Clear Sky Offers Good Prequel To Classic Shooter
The original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game, Shadows of Chernobyl was released without too much fanfare, yet quickly managed to become a classic in the minds of many players, myself included. The game was a realistic shooter with a gritty post- apocalyptic type of feel, set in the exclusion and highly radioactive zone around the melted down Chernobyl nuclear plant.
In the original game you played a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. left for dead with a serious case of amnesia. In Clear Sky, you actually play a mercenary working against the main character from the original game, and work to stop or kill him. It’s a pretty neat concept to be playing the other side of the situation, though if you never played the first game you won’t really be lost or anything as the plot here has its own beginning, middle and end. However, if you did play the first game, then it will be great to chase your old character down, or to revisit a lot of the locations from the original game and see how they were different just one year ago.
The graphics for Clear Sky have been vastly improved, though they do demand some serious horsepower. I don’t really think you can achieve the top level graphics with a single core system regardless of your peripheral equipment. Thankfully, it looks great on medium graphics settings as well, and plays pretty good on most systems we tested it out with, though a high-end video card is a necessity in any case. If you happen to have Direct X 10, you will get even more eye candy like god rays of sun streaming down from heaven and water snaking down the sides of buildings in a downpour. But pretty much you can play Clear Sky with the same hardware as the original game and be okay.
The plot of Clear Sky is not quite as intense as Shadow, but still keeps things moving. Basically you are a mercenary with some special connection to the zone, such that emissions that kill everyone else around won’t take you out. The Clear Sky faction in the game is completely new, and made up mostly of scientific types. They guess that the reason the zone is currently being wracked with earth-shattering emissions is because it’s like an entity which is angry because some group of Stalkers made it to the middle of the zone. Like a human body trying to expel a virus, the zone is tearing itself apart tying to be rid of the menace. Of course if you played the first game you know that this is actually your character Strelok from Shadow, but now you have to stop him.
Clear Sky guesses that if Strelok is able to return to the center of the zone once more, that all life will be stamped out. Also, each emission may not instantly kill you (though later in the game you have to reach shelter or they will) but even so it’s slowly killing you by frying your nervous system. If you don’t stop Strelok, you won’t make it out alive either, just like everyone else.
Clear Sky, like Shadow, runs the gauntlet between an RPG and a Shooter, though it’s more Shooter than anything else. The world itself and the game’s plot are fairly non-linear for the most part. You might be told to hurry up and do something, but realistically you can take your time and explore the land.
There are a variety of cool weapons in the game, all pretty much based on their real-life counterparts. So there is both Russian equipment, which is by far the most prevalent, but also British, and American arms as well. And you can customize your favorite guns with a bunch of different mods if you can find a technician, and have plenty of cash to spend. So you can easily trick out your average assault rifle into either a "spray and pray" type killing machine or a silent but deadly sniper rifle. And unlike the previous game, you can also have your weapons and armor repaired by the same technicians, though I do wish there were gun cleaning kits in the game to let you perform this vital field work yourself.
One of the reasons I love the game so much is the realism in terms of combat. Bullets will hurt you, and hurt you bad, if you get hit. Some people may not be used to this level of realism in shooters, but I find it refreshing. It does make things very challenging though, especially at first when you don’t have great equipment. Later on, this realism can work in your favor though, like when you have a sniper rifle and night vision. Then you can take out almost an entire camp of enemies and never be seen, a true feat in a realistic title like this.
The two main changes in the game other than with weapons are faction wars, which I could have lived without, and the new hidden artifact interface, which is also a little annoying though not too bad with a good scanner (there are three types you can use in the game).
For faction wars, you can basically join a faction and then fight to the death against the others. So Duty and Freedom are still at each other’s throats, but so are Stalkers and Bandits. The new faction Clear Sky fights Renegades. I would recommend staying neutral or friendly with Duty and Freedom since they are all over the game and quite powerful. But you can mix it up for the Stalkers or Clear Sky against their enemies without any problems since Bandits and Renegades are scum bags that you are going to be killing a lot anyway.
Faction wars are pretty much like capture and hold the point type of games. You need to hold certain points for a time until your faction can gain ground and fortify the area. Basically this means you have to charge in and kill all the bad guys single handedly and then wait a long time before your worthless allies come up and you are given credit for taking the point. And then you have to run back and help them out every time they are attacked by bandits, dogs or mutants, which is a lot. So you will probably play the faction wars a bit and then quickly get tired of it. It goes on all around you in the game, though you can mostly ignore it.
The invisible artifacts are a new and odd twist as well. Before, you could see the artifacts and could scoop them up. Now for some reason they are invisible. So you need to use detectors to find them. The first detector is about worthless. The second one you find at least gives you some direction. The third and most advanced one gives you a radar showing where to go exactly, which works well. Artifacts however are placed inside dangerous anomalies or highly radioactive areas, so you are going to need to get burned, shocked, radiated, exploded or beaten up to get them. There is just no getting around that. Given that artifacts can give you almost magical powers, it’s worth the pain to dig them up.
Okay, now for the bad part, which is why I gave Clear Sky a gameplay score of 3, which really should have been lower. And this is the same problem as the first game: the bugs. It seems, like the graphics, the bugs have also been enhanced. They range from annoying like not being able to complete a quest because the quest giver suddenly forgets who you are after you have trudged across mutant-infected swamps to retrieve some stupid item for them, to the critical and seemingly random game crash. I have even had the game crash only to reload it to see it crash again, like the crash was written into the save file or something. Basically, Clear Sky has more bugs than any piece of commercial software I have ever encountered. And dang it, if the game was not so good otherwise, I would slam it much harder than this. I can live with having 15, yes 15, unsolvable quests in my inventory and a bunch of flash drives that people wanted me to pick up but then won’t accept, the occasional complete crash, and some idiotic AI problems with my supposed allies, because I really do love exploring and fighting in the zone.
Also, and this is a minor complaint, I would have liked to see some variety in the people you meet in the zone. Why are there no women in the entire zone? Good grief, Russian women made some of the best snipers in the world, yet not one female decided to head into the zone to get rich collecting artifacts? Also it would have been good if not every guy you meet was Russian. How about some British or Korean mercenaries? A tiny bit of variety would have added some more flavor.
At least there is also a multiplayer mode which is pretty fun to play. Given the gorgeous rundown looking environments, it’s nice to be able to fight in all those beautifully rendered zones against real people.
I know not everyone will have the same light handed take on Clear Sky as me and really, this is not a game for everyone. If you don’t have infinite patience and a true love for open world shooters (or perhaps are not a hardcore Stalker fan) then you might want to let this one pass. Or you should probably at least wait until all the patches come out to fix the problems, though the developers should have done this long before the game shipped. And given that the release of Fallout 3 is just around the corner, there might be a better outlet for your post-apocalyptic ambitions real soon anyway.
In the end, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky is a very good game that could have been great had it not been for the biggest slew of bugs this side of the Amazon. Even so, the game is highly entertaining and probably a good buy for those who like open world shooters, or the Stalker series in general. It earns 4 GiN Gems, for only being slightly radioactive.