons aren't just lost forever anymore. There aren't any upgrades (in the vein of CS or CoP), but there are a small variety of attachments you can add to weapons. I'm not kidding about the clown car analogy earlier BTW, I think on multiple occasions I probably killed 50+ enemies just trying to get through an area. It's a good thing grenades are absurdly overpowered in this game (especially on AA2.1 Master mode), they seem to almost OHKO everything in their massive splash radius.
My problem with the game is primarily with the late game and ending sequences, specifically from the start of the Pripyat mission. From this point onwards, the game becomes far more linear and scripted with few meaningful objectives or things to explore, and the extensive foliage and urban architecture of Pripyat made it almost impossible to find enemy targets before they find you. Getting shot constantly through bushes and trees isn't a very fun experience. This only gets worse when reaching the exterior of the CNPP when fighting military choppers with instakill hitscan machine guns and rocket salvos caring more about a random Stalker than the hundreds of Monolith troops 50 meters down the road. And after an extensive interior segment, triggering the path to the true ending requires trudging a portal maze that is far longer than it needed to be - probably 20+ portals taking over an hour of grueling and repetitive Monolith squads. At least it finally gave you a chance to properly use the Exoskeleton, Tunder, and Gauss rifle which were rarely found before, but the ending seriously burned me out and I barely cared about the actual ending once I reached it. The concept of the C-Consciousness and all the happenings of the Stalker series is pretty cool BTW, and this game's story is ultimately the most interesting of the trilogy as it leans into the actual nature of the Zone more than the others.
Beyond the main storyline, the faction war in this game exists but isn't super fleshed out, probably about on par or maybe even less than in CS. There are small sidequest chains for each, but they only contain a smattering of real sidequests among a majority of killtenrats quests, the types of which you can grab at pretty much any other quest vendor. I feel like Duty's position right next to the Bar makes them by far the more attractive choice, as they hold what is basically the center of SoC's map, while Freedom only holds a corner of the Warehouses and the Boundary with the Red Forest which you don't reach until endgame. It doesn't help that Duty's gear is on par, or even better than Freedom's gear - they give you an armored SEVA suit as a reward for some early quests. Regarding other sidequests, Sidorovich and the Bar patrons have only a few significant ones, but the majority of them are just repeated quests for clearing out mutants and bandits, or for finding items and artifacts. Nothing special.
Overall, it's very easy to see the rough edges, jank, and incomplete ideas that are ubiquitous throughout this game; I'd say it's actually much harder to avoid the signs than it is to see them all over the place. It's really ambitious in the scale it wanted to present, and while it managed to nail a certain atmosphere that no other game (not even Metro) has ever truly replicated, it still feels somewhat like a missed opportunity in some ways. I'm very happy to have finally experienced this for myself in its entirety but I'm not sure if I'd be interested in playing it again (especially with the grueling ending segment). I hear that CoP is by far the most polished and open-ended game of the trilogy, even if the main storyline is very limited in scope - so I'm hoping the series ends with a strong final entry!
