Chernobylite

Genre: First-Person Shooter

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: Review code provided by the kind folks at Untold Tales.)

Chernobylite is a First-Person Shooter with Stealth, Horror, and Survival Adventure elements released in 2021 on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2024. This game takes place in a version of modern-day Chernobyl and its outlying areas as a scientist tries to search the area for answers about the disappearance of his wife, who mysteriously vanished shortly before the infamous nuclear meltdown. However, in the world of the game, there is more going on here than a mere nuclear accident – soldiers patrol the area, monsters start to appear, and there are glowing green rocks, the titular chernobylite (a fictional substance that shares a name with the real-world mineral discovered in Chernobyl after the nuclear disaster). This game is not shy about diving straight into sci-fi, either – if the monsters didn’t give it away, the protagonist’s Rick Sanchez-style portal gun should make it clear.

While Chernobylite is functional on Nintendo Switch, it doesn’t exactly run great on Nintendo’s aging hardware. The 3D graphics seem akin to a mid-generation Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 game, and even then there are some nasty framerate drops, plenty of pop-in, and some clear cutbacks to some of the 3D geometry (at one point, a truck tire looked extremely angular, for one example). These visuals are backed by a tense cinematic soundtrack and joined by some decent Russian-language voice acting or, if you prefer, some very out-of-place sounding English voice acting.

The core gameplay here is a Stealth-focused single-player campaign-based First-Person Shooter, but this isn’t really giving the full story. Chernobylite’s levels generally have you focusing on a specific mission, but throughout you’ll be scrounging for materials as you work your way through each of the game’s areas. In-between missions, these materials are used to upgrade your home base and manage your growing support staff, who can then be sent on their own missions while you’re working on your own.

This makes for some interesting decisions once you’re back at your home base – do you use materials to build out comfortable living quarters for your troops? Or do you put it toward tools to construct better items later down the line? Do you generously reward troops who do a good job, or direct the rations to members of your crew who need it the most? And in addition to this, throughout the game you’ll be given choices to make that can affect both the story and what group members will be available to you.

Overall, this makes for pretty compelling gameplay, though each individual element feels a bit underbaked – the gunplay is merely okay, enemy AI isn’t especially bright, the Horror elements are undermined by the technical issues on Nintendo Switch, movement feels stiff, scavenging is less rewarding than it should be as there are too few different things to look for meaning you’ll never delight at coming across a really rare find, and in turn the base management feels far more simple than it should.

And yet, despite its numerous issues, Chernobylite ends up being greater than the sum of its parts, with its mix of elements having just enough of everything to make for an enjoyable and even occasionally tense journey into a hostile irradiated ruin of a city. I do think you’re better off getting this game on another platform if you can, but if the Nintendo Switch is your primary platform of choice, I still think you’ll find this to be a worthwhile and fairly unique experience.

tl;dr – Chernobylite is a First-Person Shooter with Stealth, Horror, and Survival Adventure elements, where players scavenge for supplies, build up a small band of mercenaries, and take on soldiers and monsters in a sci-fi take on modern-day Chernobyl. Each of the individual elements of this game is weak or in some way lacking, but these elements come together to create an overall fun experience that’s not quite like anything else out there. If you can, play this on another platform, because the Nintendo Switch version definitely has drawbacks, but if you primarily play on Nintendo Switch I still think you’ll find a lot to like here.

Grade: B-

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