S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat - First Reviews

Here are the first three English S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat reviews we've seen.

Calling it STALKER: Unbroken, Eurogamer awards an 8/10.  A bit on the upgrade elements:

The RPG elements gel extremely well, the branching and exclusive paths of upgrades allowing you to modify kit according to your play style. Decent equipment is available much earlier, too - there's no more wandering around for hours with a sawed-off and a trenchcoat. By the end of the game you'll likely be rocking a pretty serious armoured exoskeleton and assault rifle combo, with sniper-weapons and piles of healing equipment in your pack.

Resolution Magazine also goes for 8/10, though the text sounds more effusive:

This is a marked improvement over Clear Sky. Call of Pripyat takes the best ideas of that game, along with those of the original, and focuses its effort on refining those elements, chucking away the rest. Clear Sky’s factional alignment system is gone: the Zone is now a place where most stalkers are working together to survive. The PDA markers, which allowed you to track the location of various living entities around the game world, have also been plunged into the rubbish bin. It’s a great deal more stable, too, with no serious bugs to be found (and although Stalker still has its glitchy moments - a bandit apparently dancing a merry jig on the spot was my personal favourite - these almost add to the surreality of the place as a whole). It’s refined, streamlined and tightened.

...and Rock, Paper, Shotgun is a little more critical but still very positive overall:

To sum up, I know it’s basically meaningless for me to recommend this to people who have played the previous games, because most of them will just buy it anyway. But the recommendation is there to all of you. You should play this. Yes, it is simply more of the same survival FPS we’ve seen twice before, with new and interesting bugs (such as a broken cut-scene in which I found myself hunched over the corpse I had been examining) but this time it feels freer, and more relaxed. It’s been executed imaginatively and competently, and delivers genuine surprises. The rough edges remain, and still they do nothing to diminish its charm. Call Of Pripyat is a vital excursion to the zone and probably the most interesting shooter we’re going to see on the PC in 2010.