The Beastmaster of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, part three: the stalker becomes the stalkeredNot the kind of follower I was hoping for
Not the kind of follower I was hoping for
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
After a failure-riddled start,my attemptto turnS.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s mutants into beasts of war is finally bearing fruit. I’veengineered a Bloodsucker attackthat wiped out the worst of villains – someone who was mean to me – and I’ve progressed far enough to really open up the map, and with it, access to more of the Zone’s fiercest fleshwarps.
It’s chaos. The rodents, bouncing all the while, spread to out to gnash at whichever random piece of flesh their radiation-addled instincts decree, while the gangsters immediately abandon what little combat discipline they started with to rake full-auto fire around each other’s feet. And, at me. For all our numbers advantage, I can’t entirely shake the aggro heat, forcing me to duck and dip between hollowed-out bus carcasses as both aimed and stray bullets ping into the sides.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
Out in the open, the situation is deteriorating. My fuzzy minions are chomping bravely, but they lack the reach, speed, and leathery skin-armour of a Flesh or Snork, and against the ceaseless rattle of six different AKs, their numbers are rapidly thinning. Bravely, I retreat, shuffling through a waist-high gap in the maze wall just as I hear the final nasally death cry of my rat army. Never has so much been owed, with so little achieved, to so few. Worse, I can’t just skip past these blokes like I’ve done with previous human foes; the objective is, specifically, to make them dead.
Soon, I begin wondering if the mutants are trying the same with me. I spend a weirdly peaceful few minutes investigating old ruins and forest clearings, hoping for something with fangs to pop out, yet they never do. The closest I come is catching the sounds of a trapped Bloodsucker inside an underground garage, but after examining the entrances and exits, I conclude I can’t escape while also taking him with me, and thus have no choice but to let him starve to death.
As I leave the garage, wondering if I should have dropped in a sausage or something, a flashing white semicircle – I should really see my ophthalmologist about that – alerts me to an approaching do-badder of the more sapient kind. Then a shot lands square in my chest, to the tune of what is now a much more familiar bang. It’s that guy again!
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
You.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
Somehow, he’s tracked me across a good kilometre of ground, and must have practiced his sharpshooting along the way because good Christ he is killing me. I book it across open ground, copping two more hits, and start chain-popping medkits as soon I reach the cover of a small forest. I still don’t have the means to fight back against my pursuer – I’m without mutants, and swore never to shoot a gun or insert a knife in anger – so have little choice but to run fast and hard back towards the maze, where I can decide my next move.
Yet within seconds, that white curve is back, and so is the shooter, who refuses to fall outside of blasting range no matter how fast I sprint. I scale hills and weave through trees trying to shake him off, bandaging an increasing variety of bullet wounds as I go, but nothing works. Every time I seem to get clear, he’s there, hoofing it with the grim determination of a man who has nothing left in this world but the will to take my life. I don’t know him. He doesn’t know me. But he knows I must die.
From dusk to darkness, he chases, and the lack of light is only making it harder to find some kind of self-defence monstrosity to direct at him. I’m getting exasperated and making rookie stalker mistakes, charging into anomalies that shred my skin with a thousand pieces of floating, broken glass, or gravitational pulses that spit me out with painfully crunched bones. None of this helps my dwindling medkit and bandage supplies, which are in danger of running out completely if I can’t shake this inhumanly fit bastard.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
Then, from the gloom emerges another pile of abandoned cars, and in the centre: a lone Snork, feasting on a corpse and emitting an unusual electronic beep. Friend, I have never been so happy to see your emaciated, gas-masked face. I’m wary of using a single mutant to fight off what looks like a fully armoured soldier, given how badly that mass rodent rush went, but at this point I’ll take whatever ghoul I can get.
No more running. I turn around and, with the Snork on my tail, charge back towards the pursuer, meeting him in the trees. It’s a long, costly, extremely difficult-to-screenshot fight, as the Snork repeatedly abandons the target to try beating on me instead. But, as I sink my ninth syringe of painkillers, the mutant’s most powerful leap attack connects, flattening my tormentor and sending his limp corpse sliding pathetically through the mud.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
That just leaves one other mystery: why was the Snork beeping? Returning to the body, I find it strapped with a electronic collar, while on the dead stalker he was snacking on, a PDA reveals that somewhere out there is a scientist paying big money for them. Looks like I’m not the only one in the Zone looking to tame its beasts.
