Chernobyl Terrorist Attack

The Chernobyl disaster spawned quite a few stories and myths, ranging from pertinent tales about the effects of radiation on the environment, to ludicrous horror stories involving terrifying monsters and powerful mutants. In essence, the event proved to be extremely profitable from an artistic point of view, since many books, movies and video games took a stab at portraying the Eastern-European catastrophe from different angles.

Chernobyl Terrorist Attack is a first-person shooter that tries to take a bite out of this cake and hopefully attract a bit of attention from the industry, by flashing the crowds with sophisticated words like dynamic gameplay, impressive graphics and vivid atmosphere. Naturally, it does all this while stubbornly disregarding the existence of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., although it is fairly obvious that the comparison is the first thing that everyone will do after the first minutes of gameplay.

However, the game has a more realistic approach when it comes to the main story line, but only in the sense that Pripyat is not riddled with anomalies, gruesome mutants and vicious factions that fight each other for territory. On the other hand, it involves a terrorist group that wants to blow up the nuclear power plant for a second time, if they do not get ten billion dollars in the next 24 hours. Aside from the obvious futility of blowing up an already destroyed reactor, it would also be quite the challenge to run away with ten billion in cash, logistics-wise, not to mention the fact that most countries would put themselves in serious debt if they had to depart with that much money at once.

As far as the gameplay is concerned, things are not as dynamic or exciting as advertised, mostly because the confrontations are pretty dull and they lack any form of challenge, what with the reckless AI and the inconsistent mechanics. The action is very repetitive and it basically revolves around scripted events that spawns the enemies in certain locations whenever you walk into the designated area.

Graphically, the game does take advantage of some new-age post-processing effects, such as bloom and depth-of-field, but it fails to portray the environments properly and create any kind of atmosphere, even if the city has been modeled after the real locations around Pripyat. Moreover, the character animation is rather poor and the shortage of weapon models leaves no room for experiments, since you only get to wield a handful of guns throughout the adventure.

Chernobyl Terrorist Attack tried to blend a variety of previously successful elements from a lot of other titles out there, but the lack of experience clearly shows in the final product. Hence, while you can still have a bit of fun and admire Pripyat one more time, there's certainly nothing special about the game.