Chornobyl Liquidators is an immersive simulation game where you take on the role of one of the first responders of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Chornobyl Liquidators Review Overview
What is Chornobyl Liquidators?
Chornobyl Liquidators is an immersive simulation of post-disaster Chernobyl and Pripyat based on the actual 1986 nuclear accident. But unlike many of its peers, it doesn’t feature any irradiated monsters or mutants. It’s only you, your fellow disaster response crew, the soldiers, and the politics that moved behind the scenes.
Chornobyl Liquidators features:
⚫︎ Gritty gameplay emulating the numerous tasks of nuclear disaster management
⚫︎ Choice-driven narrative
⚫︎ Abundant environmental storytelling
⚫︎ Multiple sides to align with
⚫︎ Gripping backstories that progress with the plot
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Chornobyl Liquidators' gameplay and story.
 Steam Store |
$19.99 |
Chornobyl Liquidators Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Relative Narrative Freedom Gripping Environmental Storytelling Down And Dirty Gameplay |
Loaded With Bugs Uncanny NPCs Really Awkward Controls |
Chornobyl Liquidators Overall Score - 76/100
Chornobyl Liquidators is a nice and gritty game that emulates the herculean efforts of disaster management crews in nuclear disasters. It also mixes in a very realistic depiction of political intrigue that comes with such major accidents. While it’s severely impeded with numerous bugs and frankly terrible voice acting, it’s still worth trying out.
Chornobyl Liquidators Story - 8/10
Featuring numerous political conflicts during a nuclear disaster’s aftermath, Chornobyl Liquidators’ story is an engaging tale of survival, family, friendship, and big decisions. But while watching your character navigate through the politics of post-disaster Chernobyl and Pripyat is an absolute joy, unfolding of your companions’ and their families’ lives as they survive with you is also quite worthwhile.
Chornobyl Liquidators Gameplay - 8/10
There’s an amazing variety in the number of things this game has you do in the name of completing your tasks. These are accurate to what the Chernobyl liquidators were honored for such as fighting fires, organizing evacuations, sanitizing areas, etc. Not only that, the game also has you completing more secretive operations for the KGB. It’s a lot of fun and only really suffers from the occasional unresponsive and clunky controls.
Chornobyl Liquidators Visuals - 7/10
Chornobyl Liquidators features a lot of gritty environmental storytelling that adequately visualizes the aftermath of a nuclear disaster. Your tasks during those troubled times are animated wonderfully, which makes the entire experience quite engaging. Unfortunately, there’s also a lot of visual bugs that, while occasionally hilarious, can also completely break the game and force a restart.
Chornobyl Liquidators Audio - 8/10
The ambient noise in Chornobyl Liquidators makes the game immensely enjoyable and immersive. When combined with the game’s sound effects, it can easily evoke a mood appropriate for any mission. On the other hand, the same can’t be said for the voice acting. Many of the lines sound like they’re just being read off a script.
Chornobyl Liquidators Value for Money - 7/10
Chornobyl Liquidators’ replayability is hard-carried by its story. While, sure, the gameplay has a lot of variety and each mission that doesn’t specify a method can be approached in different ways, it doesn’t really have the same pull as trying out a different set of choices for subsequent playthroughs.
Chornobyl Liquidators Review: Lots of Bugs, Tons of Potential
The Chernobyl nuclear disaster was a major incident that shook the whole world and turned many eyes towards the topic of nuclear energy. As someone with an engineering background and a passing interest in power generation, I’ve seen quite a lot of documentaries regarding the stories that surround it. While most of my interest is admittedly on the Chernobyl dogs, the stories of the Chernobyl Liquidators were part of what I’ve delved into.
Chornobyl Liquidators is a game that takes its inspiration from the heroic feats of the disaster management crew of the accident. It mixes a fictional plot abundant with intrigue and personal backstories with a historically-accurate tale. The result is an engaging and bold game that puts you into extremely demanding situations.
Although, to be honest, the gameplay isn’t going to appeal to everybody despite how nice it is. Chornobyl Liquidators is essentially House Flipper, but exchanged around half of its variety for a story. That means it might alienate around half of its possible audience to appeal to a player base that might not even notice it.
On top of that, the game is riddled with a similarly challenging amount of bugs and inconveniences that might affect your experience as a whole. There’s even obvious design oversight every now and then such as being allowed to casually converse with NPCs while the radiation kills you. It’s also stunted by the very awkward voice acting; a practically omnipresent annoyance due to its narrative-driven gameplay.
There’s also a lot of times when the game feels less like an emulation of disaster management and espionage, and more like a platformer. Is it a good platformer, though? No, not really.
So, what do you do in Chornobyl Liquidators, anyway? Essentially, you’re part of the cleanup crew. Your arsenal includes what are essentially a giant brush, a scoop, a spray can, and a geiger counter. Well, they’re called different names in-game, but the uses are basically the same.
What’s great about the game is how versatile these tools are in a radioactive landscape. Not only can you use them for their intended purposes, but you can also use them to open up new paths in times of dire need.
While your equipment essentially has infinite ammo, the same cannot be said for your stats. During the course of the game, you’ll have to manage your health, stamina, stress, and radiation levels. These stats are intricately connected with each other. For example, getting dosed with enough radiation will cause your health to whittle away. Meanwhile, with low enough health, your stress levels will gradually accumulate.
In order to survive the radioactive fallout of the nuclear disaster, you must forage for supplies (by taking them without consequence like the real protagonist you are) while accomplishing the tasks you are ordered to do. You must also make strong connections with the people around you by helping them out, listening to their woes, providing them with items, etc.
