After putting a few more hours into "Stalker: Shadow Of Chernobyl" I thought I would give you my impressions of it so far. The game takes place in the radioactive exclusion zone in Chernobyl. You play a "Stalker" as you try to survive a life in the exclusion zone as well as trying unravel the mysteries behind the numerous "anomalies" that are taking place within the zone. The first thing I noticed about this game is it's scale. The exclusion zone is really, really big. Big on an oblivion scale, so you will end up doing a lot of walking as you can neither fast-travel or use vehicles. Stalker is pretty much oblivion with guns and mutants, which in my opinion is a formula for a pretty awesome game.There are a ton of missions to do. The main story is pretty lengthy by itself, but when you throw a daunting amount of side-quests STALKER is shaping up to being an extremely substantial came. The atmosphere in the game is amazing. STALKER has very realistic weather effects, which really add to the sparse atmosphere. Much like in Bio-shock, you always feel very alone during the game and you often find yourself in intense gun fights with the many enemies you have, not to mention the hordes of mutants that roam the Exclusion zone. The gun play is really realistic so you will often find yourself having to take more shots at your target than you initially thought. The RPG elements of the game are great, since you don't have levels so no level grinding of any kind is required. The only thing you have to worry about is finding better guns and Armour. However, the game does have some pretty notable negatives. This is mainly to do with hard-ware as, even though the game doesn't look amazing by any stretch, it will require some pretty good specs to run it. In terms of graphics it does the job, nothing amazing but nothing hideously ugly, it doesn't have the best frame rate either so some tweaking is required to get it steady. Overall, it is shaping up to be a great FPS-RPG. The FPS game play is top notch, and the RPG elements are light enough to welcome rookie RPG players. If you can get your hands on a copy , I got mine for 10 euro brand new, it definitely warrants a purchase.