S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

One of the greatest games of all time, bar none. HOWEVER you should buy it NOW, even though S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is less than a week away (for real this time!) because xrMPE just made finished their CO-OP mod!!! You can play the whole campaign co-op with up to four players. And if you already own the game, go get it now! The mod is FREE!!

Listen here, rookie. I’ve got 1,000 hours in Call of Pripyat. My soul is more irradiated than a glowing artifact, and my blood type is now officially “vodka.” The Zone isn’t just a place; it’s a lifestyle. Buckle up because I’m about to share wisdom forged in the fires of blowouts and snork ambushes.
Step One: You Are But a Babushka in the Zone
First things first, toss out any notions of “winning.” The Zone doesn’t care about you. Your starter pistol? A joke. Your first mission? A death sentence. Think you’re hot stuff with your shiny new anomaly detector? Joke’s on you—it’s leading you into a gravity well. But don’t worry, Beard’s got your back with an offer to trade your left kidney for some expired bread and a bandage.
Spreadsheets are Sexy
Real stalkers live in Excel. You think you’re playing a game, but no—you’re curating a personal database of artifact spawn points, NPC schedules, and anomaly patterns. My desktop is 70% Zone spreadsheets, 20% anomaly maps, and 10% memes about “Cheeki Breeki.” I have macros for calculating artifact profitability, and I consider this fun. Are you even in the Zone if you’re not alt-tabbing between Jupiter factory blueprints and artifact auction price trends?
The Three Rules of Zone Combat
Always Save: Quick-save before every encounter, every conversation, every sneeze. You WILL accidentally step on a landmine or aggro an entire bandit camp because you sneezed too loud IRL.
Never Waste Ammo: Your bullets are worth more than your life. If you’re out of AP rounds, congrats—you’re now a pacifist in a zone full of mutants.
Aim for the Knees: Forget headshots. Mutants don’t care about headshots. Knees? Knees make snorks crumble like Zone breadsticks.
Artifacts: The Zone’s Lootbox System
Artifacts are the Zone’s love language. You’ll sprint into a death anomaly for one, lose half your health, and chug vodka like a champ to recover. But when you sell it to Owl for enough rubles to buy a rusty AK, it feels worth it. My artifact loadout is optimized to turn me into a tank with negative 10 stamina. Who needs to run when you can tank a bloodsucker head-on?
Guru Level: Zone Whisperer
After 1,000 hours, I don’t just survive the Zone; I AM the Zone. I can predict blowouts based on the way the clouds shift. I know NPCs by their walk cycles and can recite every Cheeki Breeki bandit taunt. Once, I cleared out a Monolith base with a knife and a dream because I forgot to buy ammo, and honestly? It was exhilarating.
Community Memes to Embrace
“Get out of here, Stalker!” is a lifestyle, not a phrase.
Every anomaly is a friend you haven’t been exploded by yet.
Bloodsuckers? Just vodka enthusiasts looking for a cuddle.
The Zone’s economy is a pyramid scheme, and you’re always on the bottom.
The Final Guru Tip
You don’t play Call of Pripyat. The game plays you. It breaks you down until you become a mutated spreadsheet goblin who eats radiation for breakfast and prays to the RNG gods for a Bear detector. But when you finally step out of the Zone and hear a real-life bird chirping, you’ll miss it. You’ll miss the constant danger, the thrill of hunting artifacts, and the sheer, unrelenting chaos.
And then you’ll go back in for just one more round. After all, rookie, the Zone never truly lets you leave.
TL;DR: 1,000 hours in Call of Pripyat turned me into a vodka-drinking, spreadsheet-making anomaly whisperer, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

This game still holds up today 2024 even without mods. Playing this cause the excitement that Stalker 2 is finally going to be released is too much.
The atmosphere of this game is amazing for a game that came out in 2010! The game systems and player choice is amazing! You are literally just dropped in to the zone and it up to you on how and when you complete your objectives. There is very little if any hand holding. There is no yellow paint on how to do anomalies you have to figure it out.

