Exterior Fighting
Fighting in the great outdoors can be a tricky proposition, depending on a number of factors: the number of enemies you're going up against, the types of weapons they're using, the type of weapon you're using, the amount of ammo you have to spare, and so on. That said, here are some basic tips to hopefully keep you alive.
Sprint Between Cover: Run. Not necessarily away from your enemies, but towards cover. If your foes spot you from a long ways away and open fire, then you'll be at a marked disadvantage. While your enemies might not be accurate from long range, they'll have the advantage of infinite bullets and strength of numbers, so they'll be able to whittle down your health from long range while you struggle to hit them.
So, try to close in on your foes whenever possible. Luckily, in the great outdoors, there will usually be plenty of cover for you to use, so get used to sprinting from cover to cover until you get within a decent firing range. If you sprint out from one piece of cover to another, you may get hit by a bullet or two; these will stop you from sprinting, but if you simply hit the button again, you'll resume running. Keep going until you manage to hit a piece of cover that satisfies you and allows you to fire at your foes from a range that will let you actually hit them.
Duck: Well, duh. You have a crouch key in the game here, which will let you crouch down a bit before firing. You also have a second crouch key that can only be activated when you're already using the first, normal crouch key; it lets you crouch down even lower. And that's awesome.
Anyway, ducking down a bit will make you a smaller target, making it more difficult for enemies to hit you. It seems to have a fairly small effect on accuracy, as well. There isn't any way to go prone, as far as we can tell, which is too bad.
Know When To Close In: Some enemies will switch weapons if you get close enough to them. If a soldier with a sniper rifle or a rocket launcher is giving you fits, try to sprint close to them and engage them at close range. Usually this will force them to switch to a pistol and engage you with that, reducing their effectiveness quite a bit.
Interior Fighting
You'll be doing plenty of fighting inside structures and facilities as you proceed through the game, which bring their own unique challenges. Here are some tips to help you out.
Use Grenades: You'll find a fair number of grenades on the bodies of soldiers that you kill. Pick them up and save them for interior fighting. Grenades can be bounced off of walls and around corners, and are especially helpful when you have three or four soldiers to deal with at one time. Soldiers will spread out when a grenade lands near them, so be ready for that by switching to another weapon after throwing your grenade.
Grenades are, by default, bound to the 4 key.
Lure Your Foes To You: When dealing with enemies in tight corridors, it can help to be a little noisy. Generally it's easier to tag enemies as they come around corners looking for you; you'll know approximately where their head will be, and will be able to snap-fire more quickly than they'll likely be able to react to. If you have a shotgun, you can blast them in the chest for an instant kill in most cases.
To lure an enemy out to you, simply fire at them a few times, then duck back behind a corner and wait for them to come. Not all enemies will actually follow you around a corner and let you take them down; if they don't, though, then see our advice about bouncing grenades off of walls above.
Weapon Types
There are a number of different types of weapons in Stalker. Here’s a rundown on the basic sorts.
Knife: You start the game with a basic knife as your buddy, bound to the 1 key. It’s not going to be of much use to you during the game, unless you want to smash crates to see what’s inside of them. You can still use it to get kills on enemies, if you wish; try rushing them while they reload and slicing them. This is most useful on zombified enemies, who seem to be less resistant to knife attacks than normal humans.
Pistols: You’re going to start the game with no weapons at all, save the knife, but you’ll soon find a pistol. You won’t be using it very long, but your pistol will still be a trusty sidekick for the first hour or so of the game, allowing you to rapidly shoot enemies while conserving ammo for your more significant weapons. Go for the headshots when you’re up close with your pistol; at greater distances, the inaccuracy of a pistol will force you to shoot the body if you want to hit your target at all.
After you grab enough ammo to consistently be able to fire an SMG or assault rifle, you can feel free to drop your pistol and all its ammo. You'll find better pistols as you proceed through the game, but they'll almost always wind up being dead weight after you get an assault rifle.
Shotguns: There are only a few different types of shotguns in the game, but you’ll be using the first one, a simple double-barrelled sawed-off shottie, the most. It pops up fairly early on in your first little skirmish, and it’ll be a powerful tool for popping fools from then on. Like you might expect, shotguns exchange accuracy for power; they can’t hit anything farther than a few meters away with any reliability, but when you get someone up close to you, they’ll put him down right quick.
Shotguns are thus best used indoors, in small buildings or in the larger facilities that you’ll eventually be entering. If you can get an enemy’s attention and lure him towards you, you can simply wait for him to come around a corner and blast him a couple times for a quick kill. They work best on the lightly armored foes you'll be encountering early in the game; by the time you start seeing exoskeleton-using enemies from Monolith or Freedom, though, you'll find shotgun effectiveness to be greatly reduced, with many enemies able to shrug off a full clip of six shotgun shells. If you're really good at getting headshots, then the pump-action shotguns available later in the game might be worth your while, but the lengthy reload animations will probably allow enemies to kill you off with impunity.
Submachineguns: Early in the game, you'll run across a number of submachineguns, such as the Viper 5, mostly in the hands of the military or well-armed bandits. These weapons aren't very accurate, but can quickly put down lightly armored enemies with body shots or a well-aimed headshot.
Assault Rifles: The mainstay of your arsenal will be the assault rifle. These versatile weapons can be shifted from semi-automatic to automatic fire, letting you go from accurately getting headshots at medium range to simply blasting fools with automatic fire when they get too close.
There are a huge array of assault rifles in the game, with the highlight probably being the GP 37 that you'll start running across when you reach the Army Warehouses district. With a built-in scope and low recoil, you're going to want to be using that weapon for most of the rest of the game. Up until that point, you'll be finding new assault rifles to use every couple hours of gameplay or so. When deciding whether or not to use a new weapon that you've discovered, check the stats: weigh differences in accuracy and ammunition before making the switch. Sometimes it's best to simply pass up a new weapon and collect the ammo for it until you have enough to ensure that you can actually using it. Dropping your old weapon and 300 rounds of ammo for a new gun that only has 20 rounds in it is usually a bad idea. You'll usually want to have at least 100-200 rounds of ammo for a weapon before you can feel comfortable calling it your mainstay.
Sniper Rifles: You'll start running across sniper rifles in decent quantities when you reach the Army Warehouses and Red Forest districts. These are unmatched for accuracy, usually, allowing you to get somewhere in the vicinity of your target's head from a good distance away. Ammunition will be fairly sparse, though, so you won't want to be using sniper rifles on every foe you see. In most cases you'll simply want to save your ammo for enemy snipers that are hidden up in towers or other high elevations. The only true sci-fi gun in the game, the gauss rifle/railgun, is considered a sniper rifle, but you won't actually find it until it'll probably be too late for you to make much use of it.
When carrying a sniper rifle, your ability to aim will be slowed down a bit (to make it easier to aim at distant targets), and you also will be prevented from running for some reason.
Rocket Launchers: There are very few rocket launchers in the game, with perhaps only a dozen rounds of ammo or so available for them in total. They're powerful, of course, assuming you manage to aim them at a crowd of foes, but they're also heavy and cumbersome to carry around while you wait for the perfect opportunity to use them. We never really bothered with them, ourselves, mostly due to the weight issue.