These three settings can be tweaked individually, allowing you to craft a bespoke experience. Going back to the difficulty however, while the default settings started off at a good level, but ultimately leads to your character feeling too overpowered – removing all sense of fear and making even the Black Stalker feel like a piece of cake – the difficulty settings are not simply “easy medium and hard” but in fact allow you to alter the difficulty on three different levels: Survival, Combat and Management.

Furthermore, without spoiling anything, some of the late-game weapons are quite exciting and unique. This means that while there aren’t too many weapons to choose from, the number of gameplay styles afforded by these customisations is much greater than it initially appears. The best part is that all of these changes are reflected in the gun models, with every single change making the weapon look different. The level of customisation is deep enough to allow you to turn the AK into an effective sniper rifle. While the selection is limited, each weapon – from the revolver, to the AK-47 to the shotgun is completely customisable, affecting handling, fire rate and more. This does allow the game to showcase its weapons, which have clearly had a lot of thought put into them. Once you have a firm grasp on the game however, Chernobylite becomes an easy – and sometimes tedious – experience, with repetitive mission structures, exploitable AI and more ammo and health packs than you could ever need. At the default level, the game starts as a stealth thriller title, with players needing to carefully manage their resources, ammo and more – all the while staying clear of enemies when possible, and trying to achieve the objective before the Black Stalker’s arrival. Depending on what difficulty you are playing on, Chernobylite offers entirely different experiences. With all that in mind, the game offers plenty of different gameplay styles which one can approach each level with. Throughout each journey into the exclusion zone, players must also make sure to manage their health, radiation levels and psyche – all of which can be affected by different events and interactions. You can stave off this enemy and the storms by creating various equipment such as the Chernobylite Neutraliser and Wormhole Blocker. While you can take your time and spend as long as you want searching for supplies throughout the level, Chernobylite storms will begin to gather, with an extended stay seeing you attacked by a creature known only as the Black Stalker. Going into these levels, players will encounter NAR soldiers NPCs scripted events (some of which can have effects later on based on your decisions) and other enemies. Depending on their health status and equipment (both of which are affected by your direct actions), the companions will either succeed -bringing in new supplies – or fail: the consequences of which I will leave up to you to discover. With all that, you will assign different missions to different companions. These timed-missions are of little importance however, and hold no effect on the story.

While the story missions will remain until you select them, the 5 or so other missions available to you will eventually be unavailable if you do not complete them within a certain number of days. Missions will vary from unimportant supply runs, to vital story missions. These open levels will be visited by you many times throughout the game’s 25-hour long campaign, each of which has its own sense of identity. This world is split up into 5 distinct areas. You need companions, tools, intel and more – all of which can be found in the world. After the conclusion of the prologue, the player’s ultimate task is to infiltrate the NAR’s base, however in order to do so you must first be prepared. Tackling the gameplay loop one by one we’ll start with the missions. The game is split up into days, with each day consisting of a similar repeated pattern: You wake up at your base, select what mission you wish to go on (out of a possible 5), assign the rest of the missions to your companions go on the mission all the while gathering resources, picking up clues and experiencing the level then returning to your base after a – hopefully – successful mission feeding your team, creating weapons ammo and more and then going to sleep. In Chernobylite, the primary gameplay loop is perhaps one of its strongest suits – at least initially. While music, graphics and story are all important facets to a game, for some titles, gameplay remains king.

Chernobylite black stalker