All of these will be useful as you navigate through the environmentally and politically dangerous landscape of Chornobyl Liquidators.
Pros of Chornobyl Liquidators
| Things Chornobyl Liquidators Got Right |
|---|
|
Relative Narrative Freedom Gripping Environmental Storytelling Down And Dirty Gameplay |
Relative Narrative Freedom
The most engaging part of playing Chornobyl Liquidators isn’t its gameplay. Sure, it’s fun if you enjoyed the publishers’ House Flipper, but Chornobyl Liquidators offers something more.
It actually has a story! But it’s not just any linear story that usually accompanies these types of games. Chornobyl Liquidators allows you to make choices that dictate the direction of the game’s narrative. On top of that, these choices are designed in such a way that you can choose a side that’s typically neglected in plots rife with political conflict: nobody’s.
While sure the game does proceed in a rather linear fashion regardless of your choices, to be able to deny each side their requests or demands and keep everything to yourself whenever you’re able to is quite a breath of fresh air.
Gripping Environmental Storytelling
As a game that aims to replicate some of the events during the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, being able to see the environmental effects of the accident adds a lot of immersion to the experience. This is not only visible as ruined buildings and radioactive areas, but also as heavily-cordoned garrisons and fully-geared soldiers.
The developers have taken great care to ensure that every area feels lived in. Past tense, most of the time. Abandoned buildings truly feel abandoned in a way that truly feels appropriate for the occasion. And what else can make you really feel like you’re there?
Down And Dirty Gameplay
The Chernobyl liquidators were heroes that had many roles during the Chernobyl nuclear disaster’s aftermath. Some of these include fighting the fires that resulted from the reactor’s accident, removing the radioactive debris scattered around the territory, sanitizing the affected areas to prevent the outbreak of diseases, and many other tasks.
You are given an arsenal of tools to help you enact those same tasks. What makes it even more immersive is that your tools are limited in much the same way as the real ones. For example, your spray needs to be regularly repressurized, and your hose can’t spew water without being connected to a hydrant. Heck, even if you can’t even walk too far away from a hydrant if your hose is connected to it.
Of course, the real stuff requires much more than what the game needs you to do. But this is a necessary compromise to at least keep the game moving. Balance is key, after all.
Cons of Chornobyl Liquidators
| Things That Chornobyl Liquidators Can Improve |
|---|
|
Loaded With Bugs Uncanny NPCs Really Awkward Controls |
Loaded With Bugs
Rather unsurprisingly, Chornobyl Liquidators is currently inundated with numerous bugs that range from amusing graphical problems to major ones that can force you to restart. Fortunately, the vast majority of those I’ve encountered belonged to the former, so most of the time it only earned a guffaw.
The funnier ones include your character manifesting an extra set of arms to interact with environmental objects while simultaneously holding a tool, and one that caused my fire hose to remain on the hydrant even after I removed it. There's also one where your body just disappears from this plane of existence and not manifest a shadow, but that might just be an oversight.
To be fair, the only bug I encountered that forced me to reset was when I triggered a dialogue at the same time as I picked up a document. The result was that the document I was reading got stuck on my screen regardless of what I did. Otherwise, the game was completely playable regardless of the visual peculiarities.
Uncanny NPCs
While your playable character has an amazing set of animations for practically everything he does, the same can’t be said for everyone else. They all move in a way that makes them look like hypnotized characters or absentminded zombies. In fact, I haven’t even seen any of them make a gesture while I engage in a conversation with them.
Coupled with the fact that their voice acting sounds like it's being read off a script, one can’t help but wonder if they’re really talking to characters designed to act like human beings.
Really Awkward Controls
One of the things I noticed immediately as I started the game was that certain commands took multiple tries to get a response. At first, I thought that it was just my computer showing symptoms of kicking the bucket, but I didn’t have any problems with the next game I played.
The same problem manifests when you’re trying to restore pressure to your spraying tool and when you’re consuming food items. For the former, it acts like crouch where you need to input the command multiple times to make it work, and for the latter, the consumable’s effect is immediate upon pressing the appropriate hotkey, but you’ll have to wait for a bit before the animation is actually performed.
Lastly, navigating the ruined landscape can be a figurative roller coaster of an experience when it involves having to hurdle yourself up a sheer incline. This is because the vaulting animation is activated each time you press spacebar on climbable ledges, regardless of your current height. That means you can climb up a ladder, interact with a ledge that’s located lower than you, and your character will teleport to a lower position just so it can play the vaulting animation.
Is Chornobyl Liquidators Worth It?
Try it for the story
Chornobyl Liquidators might be riddled with bugs, but there’s barely anything there that would completely ruin your run. At the very least, you’ll derive at least enough enjoyment from it to justify the purchase.
| Platform | Price |
|---|---|
| Steam Store |
$19.99 |
Chornobyl Liquidators FAQ
Does Chornobyl Liquidators have multiplayer?
No, Chornobyl Liquidators is a purely singleplayer experience.
Is Chornobyl a real place?
It’s based on the actual partially-abandoned city of Chernobyl in Ukraine.
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Chornobyl Liquidators Product Information
 |
|
| Title | CHORNOBYL LIQUIDATORS |
|---|---|
| Release Date | June 6, 2024 |
| Developer | Live Motion Games |
| Publisher | Frozen Way |
| Supported Platforms | PC |
| Genre | Survival, Simulator |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | Mature |
| Official Website | N/A |
