This is by far the most infuriating game I have played this year. I cannot remember getting this frequently and this extremely hacked off by a game since I was a stroppy pubescent twat silently howling at the ceiling after being cheated yet again by Mortal Kombat 2 on my shabby old amiga. Quite simply, Stalker is utterly fucking broken.

Reconcile, if you will, these two facts about this ostensibly shooty game:

1) Whatever gun you use, anything other than a perfect headshot is totally useless, as even the most weedy people you fight can absorb dozens of body shots, and will raise the alarm the minute they even imagine you’re attacking them.

2) However carefully you aim, all your guns are ridiculously, hopelessly inaccurate at any distance greater than about four feet.

I’d normally throw a line like that in as comic hyperbole, but here it is the literal truth. I’ve just now been playing the same little area for an hour. Broadly speaking, you could choose to directly assault, or use a stealthy approach. Let’s explore these options.

Combat: You see a guard. You get into cover maybe 20 feet away. You take careful aim and fire a single shot at his head. It misses completely. You take another shot. It misses completely. You take 47 more single shots, with him chipping away at your health all the while and someone probably flanking you, and finally, he goes down. You start on the next enemy, and realise you’re going to run out of ammunition and probably medkits long before you’ve dealt with half your opponents. You start again.

This time, you get closer. It makes no difference. You start again.

This time, you get closer, and instead of going for head shots, you go for short bursts at the body. It takes a clip and a half, and he still only goes down when the spray of the weapon hits his head anyway. You’re in a marginally better position, but still pretty screwed. You start again.

You open with a grenade. It takes so long to explode that your enemies have ample time to simply walk away, and perhaps write a short letter to their MP, before it goes off. You start again.

You open with a grenade, thinking that flushing them out rather than killing them will at least help. You neglected to consider that your piss-weak, utterly inaccurate guns are now trying to take down a moving target. You start again.

You charge blindly at the nearest opponent, unloading the entire clip at point blank range into his torso. He <i>might</i> go down if fewer than a third of the bullets veer wildly off course, or the recoil happens to catch his head. You start again.

You swear a blood oath to kill that bloke on the stairs, at least, so run at him with a knife, hammering the ‘use medkit’ button as bullets hit you from every angle. He goes down, so you run at his mate. He too goes down, and you try for a third, run out of medkits, and die. You still are not having any fun.

Screw this, right? Clearly, stealth is the key. Aha. Ahaha.

Stealth:

If you miss a single shot, ever, your enemies will be alerted and render stealth moot. Your stealthy guns are even more inaccurate and even less powerful than your assault weapons. However slowly and quietly yo move, however much you avoid line of sight and stick to the darkness, some distant guard will somehow spot you long before you reach stabbing range, or your target will simply whirl around, presumably guided by your revolting stench or something.

Or, in the tiny minority of times you get close enough to stab someone, you will aim squarely at the back of their chest, or their neck, or anywhere really, and slash or stab them. And absolutely nothing will happen.

So you’ll try again, moving as close as physically possible, and nothing will continue to happen. Now you’ll either find that the guard shouts and turns round and you’re back to square one with the assault rifle, or you’ll get incredibly lucky and he’ll die. If he dies, there’s a fair chance he’ll shout and his gun will go off, and you’re back to square one again. If you’re extraordinarily lucky, he’ll go down quietly, and you’ll get to start the whole process again, hoping that you can repeat your improbable success for every enemy on the map.

I could go on to criticise the looping dialogue; the annoying controls (want the low crouch button bound to a single key? Tough. It’s two keys by default, so it must always be two keys), the hamfisted sub-quests with their worthless rewards; the confusing and misleading ‘pda’ map/diary/statistics screen; the fact that the same gangs of enemies will respawn every time you enter an area until the bodies are literally piled up around campfires, leading to tediously repeating the same battles dozens of times.

Or I could go on to say how much potential the game has with its novel setting, sometimes challenging AI, atmospheric sound and neat lighting effects. But there really is absolutely no point at all, is there? It’s a largely combat-based game where all your weapons are all but useless, and only cheap AI exploits and blind unfavouring chance will even get you through the first mission. I would lavish praise upon it and hail it as a welcome challenge, but for something to be a challenge, you must actually stand a fair chance. Even Far Cry 2’s weapons were at least effective when they weren’t exploding in your hands. Stalker doesn’t even bother with that much. It is quite simply fundamentally flawed, as should have been immediately obvious to every playtester. It’s difficult to stress quite how absurdly, frustratingly broken it is as a result.

If you want a good idea of what playing Stalker is like, picture a racing game where however skilfully you steer, your car arbitrarily spins out and crashes 70% of the time, or a fighter where your character decides to kick in the wrong direction when he feels like it, which is every other second. Or an RTS where your turrets shoot aimlessly into the air whenever your enemies attack. Or a chef who plonks a raw chicken on your plate and looks at you expectantly, perhaps rubbing his fingers together in the manner of an uncouth porter. Or a prostitute who (That’s quite enough of that, sonny - Ed)