Do it both in SoC and CoP (both vanilla, patched), count the times when it kills you due to anomalies in your path or NPCs shooting you up while you're in the open.ĬoP is an *excellent* game, but it's both less atmospheric and easier than SoC.

You can stop to fire at whatever attacks you but you can't actually move off the rail.

You can always do a simple experiment - take a map, plot a straight path avoiding major *known* anomaly clusters and walk this path. Behind the iron curtain it was all much more real and much more prevalent, and SoC capitalizes on it better, because it shows little and lets the imagination run rampant, whereas CoP simply tells you a lot, but doesn't show anything to spark up your imagination. You see, in the west you have tin-foil wearing nutjobs fearing gubmint secret experiments and shit, but barring few exceptions this is just crackpottery. And, unless you're a military operative yourself it's also a place where you get popped if you're caught sneaking in or out, because it kills military too and they can't take out their hate on the Zone itself so they will be happy to pop the reason why they are there in the first place.įinally, maybe it takes a Pole or Ruskie to appreciate it, but while CoP's main plot is generally tying the loose ends left by SoC, SoC does the secret labs part much better. It was never supposed to be a place where you can expect to live long, it was supposed to be a place brave, desperate and plain stupid sneak into to try to make small fortune and GTFO before they die, get irradiated or something fucks them up in ways science has yet to understand.

It's always supposed to be a place that will certainly kill you if you ever get too comfortable with it and that will fuck you up even if you are extra cerful and lucky enough to survive.

It's been that way ever since Strugatsky brothers penned their Roadside Picnic way before Chernobyl disaster even happened. Second, Zone is supposed to be not a place for men. Click to expand.Which begs the question - is your SoC even patched? Because if it is, then there aren't that many mutants and enemies in the game at a time and they are used conservatively.

Stalker shadow of chernobyl ending