But first things first, and our initial mission is to find Nimble, who's in possess꧑ion of a flash drive containing sensitive data the trader w🌜ants to retrieve.

Climbing stairs and walking into sunlight, we get our first proper look at the world of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Running on our state-of-the-art XWorks X8i-C2D PC, it's an imꦺpressive visual feast.

A blue sky with wisps of cloud looms overhead filled with birds, while ܫsmall bushes sprouting 💃from the ground are blown around by the wind, trees bend in the breeze and dust periodically gusts across the landscape.

A minute spent soaking it all up, we 😼then 🍌move off to a nearby camp where a stalker called Wolf not only informs us of Nimble's whereabouts but hands over a pistol and a knife to go with a pair of binoculars already in our possession.

Gun! Hurra🐓h! Unfortunately, it turns out that Nimble's been captured by a group of bandits and so, along with a group of Wolf's cohorts, we've got to go bust Nimble's♌ ass out of jail, so to speak.

Unfortunately, it also turns out that these NPCs don't take kindly to you waving a gun in their face, so I have to lower my pistol to get their sawn-off shotguns out of my face. Whoops. Reputation and relationships with other characters is an important part of the game, you see - build up rep with certain NPCs and yo🐻u'll benefit from cheaper items when trading and additional info for missions that you🐈 otherwise wouldn't receive.

Benefiting from the added fire power of Wolf's buddies, we charge off over a rolling landscape to a dilapidated factory where the bandits are holed up and a firefight ens🎐ues, the air filled with shouts of the living, cries of the dying and bullets whipping past our ears.