This game is amazing, but there's already a thousand reviews telling you that, so I want to quickly talk about the massive modding scene this game, specifically, has.
If you go to google and search for "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly", you will find a link to a moddb page that has a FREE download for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly mod, which is a mod for this game. Basically, it is a fanmade engine update for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. that was much needed. It also adds a lot of new things and has a far larger map than any of the official S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, as it's pretty much all of the maps from the 3 games merged into one, and it works amazingly. It also features a main story that is 3 (+1 bonus) chapters long, and while these questlines won't be winning any awards, they definitely kept me sufficiently interested to keep exploring the zone, and also provide some answers to some questions the original trilogy left, though they're obviously fanmade theories and not actually canon.
I will say though, play the original trilogy first, if only to support the devs. A 4th game should also be releasing later this year, so now is the perfect time to get stuck in.
Now things get interesting, mods on mods on mods.
On ModDB there are a ton of mods that you can install ontop of stalker anomaly, which add new animations, areas, weapons, questlines, etc. Though if manually modding games isn't your thing, there are also lots of modpacks that completely overhaul the game in various ways. The main one I want to gush about for a moment is S.T.A.L.K.E.R. G.A.M.M.A.. This FREE modpack has given me the most entertainment I've had while playing any video game for years. Seriously. No games core gameplay loop has gripped me by the balls like G.A.M.M.A. has. It is, for me, the perfect single player FPS experience, and it is entirely free, though it is like 200gb to install (100gb after installation).
One downside with G.A.M.M.A. however, is that it does not like to run well sometimes, as it is a collection of hundreds of mods. I have an RTX 3060, Ryzen 5 3600 +32gb of RAM, which is by no means any sort of super computer but seems like it should be sufficient, however it will still have times where it struggles running G.A.M.M.A., though these are only ever dips down to 40-50fps for about a minute max, then it usually smoothens out again. A YouTuber named "Cheeki Breeki" has a great video detailing how to squeeze the most fps out of G.A.M.M.A. that you should check out if you're interested in playing the game.
There are also other modpacks available for download, some better than others, but after playing a good chunk of them, I can say that, at least for me, G.A.M.M.A. is the best I've played, though the rest are absolutely still worth a go. G.A.M.M.A. is also massively customisable, with a ton of mods that you can enable/disable inside of MO2 after you have it all downloaded. "Cheeki Breeki" also has a great install guide. *
Anyway, all in all, Grok and the rest of the G.A.M.M.A. team have done great work compiling and creating their modpack, and it offers a beautifully brutal experience like no other game I've played, and I cannot recommend it enough for fans of difficult First Person Shooters.
TLDR: The original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. trilogy is amazing, but it can be better with mods. Try out S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly and, if you have a decent PC, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. G.A.M.M.A.
*EDIT: The GAMMA Discord now has an official channel for optimising the game, and should help get the game to run on weaker PCs. It has a ton of steps that are very detailed and easy to follow so check that out if you're interested.

Fantastic game although the threshold to get into it is quite high.

The game does not hold your hand at all. You're forced to figure out pretty much everything yourself - including what to do. I always leave the wiki open in the background to figure out which quest to complete next.

A couple tips regarding things I've noticed in the game -
1. Play on the highest difficulty - apparently the damage your bullets as well as enemy bullets go down on the easier settings. This makes killing enemies a lot harder the easier the difficulty setting is.

2. Sell ammo to stalkers that wander around, sell guns to the merchant (Owl/Hawaiian) - I've noticed Stalkers of the world pay a lot more for ammunition than merchants.

3. Hunt artifacts - Any time you see an anomaly (freak lights/electricity/fires floating around/lots of noxious gas/etc) there's a high chance there's an artifact somewhere nearby. Press "O" to pull out your artifact detector, keep spamming "F" and recover those artifacts. Some give solid benefits regarding protection against radiation/fire/improves healing factor/etc. I learnt of how important they are almost 16 hours into the game.

