Stalker: Call of Pripyat: that’s effing teamwork

You spend a lot of time alone in Stalker: Call of Pripyat. It’s a lonely world, with wide expanses of abandoned land, ruined buildings slumping slowly into the swamps, and strangely mutated creatures running in packs through the tall and rustling grasses. I’ve been running back and forth for a while now, completing standard tasks for an assortment of indistinguishable hardasses. Go find his missing tool chest. Place these detectors inside of anomalies. Kill all the mutants in this lair. And I’ve been doing it mostly alone.

So when I get to team up with people, it’s pretty exciting. Hanging out with Grouse, as described in a previous entry, wasn’t that great. But a mission to rescue a stalker hostage from some bandits was surprisingly fun. I had the option to convince his buddies to help me attack the bandits, negotiate with the bandits, or deal with it my own way. I chose the latter option.

After the jump, me and my new buddy eff some bandits UP!

One of the things I love most about the game is how many unique areas there are. You can have many different tasks at any moment, so you end up stumbling on all these great locations as you move from one quest to the next. I was out and about, on my way back from hunting for artifacts after a detour to kill a bunch of mutants, when I crested a rise and saw some tough looking dudes guarding a gate into a storage facility. This is unusual, so I walk up to investigate. Turns out these were the bandits that had taken the hostage, so suddenly I’m in the middle of a mission. Sweet!

I talk to the bandit captain, and the price they were asking for the hostage was so high I said “eff this!” and decided to shoot my way out. The minute I unloaded on the guards, the hostage stood up and thanked me. So after killing the guys in the immediate area, when I told him to come with me, he went to the dead bandit leader, picked up his pistol, and started helping shoot his way out! It was sweet. We blew the hell out of the bandits (dying and reloading liberally in the process) and fought our way out.

Now I have a buddy who owes me his life, and a lot of looting to do. I am the Bullet Buzzard. Hell yes.

Also, because of some sweet story stuff, I’m gettin’ a team together! Hell yeah! After so long spent alone, I’m actually gathering together a group to form a team, and it’s actually exciting. They’re also all guys I’ve met in the world, with their own little story and reason for being available, so it actually makes sense that they’d be available for my team, and isn’t just for some arbitrary story reason.

But, this is one of the guys I’m teammates with:

You win some, you lose some, I guess.

Next up, the end of the line
Click here for the previous Stalker: Call of Pripyat entry.

DoomMunky is also Mick, a theater and voiceover actor in the Bay Area. He bikes everywhere and recently became a pretty damn good pie maker.