Chernobylite launched back in 2019, bringing with it mostly positive reviews and an interesting hook for a 3D survival game laced with a touch of horror – it was made using 3D scans of the real-life Chernobyl exclusion zone. This hints at an intriguing attention to detail from the developers, and on more powerful hardware, the effort pays off, providing the game with an immersive atmosphere full of misty lighting and tangibly tragic ruins. But on Switch, the impact of the game’s most unique feature has, unfortunately, been lost in the visual downgrade.
By far the strongest part of Chernobylite for us was its ambitious storytelling. The storyline follows Igor Khymynuk, whose aim — to find his wife Tatyana, another scientist, who went missing in the zone — is compellingly brought to life as he hallucinates through missions and struggles to put together clues and launch a climactic assault on the Chernobyl facility itself, Tatyana’s last-known location.
But (and there are a few buts) we have rarely played a game so badly in need of motion aiming. No matter how much we adjusted the settings, including turning on an assist mode, we couldn’t find a sweet spot that made the aiming work for us. The consequence on the FPS side of things – a significant part of the game – was to make it mostly frustrating. We died a lot either aiming off into the grey skies, or slowly turning our sights towards an intended headshot. Or body shot – any kind of shot to keep ourselves alive.
It should be stressed that Chernobylite emphasises stealth over direct combat. You’re not meant to get into these firefights if you can avoid them. But being stealthy amounts to ducking and crawling slowly up to every enemy. This gets tiresome, and you’ll be tempted to fire one of your many guns as an alternative.
We died a lot, and dying revealed a dubious design choice. Most of the time we ended up captured (at other times, we ended up in a surreal time warp – you’ll have to play to find out why) with our kit stolen and hidden away somewhere in the same enemy army base every time. There’s a story reason for this, and some very minor variety, but we soon found it repetitive. Sure, you can save scum to avoid it, but the game’s momentum suffers.
Other elements — base building, people management — got lost in the fallout. Our sallies into the exclusion zone, gathering resources, crafting, and looking for ways to progress the game were initially as addictive as in other survival games, but we soon found this loop grind-heavy. The key elements — upgrading kit, unlocking new tiers of things to build — are done well enough if you like that flow. For the right person, Chernobylite will still be a very enjoyable time.
We liked much of Chernobylite and this is a playable port with a fairly solid frame rate, but too many things held us back from scoring it any higher – the graphical downgrade, the tedious death loop, and most egregiously, the multiple crashes that we experienced throughout. We never lost any progress but almost a dozen crashes in the 15-20 hour runtime are worth noting.
