Made it back!
Observations: like almost all of the Ukraine, Chernobyl is FLAT.
To illustrate: the raised road embankment and railway embankments in 'Cordon' are bigger than any inclines you'll find IRL.
There are a couple of riverbends with small bluffs above them – that's about it for elevation.
It's ALL wooded. Almost no open spaces at all. Everything's covered in new growth woods or thick brush that the locals call 'jungle'.
The outer zone is populated – there's a workforce (on 15-day rotations) doing road maintenance, decommissioning the plant, clean-up and such, and support facilities for them in Chernobyl town.
The buildings really do have random ladders enabling you to get up onto and travel between rooftops. Which is as cool as it sounds.
There are wild dogs – different groups hang around specific areas. In most places, they're fed scraps by the local workers and are little different from the communal 'latchkey' dogs common in Eastern Europe. In other places, particularly in the inner zone, they've been treated as vermin and are consequently properly feral. You have to know which group you're looking at. (we had a rather tense 'Ees no friendly…' encounter)
Pripyat is going fast. There was a structural survey in 2015 which concluded that water damage (from seasonal freezing & thawing) would put all the buildings there at risk of collapse by 2022.
The secondary school there is quite spectacularly concertina-ed.
(Also: the outdoor theatre in the holiday-cabin village – where you night hunt the chimera asleep on the stage – has been smashed by a falling tree.)
Thing is – there are still enough locations in there for another game, without replicating any previous levels! The giant, 126-meter high cooling tower, with its single precarious rusty ladder leading up to a crown of rickety scaffolding, echoing interior with colossal pipework and kestrels circling inside, would be spectacular.
There are two huge complexes – the unfinished No.4 & No.5 reactors – each surrounded by extensive construction sites and a fretwork of cranes.
Didn't get to do a flyover – Mayday celebrations intervened. I could quite happily go back for more!
Pics to follow when I can sort out file-jpeg nonsense.
Alien – I went with a guide from Chernobylwel.com
They were brilliant. (I had looked at a company called SoloEast, but they repeatedly screwed up the booking – one to avoid.)
gives you the gift of being OK with that. 
