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There are things in the Zone, things that come out especially at night. This is a game where you do not want to venture out at night. And yet the series manages to pull it off excellently. Few games can give you a fully automatic machine gun, pistol, hundreds of rounds, body armour, and a flashlight and still make you feel like crouching up against a corner and hoping that nothing comes by. games) a thick, dark atmosphere that draws you into it. Ruined buildings, unnatural creatures, a dark and oppressively grey sky, and haunting sounds that echo across the landscape combine to give Call of Pripyat (as with all of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. There is something about the Zone which is alien and foreign, yet oddly familiar. With a mission to investigate the cause of the problems and little else, you're sent into the Zone undercover.
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However, things went wrong, and that's where you, Alexander Degtyarev, come in. With the area now open, the Russian military sent in a number of helicopters, meaning to secure the Zone's core. In the events of the first game, an ambitious stalker looking for his past managed to shut down the Brain Scorcher, a device that would fry the minds of anyone approaching the center of the Zone. With the discovery of these treasures came those who would try to make a profit from them, the stalkers. In addition to deadly radiation and strange events that could kill a man simply because he was in the wrong place, artifacts appeared, valuable things which had a variety of uses and effects such as stitching wounds like magic, purifying radiation, and protecting the user. The game takes place, as always, in the Zone, an alternate-universe version of Chernobyl, where a massive, secondary explosion after the nuclear plant's meltdown introduced a variety of hazards and anomalies to the area. Call of Pripyat, the third in the series, fixes a lot of previous issues in the gameplay, while expanding on what the previous two games in the series offered. Shadow of Chernobyl, released in 2007, was an interesting, albeit somewhat flawed title. But few games have really put all of those elements together in a single package before. Sure, each element of its gameplay has been used in other games before, whether it's the shooter gameplay, the bleak atmosphere, the equipment upgrades, or the free-roaming, mission-based gameplay.
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series has always been something of a unique game.
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