If you were to wind the clock back some eighteen years to when S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chornobyl released on PC back in 2007, it soon becomes pretty clear that the PlayStation consoles of the time (PlayStation 2 was still being sold alongside PlayStation 3 at this point), simply weren’t up to the task of realising what was then one of the most ambitious PC titles of that time. Fast forward to just last year and all three of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games (Shadow of Chornobyl, Call of Pripyat and Clear Sky) were released in a handy dandy collection for PlayStation 4 under the package moniker of ‘Legends of the Zone Trilogy’. Boasting improved visuals along with console friendly controls and a reworked user interface, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Legends of the Zone Trilogy marked the first time that PlayStation gamers could get to grips with this beloved series.
Despite last year’s PS4 release, it transpires that Ukrainian developer GSC Game World isn’t quite done yet with the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R games. Just over a year later, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Legends of the Zone Trilogy has now stormed its way onto Sony’s current generation PlayStation console in a fancy enhanced edition, bringing with it yet more improvements over last year’s last generation edition to boot.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Legends of the Zone Trilogy Enhanced Edition Review
The Best Way To Play A Trio Of Aging Open World PC Classics
Making the most of the aging but still punchy PlayStation 5 hardware, each title in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Legends of the Zone Trilogy Enhanced Edition boasts substantially updated visuals with improved lighting, overhauled textures, refined lighting and 4K resolution cinematics. Speaking of 4K resolution, each of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R titles also tears along at 4K resolution and 60 frames per second, with an ‘Ultra Performance’ mode also available permitting users of HDMI 2.0 compliant TVs to engage a greased-lightning smooth 120 frames per second mode.
The improvements don’t end there either. In addition to mod.io support, which allows PlayStation players to tweak their experience with a broad selection of different downloadable mods for free, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Legends of the Zone Trilogy Enhanced Edition also provides keyboard and mouse support as well. Certainly then from a technical perspective, this is arguably the best way to play the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R games on console and it isn’t even close. As to the games themselves however, your mileage will vary depending on how strong your tolerance is for jank and for game design that is creeping towards two decades old.
Visually speaking, though the trilogy does see incremental improvements as you work your way from Shadow of Chornobyl through to Call of Pripyat, these are still very much offerings of their time with dated environments, clunky character animations, fairly rudimentary effects work and ample amounts of game world clipping jank that open up a portal to the 2007-2009 era of gaming.
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Likewise, though improvements have been made to the controls and UI to make them more friendly to controller toting console folks, it all still isn’t quite as elegant as it could be. One such example of this involves a firefight I entered into with some enemy Stalkers in Shadow of Chornobyl. In this scenario, I was able to down an enemy Stalker and as I sprinted towards his prone form to quickly loot his armament and gear and then retreat into cover, there was a noticeable instance of lag where the game simply couldn’t instantly process the looting command that I wanted it to – resulting in me having more holes in my character than I thought was necessary.
Though the various titles in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Legends of the Zone Trilogy Enhanced Edition are arguably somewhat dated from a technical standpoint, there is still a trio of good times to be had here for fans of open world survival and action adventure genre offerings. As the titular Stalker in The Zone, a vast area based on the real-life Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, players are tasked with uncovering the mystery behind their identity, keeping themselves alive and looting everything that The Zone has to offer.
Very much an adherent to traditional open world design principles, each of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games has you traversing a sizable game world, talking to NPCs, getting main missions, side missions and uncovering secret caches of loot. It’s pretty basic stuff on the face of it (outside of key story characters your interactions with other NPCs tends to just be variations of “what’s new” and “what missions do you have for me”), but the added survival elements do help to keep things interesting.
Not only can enemies put you in the ground real quick (you can bleed out on top of whatever other injuries you’ve sustained), but you also need to consider the various murderous anomalies prowling The Zone, stamina levels and radiation levels that can also get you to the game over screen real quick. There’s also ample scope for pitting the various denizens of The Zone against one another too, with the ability to lure enemy soldiers into the vicinity of nearby mutants, proving to be a valuable one that preserves your ammo and most importantly your health, too.
Because of how precarious life tends to be in The Zone, using cover becomes essential to your survival pretty early on in all three games, encouraging you to crouch and go prone behind the various trees, man-made structures and more as you return fire to your enemies. It’s also worth noting that the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games also place something of a premium on ballistics too, meaning that you can’t expect to snipe an enemy 50 meters away with a handgun but must instead get close to get the job done.
Mission design however, does leave a lot to be desired and much like other aspects of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Legends of the Zone Trilogy Enhanced Edition, is very much a relic of its time. Rather than getting epic drawn out missions with complex objectives, the many side missions that you’ll embark on very much tend to be of the ‘fetch this’ and/or ‘kill that’ variety, with very little in-between. Sure, it’s a touch disappointing, but arguably in 2007-2009, it was far less of an issue then whereupon open world fatigue had yet to properly set in.
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Though the mission design can seem rote, it does play into a broader faction mechanism whereby the more missions you do for a particular group of folks and the better you behave toward them (talking first, rather than shooting first), all accumulate to unlock new missions and other such valuable opportunities. It’s a straightforward system for sure, but it does help to make the overly simple mission design a little easier to digest.
Where the S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Legends of the Zone Trilogy Enhanced Edition fares a little better is in its story and setting. Essentially unfurling across all three games, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Legends of the Zone Trilogy Enhanced Edition not only has players uncovering the identity of its titular protagonist in the first game, Shadow of Chornobyl, but in Clear Sky, a prequel to the events seen in that game, provides players with insights into events which triggered Shadow of Chornobyl to start with.
Finally, Call of Pripyat acts as a sequel to Shadow of Chornobyl and serves to wrap things up from the first two games into a compelling third act. Put simply, the real-life Chernobyl accident has proven to be a veritably fertile bed of creative endeavour for storytellers since it happened and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Legends of the Zone Trilogy Enhanced Edition certainly makes the most of this setting to say the least.
Though the world of the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R games have been essentially frozen in time (something that GSC Game World affectionately alludes to in the text preamble which appears before each game begins), there’s still a lot of fun to be had here. Sure, the mission design is basic, the visuals have aged and there is much jank to be found, but equally the survival gameplay is compelling and the story which masterfully bridges itself across three games proves to be just as inviting in what is a definitive collection of the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R games on console.
https://youtu.be/ghoJS2asskE
S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Legends of the Zone Trilogy Enhanced Edition is out now on PS5. The enhanced PS5 version is a free upgrade to owners of the PS4 version of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Legends of the Zone Trilogy.
Review code kindly provided by PR.