When I first heard about S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl I hadn't even begun working. I was still living back in Edinburgh in my parents' house, fresh out of uni and lazing in my bed, enjoying the football World Cup in Japan and South Korea. Early news of the game sounded really promising; the setting of a dark horror FPS in the ravaged lands of Chernobyl sounded truly exceptional and the general consensus was that as soon as the game came out it'd be a huge hit. But that was just the problem - it never came out. Issue after issue of PC magazines came out with new titbits on the game here and there but then months and months, and eventually years and years passed. The phenomenal graphics we'd initially seen began to lose their groundbreaking impact as all the new games started to catch up. S.T.A.L.K.E.R., it seemed, had taken so long to come out that its star had maybe burnt out too soon. Finally, no less than five years after seeing the first screenshots, I had a copy of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. to try out for myself and I was mightily excited, despite the wait.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. takes place in Chernobyl, the scene of the awful real-world events of 1986 when an explosion at a nuclear power station rendered the area uninhabitable. In the game this area is habitable and it's where gangs of mercenaries called S.T.A.L.K.E.R.s ply their trade. In the game world, named The Zone, you take the role of a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. out to make your way in the harsh terrain of Chernobyl, slowly working your way up the ranks among the others. You begin the game as a mere grunt, with no military experience, very little equipment and complete ignorance of your surroundings. As you take your first steps outside under the dark radioactive sky, with wild dogs yowling ominously nearby and masked gunmen staring wistfully into the distance, the atmosphere really is very striking.

Your first point of contact is a swarthy, sarcastic Russian who runs a small encampment where you begin the game. He sends you out on your first mission, a rescue at a nearby farm. He implores you to accept some assistance, as some bandits have kidnapped his contact and they're likely to put up some serious opposition. So you head into the village and find some battle-worn men crowded around a campfire, weapons at the ready, listening to one of their fold strumming listlessly on an acoustic guitar, a simpering, lonely melody accompanying the endless rustle of leaves blowing in the wind all around you. You ask them for help and they leap to their feet and lead you out into The Zone. They tell you to stay close, as there're evil beasts afoot tonight. You hear the beasts roar and scream, spotting huge, muscle-bound shapes dashing through the undergrowth on either side of the dusty road as you run along, trying to keep pace with your fellow S.T.A.L.K.E.R.s.

The farmhouse buildings loom into view, hulking and malevolent, as your Geiger counter starts to crackle, the unwelcome sound of nearby radiation. As you close in on the nearest building, a figure clad entirely in black bursts from a doorway and his pistol cracks off into the night. You dive for cover behind a nearby tree, loading your revolver and peer around the corner to fire back. Meanwhile your companions bound ahead, firing their machine guns at everything in sight. My God! There are literally tons of them, bandits appearing like ants from everywhere, taking pot-shots from their hiding places. You pluck up the courage and join your friends, firing blankly into darkened doorways, your pulse racing. Will you make it through this one? You just don't know…. but my oh my, are you having fun or what?!

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. begins at a cracking pace, as I'm sure you can tell by now. You're literally propelled into a living, breathing world where you're constantly under the threat of armed mercenaries, hideous mutated beasts and having your brain fried by radiation. To progress through the game you pick up missions from contacts throughout the game world of The Zone. It's much like Oblivion in that the more people you meet, the more missions you find yourself about to partake in. The missions also take various different forms; my aforementioned rescue mission is just one of many. You may be asked to recover an artefact from a bandit stronghold, explore a strange radioactive anomaly in a darkened forest, escort an important military dignitary across a barren zombie-infested wasteland, hunt down a rival S.T.A.L.K.E.R., spy on a rival gang, defend a village from an onslaught of mutated monsters and many, many more. The gameplay takes the form of a non-linear story, so you can pick and choose how you would like to progress. Plus there are no less than eight different endings to the game, so there's a lot of replay value.

