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F Top 21 in 2010 - 6) Stalker: Call of Pripyat

Andy Chalk Profile _ Twitter _ E-mail _ Homepage

2010 was a busy year and it saw the release of a bunch of great games. Staff and regular freelance contributors at Gameroni had the opportunity to play a wide variety of titles over the past 12 months and together we've compiled a list of 21 of our favorite games from the period. These are the ones that had the biggest impact on us, not necessarily the industry as a whole. We're sharing that list with you now, one title per day over a period of three weeks. Though there's only a loose order to this list, in general you can know that we liked games more as we work toward the number one selection. ----- 6. Stalker: Call of Pripyat (PC) When you talk about the top shooters of 2010, a few titles leap instantly to mind. Halo: Reach. Call of Duty: Black Ops. Medal of Honor, maybe, or BioShock 2. But S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat? It had neither the hype nor the audience of any of those other games, yet it surpassed them all in many ways. As a PC-only game from Ukraine it never had a hope of being the biggest FPS of 2010, but the best? That it may just be. Call of Pripyat is special because it's different. Developed by Ukrainian studio GSC Game World, it brings an entirely foreign sensibility to the genre; yet while European games have in the past usually meant half-assed, buggy and weird, Call of Pripyat is well-executed, technically sound - and, yes, weird. But that's precisely what makes it an experience unlike any other. Where most big-budget Western shooters follow a fairly set formula of building a story around the player as hero, Call of Pripyat approaches the problem from the opposite angle, creating a world and then turning you loose in it. I mean that quite literally; there are no levels, no guidance and virtually nothing to prevent you from marching headlong into areas for which you are grossly ill-equipped. Make no mistake, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in which the game is set is nasty, brutish and determined to make your life as short as possible. It's a liberating, terrible freedom that springs forth from GSC's willingness to do things that no sane Western studio would ever try. You are the central character, but you're also just one piece on a complex and ever-evolving chessboard. The world around you goes on, eating, breathing, fighting and dying, with or without you, and ultimately, no matter what you do, you won't win. You'll survive, maybe you'll escape; you might even save a handful of men. But you won't save the world. The Zone will continue. I think that's brilliant. Fantastic FPS action leavened with a genuinely unique perspective is a much-needed antidote to the steady diet of space marines and super-soldiers we've grown used to. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat is bizarre, it's viciously difficult, it's a PC exclusive - and it's my hands-down pick for best shooter of 2010. ----- Each of the posts that we make as we reveal our list of the Top 21 games of 2010 is written by one of the people on our staff and freelance team who advocated most aggressively for an individual title's inclusion. Check back tomorrow to see if one of your favorite games made our list, and be sure to leave your comments if you have any to share!

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