Publisher bitComposer Games announced today that PC adventure-FPS S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat will be released in February, 2010, to North America and Europe. Yup, no exact date was pinned down beyond that-- the publisher just said some time in February.
This anticipated follow-up in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series is crafted by Ukrainian game devs GSC Game World. Thus, the game has already been released in Russia and other non-English speaking bits of Europe, such as Germany.
Eastern Euro reviews have been mixed for this game. One mag gave it a score in the low '50s, while a few other mags gave the game a score in low '80s.
Call of Pripyat takes place right after the events of the end of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl . To avoid spoilers as much as possible: the hero of the last game goes into this irradiated Chernobyl place crawling with mutants, kills them all, and then calls in the cavalry. The cavalry -- in this case, the Russian army --- comes in, gets devastated by a new batch of terrible, misunderstood blood-hungry mutants, and then everything is sort of set back to square one for the hero, who has to go wander around the irradiated wastelands some more.
Oh -- but you are a new hero though, this time around. This time you are a dude from Ukraine's Security Service. A dude named Alexander Degtyaryov. A dude who wants to know the secrets of "The Zone." A dude who wants to hear the call of Pripyat. No matter what it sounds like. Or if there are mutants. Or Russians. Or Ukrainians even.
Call of Pripyat will have DirectX 11 support. The game seems to scale well -- newest hardware gets the nice eye candy, older stuff can't see it, but can at least run it. Hopefully the game will run a bit more smoothly, with less bugs, than the first title in the series.
Here are the system requirements:
Recommended: Intel Core 2 Duo E7400/AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+, 2GB RAM, nVidia GeForce 9800 GTX/ATI Radeon HD 4850/512 MB DirectX 9 or 10 compatible video card
Minimum: Intel Pentium IV 2 GHz/AMD Athlon XP 2200+, 512 MB RAM, nVidia GeForce 5700/ATI Radeon 9600/128MB DirectX 8 compatible video card
We can't imagine that this game would be much fun running a 2GHz Pentium IV, but hey, they say it works. Thank the prevalance of older PC hardware in Europe for that. No need to buy a $1000 game machine for this one.
Section:PC Games
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