Sov's Crazy Ramblings

As I previously promised here is my personal opinions on the recently released S.T.A…. What the hell, stalker.

Stalker Clear sky is a prequel to the first title, STALKER: Shadows of Chernobyl. Both games take place in a strange future ukraine where instead of killing everything, the destroyed reactor at chernobyl instead spews out strange waves that change the fabric of time and space and twist it everywhichway. This makes for some interesting gameplay, with the player constantly having to dodge dangerous anomalies and work out how to use the zone to his or her advantage.

You can’t actually change the sex of your character as that is an integral part of the story, another strange thing that perhaps should be noted is that not once does there appear a female character in the game. I seriously hope in this post apocalyptic world there are indeed females, otherwise I would like to reconsider walking through that odd looking white marsh a few miles back. o.O

STALKER Clear Sky, however, has some rather sad features that its predeccessor did not. Yes it has some beautiful graphics and I was in fact so amazed by the graphics that I took a good five minutes upon starting up the game to look at some of its beauty. It features some of the best HDR, lighting, shadows, mapping etc.. that I have ever seen in a game. Okay its not perfect but very little is. Added to that the performance level of it was good even at highest settings, so they got my hardware actually working.

The downfall of STALKER comes in the form of engine design and game mechanics. I won’t go into massive detail as the long list would take hours to recount. I shall just outline the points.

The game was buggy, nowhere near as buggy as the original stalker, a vast improvement in fact, but still buggy beyond all belief. Each time you reload the game is massively different, your standing with factions can drastically change, your place in the storyline can also change depending on where you save. For example: If you wish to clear a camp of enemies, you shoot one, save the game, load it and then the big army of men that was previously attacking you flees into the fields, providing easy targets for you to pick off as they flee from your awesome saving power.

Second point. They added a lot of interesting things like the faction combat, which doesn’t seem to change a whole lot. A few weapon upgrades and a whole new customisation thing that can turn a shitty little pistol into a superpowered doomsday cannon. (99% srsly). Sadly this doesn’t seem to make a huge amount of difference. You get a great spetsnaz gun near the start with a built in silencer and scope and you can use that for basically the whole game. It is a great gun to start off with and all but keeping it until the last isn’t too fun.

A lot of the same things from the first game have appeared in the second, sure its the same place, if it wasn’t the story wouldn’t fit, but they have effectively copied the gameworld from Shadows of Chernobyl and pasted it into Clear Sky, just now factions live on the other sides of the map and massively dangerous places are now theme parks.

Gun variation was…entirely unchanged to be honest, I saw all the same guns from the first game reappear in the second. There was also a mention of the amazing F200, which in real life is a brilliant weapon, however in STALKER it appears they have forgotten that and make it sound like an old-style gattling cannon, with a similar fire rate(SLOOOOooow) and the only place I have seen it is at the end sequence, where you are GIVEN it, with 20 rounds in it, and a Gauss rifle and told to go and kill the end superdude who is protected by an invincible psy-shield.

This is where the game really goes to shit, you start the ending on a long platform in the power plant, you can see the target on another similar platform running towards you, and the center of them.  You can get a couple of shots off at him and damage his shields slightly. You can’t kill him unless the game is on ultraeasy mode at this point. (for me it was on quite hard)

You then go through multiple “anomalies” which teleport you around various buildings of the power plant. After a few of these jumps you arrive in the same place you saw the end boss running. “GREAT!” you think to yourself, I must be getting close. The arrow on your minimap points mysteriously behind you but you shrug that off as some silly distraction. There is nowhere to go behind you so you decide that forwards is the right way. You take it and are confronted with multiple “bad guys” Who shoot at you and throw un-dodgable grenades.

After a few annoying deaths and many quick save/loads you get to the end of the platform and are invited to climb a ladder, You climb it and get onto the roof near the concrete casing on the reactor.  There is nowhere else to go on this roof apart from a set of stairs with an anomaly on it, you charge at the anomaly hoping it will take you to the target, but it just bounces you back 50 metres. Putting the game into an un-ending loop and thus fucking the story in its stupidly designed asscrack.

You can actually KILL the final guy but you have to do it in a rather odd way, you jump off the building, breaking most of your bones in the process, causing you to bleed for an hour or 2. During this cycle of bleeding and medkit usage you run over to where the boss guy is standing, stuck on nothing, unable to move and totally defenseless.

A few blasts form your gauss rifle later and his shield goes down, a cutscene comes in and the whole world goes to shit. Or so you would have to guess as the screen goes white, you see a load of bodies in a corridor, and then the end credits roll by.

Excellent way to destroy a game, which, up until now had proved to be actually not so terrible.

I myself found it hard to believe that QA didn’t spot a slight problem like “The game cannot be completed without using a massive glitch”. But evidently I live in some strange dimension and only I think like this.

In conclusion I would not recommend STALKER clear sky as it is far too buggy to be enjoyed for the wonderful game that It could well have been. I seriously hope there will be yet another STALKER but this time I hope they also decide to test the game before simply releasing it.

Note: Yes there are LOTS of patches for the game, I was playing with them all applied so i dread to think what it was like at version 1.0

Sub-Note: Thanks for reading, I hope you also look at the other post I posted before this about the attacks in india as this is obviously a much more important issue than gaming.