April Assassination #3 (SG Win / PoP Pick)

Please consider liking my review on Steam - it means a lot to me!

Chernobylite is a hesitant thumbs up for me. TL;DR it is a game with great production values, a solid plot (hard to follow at times and with a poor twist at the end), and a really well-developed universe to explore and live in, but that is marred by poor pacing and repetitive gameplay. At 30 bucks, if will be worth if you buy it, but you'll have to endure some repetitive stuff to see the credits roll. Buyer beware.

Now, let's dive a bit deeper. The absolute highlight of this game is the universe you'll be playing in. Combine real-world locations that were scanned for the game with great visual effects and texture work, and you will feel like you're in Chornobyl, period. The soundtrack, the fog, the rain, everything contributes to that aura and atmosphere so thick you can cut with a knife. The first time you enter each map is particularly exhilarating, as you never know what to expect, or where. Each area has a ton of landmarks that allow you to navigate effectively without the map, and I had a lot of fun just being in that world. At least at first. Some of the earlier cracks I noticed in the game was the fact that every character (NPC or enemy) in the game wears a mask, clearly done to avoid animating faces, and the poor optimization (I had to tune every setting to the minimum and still could barely crack 30 FPS, whereas I played Elden Ring and RDR2 in higher settings with better performance).

So graphics and music/sound effects are good, but what about gameplay? Here things start to get iffy. Chernobylite alternates between a stealth game and an action shooter, with emphasis on stealth particularly early on, before you have enough resources to spend them on full-on combat encounters. As a stealth game, it works but it's not great - enemies are kind of stupid, they see you but then you hide behind a small bush and they pretend you were gone and never there. You can bait enemies by staying long enough in their vision cone that they decide to investigate, which allows for easy pickings. I used a crossbow early in my game, which is supposed to be a silent weapon, and half the times it would be silent, the other half it would alert the whole camp of my presence immediately, and it was never clear when or where that would happen. If you can tolerate the slow patrol cycles of your enemies, you can usually clear enemy camps without being noticed, at least early in the game before your enemies start wearing body armor and helmets. And this is an efficient way of saving resources, but very boring, repetitive, and unengaging gameplay loop, which is a terrible combination. Stealth is also problematic in an open-world game like this one (each map is a small open-world, with you having a lot of freedom on how to move around) since it's easy to just avoid combat and go somewhere else if you want, as the game area is usually mostly open fields. This is great if you want to evade patrols, but terrible if they spot you since being detected means 4-5 enemies immediately converging to your position, with little defensive cover, and them having perfect accuracy. Remember the small bush that made you invisible before? Now you're exposed butt-naked even behind it.

Well, eventually you'll have to forfeit stealth and go into combat mode. Before you get a fully upgraded weapon of choice (I alternated between a rifle and the railgun), you'll be handicapped. Weapons can only be shot when aiming down sights (shooting without ADS executes a melee attack), and the shooting is tactical in the sense there's a lot of sway and recoil. In places with cover, tactical shooting is incredible, but in an open field with enemies flanking you from all sides, arcade shooting would have been more appropriate. At some point you'll be forced into combat because enemies start getting helmets, which prevents you from one-shotting them with a silent weapon such as a crossbow, and body armor which prevents you from stealth melee-killing them. Once I had my fully upgraded rifle, those combat encounters became laughable because you can choose to initiate most encounters, and since it's more tactical than arcade-y, having better ground will usually leave you on the upper hand. With a fully upgraded rifle, for instance, it's not hard to clear a full encampment with 5-6 heavily armored dudes without taking a hit, simply choosing where to initiate combat from and letting them charge into you.

Which is to say that the enemy encounters go from dull and boring (early game) to easy and unengaging once you have your arsenal upgraded. It's a weird progression and while it's satisfying to clear a level killing everyone without taking a hit, it makes me confused if this is a stealth or tactical combat game.

Early on you'll rely a lot on exploration and resource-gathering, and this is a very fun part of the game. You have to craft structures at your base to improve life for your allies, and also craft consumables to use in missions, including ammo. Early on everything is hard to come by and you'll be scrapping to craft anything. By the halfway mark, I had all structures built, all weapons fully upgraded, and a lot of field structures in place to use throughout missions, so the survival pressure was entirely off. At that point, I started rushing through the maps, since I didn't need resources anymore and I had seen everything on each map, even though the game still forced me to re-visit them frequently for the story missions.

And here's the game biggest flaw - the pacing. Structurally, you have 25-30 story missions, taking place on a selection of 6-7 maps. Meaning you'll be revisiting each map 5-6 times at least. It might not sound bad, but the third time you go into a map, you know it already. You probably already cleared each corner, and there's very little surprise. Still, you're forced to trek 5-10 minutes from one end to the other of this mostly empty map with a lot of resources you don't need and enemies you can either completely overpower or ignore. And this is when I really thought about abandoning the game - I was already 15 hours in and felt I had seen and done everything I wanted, and yet, had barely touched half the story missions. The story itself is interesting (even thou the final twist is crap) and has some good choices to be made throughout (which also are mostly irrelevant since they can be changed at any time, they clearly signal to you if they were good or bad the moment you make them, and they don't truly affect the ending), so it feels like they stuck a half-finished choices made onto a good story, added some padding and hoped you would continue playing long after the game stopped being fun.

All in all, it's not a bad game. But I think it would be such a superior game if it was half as long, and made you only visit each map once or twice. As I said in the beginning -- not a bad game, but buyer beware.