Give it a chance as it's super easy to just quit in the beginning. The first time I tried it years ago, I did the same. Once you've passed a threshold, the game is a joy to play.

Call of Pripyat really is something else.
I have to admit that I flushed it on my first run after 2h, because it was not what I expected, coming straight from SoC and CS. Now after a complete playthrough of CS (with a lot of bugs!) I gave it another shot and it is actually phenomenal. The few quests that I have came across were really well done and way more than generic fetch quests that you might remember from CS.
You can see the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. trilogy kinda like the METRO series. CoP has the open-world aspect of Metro Exodus. Whereas SoC and CS are more "story-driven" and not as open in comparison. CoP does have a story, but it is up to you if you want to do it immediatelly or explore numerous points of interest beforehand, to stock up on supplies and upgrade your gear.
As with the other S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, the atmosphere is unmatched. Playing during night time with a thunderstorm going, and lightning illuminating the night sky, drawing shadows of the buildings/trees before you. Damn - This game is from 2010 by the way. I kinda regret starting it so close to the release of Stalker 2. I might not have enough time to finish it..
Recommended Mods:
- Call of Pripyat Complete edition for texture, bug fixes, etc.(Does have its own exe. Just run it and enjoy the game)
- optional add-on for Complete edition: stronger flashlight

This is the best game in the franchise. And the reason why it's the best is they didn't make it into a theme park or a guided tour through the 60 square kilometers of land that's an empty wasteland outside of the main story. Instead, CoP limits its scope to just 3 locations: Zaton, Jupiter and Pripyat (with the latter mostly endgame one), but each of them has several times the content depth.
Due to having to spend most of your time within the two locations, it works wonders for your experience. You no longer have to travel very long distances between objectives, and guides (that serve as fast travel) are available not only at major hubs but can be random stalkers and can move you to any location within the area. Every location is filled with things to do and oftentimes has some quests associated with it. Anomalies are mostly kept to dedicated areas and you don't really encounter them traversing the map, leading to the ability to move around faster and less equipment degradation.
This "less is more" approach is characteristic of the whole game. CoP doesn't have dozens of redundant armor suits to pick from, but what it features has a purpose and oftentimes comes with unique upgrades aimed to distinguish the suit from everything else. Same goes for weapons - in fact, there is a trader Nimble you encounter very early on, who can get you a lot of cool stuff provided you've got money for it. This way very little content ends up gated behind story progression.
The story is a bit sidelined in this one in favor of side quests and side quest chains, and this works wonders for this game. There are oftentimes 2 or 3 ways you can approach quests, and you get in-game achievements for your actions - achievemnts that have tangible impact, like change in reputation, better prices and even unique stock at traders, not accessible otherwise. All of it gives the game a lot of replayability, which is made feasible due to the fact main story doesn't take some 100 hours to clear (looking at you, Heart of Chornobyl).
As for issues, this one definitely has some, so let's list them quickly:
1) It's dated. Duh. Grab some visual mods and a 4gb patch. Maybe a weapon pack.
2) Tier 3 upgrades for weapons and suits (read - most interesting ones) are not available until you reach Pripyat.
3) While it's the first and so far only Stalker game to feature "freeplay" after the story ends, it's very bare-bones with little things to do.
2 and 3 combined lead to a reality where you want to rush through the story ASAP and save the side quests for last, because otherwise you're locking yourself out of some cool set pieces to use your weapons at - and outside of those set pieces, the game doesn't feature a lot.
Overall, CoP is the closest Stalker series ever got to a world you'd want to live in rather than visit, to a game not unlike Skyrim or Fallout 4. It's a shame Stalker 2 decided to go back to its roots as opposed to further improving the formula found in this one.