CALL OF CHERNOBYL
CreateyourownstoriesinthisSTALKERmod.ByAndyKelly
The city of Pripyat
is a haunting place.
EXTRA LIFE
NOW PLAYING I MOD SPOTLIGHT (^) I HOW TO I DIARY I REINSTALL I WHY I LOVE I M U S T P L A Y
your fancy. But there’s a structure, a
purpose, and clear goals to strive for.
You’re playing as a defined character
and there are missions to complete,
ultimately leading to an ending.
WORLD TOUR
What makes Call of Chernobyl, a mod
for Call of Pripyat created by
TeamEPIC, so compelling is that it
removes this structure completely
and gives you the freedom to create
your own stories in the Zone. Here
the wasteland is an open-ended
sandbox comprised of locations from
all three STALKER games, as well as
locations that were cut from the
games and a brand new area created
just for the mod.
You can travel freely between
environments from Shadow of
Chernobyl, Clear Sky, and Call of
Pripyat – including, yes, the
Chernobyl power plant and the
abandoned city of Pripyat – turning
thesefragmentedchunksoftheZone
into one magnificent whole.
Transitions between different parts of
the world can be quite clumsy and
abrupt, because these maps were
never designed to slot neatly together,
but suspend your disbelief and it
won’t bother you too much.
You have no set role in Call of
Chernobyl: you choose your character,
their appearance, their name, and
their faction. The faction you choose
dictates which starting locations you
can pick from, as well as what gear
you start out with. You can play as a
standard stalker, the loner class, and
you’ll begin your adventure with an
assault rifle, binoculars, rations, a
bottle of vodka, and a few rubles. But
if you start as a member of the
government-funded Ecologists you’ll
I
t’s been ten years
since the last
STALKER game –
2009’s Call of Pripyat
- yet the Zone
remains one of the most evocative,
mysterious, and fascinating settings
on PC. This expanse of radioactive
wasteland, located between the
borders of Ukraine and Belarus,
was devastated by the Chernobyl
nuclear power plant explosion in
1986 – and, according to the game’s
fiction, another incident in 2006.
It’s a bleak, nightmarish, but
strangely beautiful landscape,
teeming with mutants, weird
anomalies, freak storms, radiation,
and warring factions. The ruined
cities, swamps, tunnels, bunkers –
and the Chernobyl plant itself – have
become home to stalkers, the
Ukrainian government’s name for
anyone trespassing in the Zone
illegally. Some stalkers are there
purely for the adventure, but others
are there to profit from finding,
smuggling, and selling the many
strange radioactive objects that can
be found littering the wasteland.
The STALKER games are best
described as semi-open world, giving
you a series of large, interconnected
spaces to explore. You’re free to play
at your own pace, scavenging, trading,
fighting, and doing whatever takesDANGER ZONE Places to visit in the wasteland
DEAD CITY
This small, dreary town
was abandoned in the wake
of the Chernobyl disaster,
and has been stripped of
anything of value.
Somehow, a statue of
Lenin is still standing.CHERNOBYL NPP
The nuclear power plant is
perhaps the most
important location in
STALKER lore. For some it’s
a place of worship; for
others, somewhere to be
avoided at all costs.SKADOVSK
A transport ship whose
seafaring days are long
over. But rather than leave
it to rot, the local stalkers
have turned the wreck into
a base and a place to trade
and socialise.BRAIN SCORCHER
This abandoned military
installation was actually an
illegal, top secret
government project
designed to alter people’s
minds and suppress their
aggression.AN OPEN-ENDED
SANDBOX
COMPRISED OF
LOCATIONS FROM ALL
THREE STALKER GAMES