S.T.A.L.K.E.R Clear Sky – PC review

Can the prequel live up to the sequel?

S.T.A.L.K.E.R Clear Sky – PC. Gaming, PC games, Deep Silver 0

Reviewer: Chris Pickering
Review Date: 5 September 2008
Manufacturer: Deep Silver
Price as reviewed: £29.99
Latest price: £8.95

Our score

7/10

Full Review

Last year’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R was one of the biggest surprises in PC gaming’s recent history. A heavily delayed title, it suddenly sprung onto shelves and proved that the aftermath of Chernobyl could be a fantastic setting for a gaming title.

Playing as a stalker, the first game saw you roaming the landscape are searching out artefacts that could be sold for oodles of cash. But the world out in the Zone was a dangerous place, with unscrupulous types more than happy to blow you away in order to take all the goodies you’ve collected. Plus there was always the minus point of roaming an area suffering from the aftermath of a nuclear disaster. Shocking stuff. Literally.

Clear Sky acts as a prequel to last year’s hit, and you’ll stumble across a number of the areas you’ve already visited (or should that be will visit?) though all will have a slightly different feel. Mainly due the huge influx of folk eager to take in the surroundings of the Zone.

For a nuclear disaster area, it seems that people aren’t too bothered about all the dangers lurking around every corner. Where the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R felt just bare enough to be both challenging and spectacularly atmospheric, this time there are simply too many people eager to chat/have a fight.

And all these people do little to help build the atmosphere. The new voice acting is reasonable for the most part, but certain characters have been stuck with phenomenally overplayed accents, which gives Clear Sky this ridiculously childish feel. You get the feeling that the developers were eager to try and cram in some Fallout-esque humour, without realising that they’re both completely different titles.

The big selling point for Clear Sky is the promise of faction warfare. With all these spectacular artefacts dotting the landscape, there are a number of groups eager to claim dominance. The intention being, seemingly, that you can join up with the faction you see as deserving of your talents, and head off to claim the Zone for yourselves.

But that all falls apart after the first half hour. Once you’re out of the initial swamp land (which proves to be one of the best sections of the game) then you’re essentially back out on your own once again. It’s a huge shame as the idea of frequent battles to claim areas of land is a decent prospect, and could have worked incredibly well in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series.

The slight flaws continue. Enemies keep on flooding towards you almost as if you’re playing a standard FPS, which is not only to the incredible detriment of the atmosphere, but helps make Clear Sky an incredibly difficult game. Keep your fingers on the quick load/save buttons. Plus each enemy seems to have a never ending supply of grenades which can blow you to pieces without you even realising one has flown your way.

And then there are the bandits. Take them out from a distance and you can be merrily on your way after looting their corpses. But, let them get close enough to initiate a little talk and you’re stuck with allowing them to take the contents of your back pack before you can head on your way. There’s no opportunity to break out of the dialogue tree and simply blast them to smithereens, meaning you’ll be frequently loading up an old save rather than start all over again with no goodies.

But despite all this, is still does feel like a S.T.A.L.K.E.R title. It doesn’t do the whole NPC interaction or trading as well as say Deus Ex, but the tension felt in the quieter moments is glorious. The small semblance of character customisation only helps too, which only makes all the additional flaws a real disappointment.

The graphics have received a bit of a touch up too, though you’ll need to be packing a mighty gaming rig if you want to get the most out of Clear Sky. Even a real top of the range system can be brought to its knees by the top settings.

Verdict

There’s no doubt about it, Clear Sky is a disappointment. With such a solid base to build on, it’s a true shame that the addition of so many flaws make this one a few steps behind the original.

It’s not all bad. It has still got that S.T.A.L.K.E.R feel, and it certainly looks a treat. But the poor implementation of the faction warfare, and the overly dense population in the Zone only push this one much close to mediocrity than anyone had expected.

Full tags

Gaming, PC games, Deep Silver

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Comments

Well I agree to a certain extent, but the game really isn't as bad as it's made out to be. It simply has a big reputation to live up to following the amazing original.