To host so much gameplay you need to have a massive map, which is what S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has in shedloads. The sheer size of The Zone in this game is quite something - perhaps not quite as big as Oblivion but not too far off. Some missions require you to traverse several different regions of the map, so you will find yourself exploring pretty much everywhere as you progress. The way that you navigate around between missions is via a PDA that lists all of the missions you're currently engaged in and the relevant locations you need to visit to complete them. Unfortunately this map is actually very unwieldy and often won't show you where you need to go, despite clicking numerous times on a mission objective, so you may need to be willing to forego the occasional mission simply because the map can't show you where you should be going. This is a real shame, as the missions in this game are so much fun that it's a real sod to have to neglect even one of them. Similarly, just entering an area sometimes triggers a mission related to that zone in the game but you're not told that a new mission has become available. This makes it very easy to miss out on missions unless you're checking your PDA every time you go somewhere, to see that nothing new has sprung into your lap.

As you move through the game you gradually start to pick up more and more impressive kit. You begin with a mere pistol but within a few hours of gameplay you're armed to the teeth with machine guns and later you can pick off your enemies from afar with a sniper rifle. You can only hold so much kit, but Stash points are cleverly placed around the map, where you can store all your excess kit. Because there are so many Stash points and you don't always visit the same places that often it does become hard to remember what you placed where and whether it's worth going out of your way to check. The developers have missed a real trick here, as if they had joined all of the Stash points together so you could have a complete pool of everything you'd hidden across the entire game world, it would've made things a helluva lot easier. The more you play S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the more you find small things like this that whilst they don't ruin the gameplay, would've added the polish needed to make this game a true classic.

Everything you collect can be sold to various vendors across the entire of The Zone and there's so much more than simply weapons to find; food, energy drinks, health packs, ancient artefacts, body armour, chemical protection suits, and you can also search everyone you kill. Even better than that, there are lots of bodies littered around The Zone from previous firefights that you may not have been involved in. Similarly, when you kill someone, their body stays where it fell indefinitely, which I absolutely love; you always want to come back and admire your handiwork when you've mauled a whole bunch of people and so few games let you do this. I salute you S.T.A.L.K.E.R, this is a phenomenally satisfying addition indeed.

The combat is also fantastic, although by no means groundbreaking. It plays very similarly to Half-Life 2, which is no bad thing as I'm sure you'd all agree. You can either fire from the shoulder in the traditional FPS view or if you think you're that good you can also zoom into the Call of Duty style mode where you stare down the barrel of your gun. Tearing down your opponents, watching them crumple realistically to your gunfire is extremely gratifying. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. also features a brilliant AI system - enemies actually work together to take you down. At one point I was in a warehouse under suppressing fire from a bunch of bandits; by a mere stroke of luck I looked to my right and saw two bandits taking advantage of my passive predicament by sneaking down the side of the building to put an inordinate amount of lead in my back. The AI also changes in an almost organic fashion; I had to replay several sections as I can often be a bit crap, as we all can, and I'd pass by a group of bandits who at one time would offer me a mission and the next would gun me down as soon as look at me. The game has been designed so that you feel like you're playing in a world that exists regardless of your endeavours to forge through the story - and it really does feel like that.

Graphically, despite having been in development for so long, this game really does excel in every department. The lighting effects are exceptional and the environment is truly a haunting and fascinating experience. The development team actually modelled much of the terrain on the actual Chernobyl, which makes its visual style even more compelling. Expect to see lots of abandoned, dilapidated buildings, their paintwork peeling away and floorboards buckled with age, vast open fields under a black and tumultuous sky, shadowy forests with leaves billowing up into your eyes in the wind. It really has to be seen to be believed and it plays in a totally unique and wholly immersing way. The sound is also of the highest calibre, with pitch perfect weapon effects and some great but hugely cheesy English with thick Russian accent voice acting. Lots of attention to detail has been given here, all to freak you out, from the spine-chilling scream of a rabid wolf in the dark to the chilling whistle of the wind through the trees. This game will scare the pants off you, mark my words. It also features deathmatch multiplayer for up to eight players online, but this pales in comparison to the single player experience and I wouldn't necessarily recommend it; there are too many greater multiplayer experiences out there.

I loved every single challenging, compelling, atmosphere-laden moment of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. It's just so different from everything else that's out there. It may be flawed in little ways and lacking in the gloss you'd expect from the likes of Doom 3 or Call of Duty but that's just part of its beauty; it's an unwieldy game at times but it's so brave in that it tries to rethink the FPS genre by blending the lightning quick gameplay of Half-Life 2 with the RPG elements of a game like Oblivion, while the Chernobyl setting is also an absolute masterstroke, providing an utterly compelling setting for a truly brilliant game.

Reviewed by Ross Alexander for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).