How STALKER: Legends of the Zone Trilogy paves the way for this year’s sequel

09.05.2024 - 13:29 / thesixthaxis.com

With STALKER 2 long-awaited release scheduled for later this year, there’s been an unsurprising spike in interest surrounding the original trilogy which debuted on PC almost two decades ago. Capitalising on this curiosity, Ukrainian publisher GSC recently launched STALKER: Legends of the Zone Trilogy, bringing the three games to Xbox and PlayStation for the first time.

The trilogy marks an opportune gateway into the STALKER series, but it comes with one major caveat. Despite the visual and quality of life improvements, these games have not really been rebuilt or redesigned with a console audience in mind. They also hail from an era in which first person shooters didn’t all ascribe to a similar, Call of Duty-like template.

As the developers claim, the trilogy has been preserved – warts and all – but with some of those rough edges rounded off to make the games playable with a gamepad on newer consoles. In that respect alone, it’s a success, and although some players might baulk at the lack of hand-holding and other modern gaming comforts, the STALKER trilogy will give you an appreciation for what the developers wanted to achieve back in 2007 and how the series’ mechanics, setting, and storytelling evolved. Most of all, it helps lay the groundwork for the upcoming sequel.

Heavily inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker – a 70s sci-fi film based on the novel, Roadside Picnic – this isn’t the kind of bizarre retro futuristic post-apocalypse portrayed in the Fallout franchise. STALKER is grim, grey, and lonely, with players left to fend for themselves within sprawling radioactive sandboxes where warring factions lay in ambush, mutated beasts roam, and where indescribable anomalies can materialise from out of nowhere.

Best described as first person survival games, you’ll run errands for various NPCs while also making sure you’re fed and free of radiation, building and maintaining loadouts of gear and weapons you’ve either scavenged or traded for. The survival mechanics aren’t as in-depth as we now see in most modern survival sims that heavily feature crafting and base-building systems. This works in STALKER’s favour, with survival elements helping to amp up the immersion without obstructing the player’s path between missions.

Shadow of Chernobyl is where the STALKER saga begins and it is, unsurprisingly, the toughest of the three games for PlayStation and Xbox players to acclimatise to. Although it does feature some handy signposting to help navigate its open world, the gunplay lacks finesse and inventory management and menus throw up obstacles. A lack of fast travel or vehicles also means that you’ll spend long stretches sprinting between distant objectives, though clear attempts have been made to populate the