#Ultra character map review how to#

The developers could certainly have picked up a few tricks from Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl and its sequels about how to make the Zone feel more dynamic. Friendly trader stalkers, meanwhile, simply stand around waiting for you to come to them. The only things you find are resources and clues relating to your story, there is no wildlife (even though the Exclusion Zone is renowned for it) and enemy AI rigidly sticks to their patrol routes or stands in one place-never sitting at desks or fighting radioactive monsters or taking a wazz. As someone mildly obsessed with the crumbling vestiges of the Soviet empire, I find these environments mesmerising.īeautiful and haunting though these areas are, they are a little lacking in substance.

#Ultra character map review windows#

It gives the areas an intense verisimilitude that I can't stop snapping-grass and shrubbery reclaiming blocky clusters of Soviet apartments, smashed stained glass windows depicting doomed communist utopias, smoggy sunlight oozing through sickly canopies. The Farm 51 actually went to the Exclusion Zone and used 3D scanning to recreate its terrain, textures and buildings. These maps aren't huge, but they look wonderful. At the same time, you can send out your companions to scout future missions or gather resources. When you're ready, you pick a mission set in one of six regions around the Zone-whether to progress the main story or search for clues. The Farm 51 actually went to the Exclusion Zone and used 3D scanning to recreate its terrain, textures and buildings.īetween missions you hang out in your base, where you can cook, build improvements, explore other peoples' memories based on clues you find, or even just go straight to the Heist mission at the end of the game (where you'll almost certainly die if you've not assembled a crew and equipment, but it's there if you want it).

Your choices will affect enemy activity in the area, how many allies you have in the Zone, and at one point even the topography of the game-you can, for instance, destroy the infamous Duga radar at the behest of a man believing himself to be in a good-vs-evil conflict with a Rat King. It's pretty ballsy for a game to lay bare the workings of its choice system like this, but given the breadth of Chernobylite's web of choices and possible outcomes, the devs have every right to want to show it off.