It’s happened to all of us at one point or another: we buy a game, tear off the shrink wrapping, pop the disc into our console or PC, boot it up and watch as our hopes are torn asunder. It doesn’t occur all that often, being the net-savvy video game fans we are, but there are some games that manage to defeat all of our ingrained warnings and end up absorbing our hard earned cash.
This circumstance befell me last week with STALKER: Call of Pripyat, an open-world FPS by GSC Game World, a Ukraine-based developer of some note. I’ve been interested in the Stalker series for a while, but I’ve never had a machine capable of running the titles until now. I figured that, after three iterations on the formula, it was probably a safe bet that Call of Pripyat would fix up the nagging problems I’ve heard about the first two games, namely the repeated crashes and lock-ups.
Well, you know what they say about assumptions, and it turns out that Call of Pripyat is just as unstable as the other two games. After raising all my graphic options to maximum, the game promptly crashed, forcing me to do it all over again. It also doesn’t help that, even on full graphics, the game looks and plays like a budget 2007 title. I understand that GSC is using the same engine, but they could have at least given it a bit of spit shine.
Needless to say, I promptly uninstalled the game and began pining after my forty misspent dollars. Has something like this happened to anyone else? I can think of two other instances of this phenomenon, but I’d like to hear your stories first. Have any of you been burned by hype? Sound off!