Chornobyl Liquidators

I went in tracking every system this game claimed to simulate, and the first act genuinely delivered. You start with a firehose in your hands on the roof of Reactor No. 4, and the game does something brave right away: as characters die from radiation exposure, you cycle through the real names and ranks of the actual firefighters who were there - Vasily Ignatenko, Vladimir Pravik, Mykola Titenok - complete with correct death dates and, in some cases, real photographs. That is not a small thing, and the weight of it lands hard. The opening mission earns its place among the more respectful takes on this history that gaming has produced. From a mechanical standpoint, the game cycles you through several distinct roles across its chapter structure. You fight fires with period-accurate equipment, survey contamination levels with the DP-5 dosimeter, use the IZS sprinkler to decontaminate landmarks in Pripyat, convince villagers to abandon their homes, and eventually pick up a shovel to clear radioactive graphite from the turbine hall roof. Survival stats are managed through items like Propidon medicine, iodine tablets, chocolate, and cigarettes - even vodka, which the developers justify (correctly) as an authentic element of Soviet-era crisis management. The stress mechanic, which tracks your character's mental and physical state, adds a thin but functional layer of sim depth to what could have been a pure walking tour. There is also a KGB cooperation thread running through the narrative that lets you choose between blind compliance and quiet resistance, feeding into two possible endings. Here is the problem, and it is a systemic one: the back half of the game abandons the simulation framework almost entirely. Acts three and four shift into stealth sequences and what reviewers have described as radioactive hallucination setpieces, and the tonal whiplash is severe. The controls feel outdated throughout, with hold-button minigames for door-prying and traversal prompts that look like they were designed a decade ago. Bugs range from mild annoyance - tasks not registering as complete, forcing a save reload - to full immersion breaks like looping NPC animations with no audio, and quest objectives clipped behind geometry. Voice acting in cutscenes is passable; in-game dialogue delivery is often flat, with actors reading lines at speed rather than inhabiting them. Steam reviews sit at a 50-50 split across over 500 ratings, which is an accurate thermometer: this is a game that provokes real affection in history enthusiasts and real frustration in everyone who wants the mechanics to match the premise. Who should actually play this? If your interest in Chernobyl runs deeper than the HBO series - if you have read Voices from Chernobyl, followed the dosimetry debates, or just want to spend five hours walking through a faithfully reconstructed 1986 Pripyat with no mutants in sight - this game will give you something that nothing else currently does. The atmosphere, the ambient sound design, and the commitment to historical sourcing (period equipment, archival documents, real names) carry genuine sim value. Treat it as a rough historical experience rather than a polished mechanical showcase, and the five-hour runtime becomes a reasonable ask. Approach it as a tight sim or a complete narrative package, and the seams will bother you far more than the radiation.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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