The concept of this game truly attracted me to what I thought would be a pleasant but stressful firefighting simulator. What I got in return was definitely not close to what I thought. But I’m kinda ok with it. Hi my name is phant0m and these are my thoughts on… Chornobyl Liquidators!
Visuals
First thing I noticed was subpar visuals. I say this is because a lot of the game has you taking out fires, and the tools you use look fine, the character models look fine, the structures look good! But what they failed to nail was the fire itself and also the water to take it down. To begin, the fire doesn’t look horrible. The main bad thing is that for most of it you can tell the fire texture is just repeated and resized. But the water couldn’t have looked more unconvincing… It looked weird? Straight up it looked like specks of dust. It basically looked dry which is probably the funniest thing you can mention about water in a game about firefighting. Luckily those are my only 2 complaints when it comes to the style. I personally loved the notebook feel to the menu and also the crazy set pieces too see! I was personally surprised by how insane a fire very early on looked and it gladly hooked me!
Gameplay
The gameplay of chornobyl is kinda relaxing, you spray fire with water with the only real strategy being where to put the end of your hose, and if the level design was mostly that I would personally be giving the gameplay section a 10 because I enjoyed that base level gameplay so much! But sadly I think the devs pushed the game a little too much, I felt the other mechanics like traversing the building felt weird and unnatural. The crowbar sections of opening the door were cool but other times there were animations that looked funny and gave me a good laugh because I knew some of the scenes were supposed to be taken serious, at least that’s how snappy the story makes you feel, yet the gameplay didn’t immerse me and instead took me away from the experience.
Story/Characters
Which brings me to the story… This is probably the hardest part of the review for me, mostly because I can’t exactly explain the story as I was laughing a lot. The easiest way for me to say this is that the animations and spoiler alert.. multiple character deaths didn’t make sense. For example in the beginning you would play as several firefighters who all just straight up die, some of them die in stupid ways that made me laugh sometimes even because of audio cues. And I think that changed my emotions for the rest of the game because what happened in the beginning possibly gave me the impression I should feel that way, but then the story tries to take a serious tone that I couldn’t quite follow since I was still thinking like a goofball.
Music
The music in this was ok, it did a good job of setting tone and didn’t sound bad, I think if the music was louder and dramatic more of the story beats would hit me!
Performance
This is surprisingly the section that I had the least issues with! I had nearly 0 issues, the only one being the already mentioned weird animations. The rest of the game runs nice and looks nice! (This is specifically reviewed on an RX 6750 XT Power color and an Intel i5 13400f)
Verdict
Anyways if you’re wondering I don’t recommend this game. At least not yet. Chornobyl Liquidators gives me the vibes that it will be an awesome game one day! If it just hits a few touch ups, the only mistakes it made were being too ambitious in certain areas. I give it a 5/10 I could see this being amazing with a few fixes but as of now it still isn’t tickling my fancy. Those were my thoughts on Chornobyl Liquidators. Please let me know what you think and thanks for reading! 🙂 keep doing great things. Your good at them. Bye!
