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I really wanted to love Chornobyl Liquidators. The premise had me hooked—a raw, unfiltered look at one of the worst nuclear disasters in history, putting you in the shoes of the people who had to clean up the mess and deal with the horrifying consequences. And at first, I was into it. The opening missions, where you play as a first responder, are intense, gripping, and honestly, best parts of the entire game. These early sections had me thinking, Okay, sure, there are some bugs, and the controls feel a little off, but this is worth pushing through.
But then the game did something weird. It tricked me.
And the rest of the game
After those initial first responder missions—the ones that really made me feel like I was in the disaster, battling flames, and experiencing the chaos first-hand as some firefighters don’t make it through. Then game just changes. It slows down, loses momentum, and turns into something completely different: a smudgy, frustrating, and much less satisfying version of Viscera Clean-up Detail. Instead of fighting through disasters, making split-second decisions, and surviving the immediate aftermath of the explosion, you spend the rest of the game cleaning up radioactive sludge, scrubbing walls, and following repetitive orders that feel more like busywork than a compelling experience.
I don’t mind slower, methodical gameplay if it’s engaging, but here, it just isn’t. The mechanics feel unfinished, the objectives are boring, and the sense of urgency from the opening missions disappears almost entirely. Worse yet, the bugs and performance issues that were already present in the first part of the game become even harder to ignore. some frame drops and stuttering, made the already sluggish gameplay feel even worse. The controls, which were already stiff, become a real problem when you’re trying to complete tedious tasks of cleaning blue fart clouds.
I tried harder to like the game than the developers did
It’s such a shame because the game had something. The atmosphere is fantastic, the historical detail is great, and those first few missions had me completely immersed. But once the game shifts gears, it feels like it loses all confidence in itself. It goes from being a gripping, high-stakes disaster simulation to a slow, buggy chore simulator. I wanted to push through, I really did, but by the end, I just felt drained. If the developers had stuck with the intensity of the opening and refined the gameplay instead of turning it into a tedious clean-up job, Chornobyl Liquidators could have been something special. Instead, it feels like a game that tricked me into thinking it was great, only to slowly reveal how hollow it really is
After going through the game in about 5 hours I can say that the game can be enjoyed, but I cannot recommend it without a strong sale. The is currently sitting at €16 on steam which is definitely too high for a game where the developers seem like they lost interest half way through.