First up, it's not scary. Not compared to the original.

However, the faction warfare can be exactly like the swamplands provided you do a few missions relatively quickly and join the first faction you set eyes on, allowing more of the faction based territory grabbing and structured mission objectives (with most factions allowing this apart from the military and possibly the bandits). Then again, Personally I prefered the "you're on your own" element of the original and that being the case, it is also possible to do a few small jobs for each faction without commiting to any and equally not really upsetting any others either.

The view on the bandits is completely wrong. There is a very clear "exit" button at the bottom of the dialogues meaning that half-way through any conversation, you can decide to whip out a weapon and cause havoc. Then again, you can just run through the checkpoints like a greyhound with a hail of bullets chasing behind you.

One REALLY annoying element is the fact that artifacts now seem to be related to moles, digging around at speed underground meaning that to get your hands on one, you'll need to do a lot of standing around in anomolies with a detector in your hand waiting for them to pop out so that you can grab them.

Compared to the previous game, money is very hard to come by, but unlike the previous game, there are lots of things to spend it on as most pieces of kit (armour, weapons etc) can be upgraded and modified.

Well, I'd say it's not a brilliant game compared to the original, but it's still a fair bit above a lot of the others... Posted by Daggsy, England
Okay, my mistake. Even the bandit faction can be joined in the same way as the others, given that you go about it the same way. Posted by Daggsy, England
9-12-08 Okay, 2 days ago I installed this game on my gaming rig that is running Vista 64 on a dual intel core proc (E6600), Geforce 8800 GTX card, SB Audigy 2 ZS and 4 gigs of ram. I had to run in medium to high settings in direct x9 (dx 10 caused my monitor to display only half of the game) only with AA and AF turned off to get decent frame rates during heavy battles. You must really need one heck of rig to run this game with all the eye candy turned on very high. Total play time was around 6 hours before I decided to bail out and give this game to a friend at work. I then went back to playing the Oblivian Lost mod for the previous STALKER game. I just got tired of all the text and talking that was being shoved in my face pratically everywhere I went. Also, I felt as if I could not get a good sense of my surroundings during battle. I have a 24 inch monitor and I'm playing this game at 1600 x 1200 resolution. When I was coming out of the tunnel on my way to Cordon I had to crank up the gamma settings just to see well enough to shoot back. This game is extremely tough even on the novice setting. I found myself bored with the majority of missions I was being asked to complete. I'm sorry but this was a real disapointment for me. Perhaps I will revisit this game when mods come out for it. For now it has lost to much of the feel from the orginal STALKER release to hold my interest. I would have rather seen them pick up from where they left off in the previous game and send me to new places doing the things a stalker does best.

MajorDan Posted by MajorDan, USA
Here's a short yet illustrative chronology of what GCS Game World essentially did to this STALKER release:

They took SoC by the scruff of the neck, shook all the marvellous ambience and feelings of dread out if it, crammed gobs of awful text -- equally stuffed full of quirky American idioms and appalling forms of 'humour' -- down its throat, re-christened it Clear Sky, and pushed it out of the door.

The result: An impoverished, confused, miserable STALKER, waiting to be scooped up into the arms of a dotting modding community.

Posted by Brigand, UK
the game is nice althoug the combat feels slugish.
single player is good, pisiblay very good although the main reasion i started fights was because someone wanted to take my guns. What is it with every other encounter, someone wants to steal my stuff only to have there head blown off with my dubble barrel shotgun ^^

as for the mulitplayer... disapointing is not the word to use... it is buggy, laggy, god awful.

im running a 9800GTX+, 2GB ram, vista blar blar blar big nice spec that can knock the socks of elder scrolls obv yet when i go online it hate it. when you use the knive it dont work properly. when you shoot it glitches... the list goes on

if you just play it for single player it is fun... play online and you may find, like me, you will go right off the game

Posted by Spiritseer, United Kingdom