S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky Comments by Kieron Gillen

Gah.

/shakes fist

Still, I loved the first, so I'll get it. I was hoping the review scores would be high for the developers sake more than anything. I want to see them do well and produce more ambitious games - hopefully sales will be helped by the fact that it's a sequel to a bit of a cult classic.

a thoughtful review (and I'm pretty critical of reviewers). I'm still buying this game. I dont mind re-loading a game save because the developers decided to make the game too hard, and that seems to be the biggest gripe of the reviewer. The upgradeable weapons options sound excellent. It isnt clear from this review if the main story is interesting or not -- perhaps the reviewer is trying to avoid giving away the plot. And there's not enough mention of the quality of the enemy AI -- that should have been MUCH more discussed in a review of this type of game.

Is the AI as completely pathetic as it was in the first one? Does it run terribly even on a good system, and even though it doesn't look that great? Are the ropey animations and aging combat mechanics back?

Did I read correctly that it's nice to see AI that throws grenades?? What year did Halflife come out again?

I'll give this one a miss I think.

Would love to have played the first game, but only ever got 2-3 hours in due to the constant crashing to desktop. And this was on two different PCs with different gfx cards, updated drivers, latest patches, trying different settings etc. etc. just pissed me off in the end.
Think I'll be avoiding this one too, unless there is an engine bug fix for "Hang every 15 minutes"?

Is the AI as completely pathetic as it was in the first one? Does it run terribly even on a good system, and even though it doesn't look that great?

Completely the opposite of my experience. Loved the AI - it could be exploited, like pretty much any can, but for an AI that navigates a pretty much open gameworld, it was excellent. Certainly one of the most fun AI to play against of any shooter, alongside Half-Life 1, Operation Flashpoint and FEAR for me. All you need to do to test the AI is do the very first mission, the carpark one, alone and on one of the higher difficulty levels.

Also ran great on my at the time less than stellar system.

"...where it simply and unavoidably strips your character of all your equipment, artifacts and money..."

LOL! Amazing design!

EDIT: Oh and are the guns as shocking terrible as they were in the first game?

The guns shockingly terrible? I thought Stalker had the best gun feeling of any game I've tried over the last couple of years! Or did you refer to the main character's bad aim? Or the way weapons constantly broke down?

The original game was difficult enough for me. I remember getting frustrated trying to approach the power plant at the end. I really enjoyed the game but that was because of the open-ended world, the atmosphere and attention to detail.

kangarootoo:
Maybe you havent seen a board where every first post is "Firsties!" and the second post is something like "Firsties!! edit: DAMN! NOOO!" and there are about 100 posts at the end that say "Lasties!". The people who said fuck off- these mental defectives just don't like spam. Crazy.

Oh and are the guns as shocking terrible as they were in the first game?

A part of this thread is obviously from a parallel universe, where people word their dubious subjective opinions as facts, and Stalker had bad AI, ran badly, and had terrible weapons. :p

Absolutely loved them - never saw the need for any of the weapon mods. The first few weapons are weak, yeah, but that quickly changes.

@avoozl: Yeah, the last part of the game apparently was rushed and obviously was a major disappointment, for me the middlepart of the game where you were starting to become a well equipped stalker with firepower and experience was where the game showed it's true potensial. Also form what I've heared the Oblivion Lost mod changes the end-part so you can investigate more around the power plant and not sprint to the first door you can find. The two last maps for me ended up in having lost of money and guns but no ammo. I had to gun down snipers on rooftops with crappy pistols or mp5 and scavenge any ammo i could see falling down.

Played it on hardest, I'm now in the start (first underground map) of Oblivion lost 2.2 mod, had to restart from 2.1 to 2.2. The beginning is indeed boring especially the 3rd time around, but wthe very fist time I felt it was a decent tutorial area to learn how animals and soldiers noticed me and having a safe plase to just getting to know the world. The mod is no problem to play on hardest because of the "real damage" model i.e fewer well placed bullets to kill.

edit: Typos and anomalous sentenses

My hope for Clear Sky was that this middlepart would be streched out with more side quests with helping factions or just dominating the zone, but it seemes like GSC have lost their way in what they really want ,yet again, by vaguely "improving everything" and even adding more flaws like the "stip all inventory" bugs(?).

Still I remain positive with the modding community ready to... well, fix it :/. (the OL 2.2 mod is the final since Clear sky is out these days).

I enjoyed original stalker a lot. As far as shooters go, it beat all the competition to the ground in the atmosphere department. Mind you, I didn't use any mods, but after I heard about oblivion lost mod, and read what it does...it seems that it turned stalker into something very, very good. Pity it's not compatibile with my version of stalker, oh well.
So who knows, maybe this staker will be good also. Besides, the point where you are getting robbed...Even at the beginning I was always keeping at least two different stashes of spare ammo and guns, just in case I'd need them or lose the ones I have. Hopefully you can do it in clear sky also, thus reducing the problem of losing everything.

I definitely remember shooting baddies in the foot without them noticing, in a throwback to 90's FPS games. And something about the weapons just didn't feel right... they didn't feel punchy or powerful and sounded like they were being fired in a furniture store.

being able to throw a grenade was about the most intelligent thing the combine AI in HL2 was capable of doing.

I didn't say 2 :)

The first few weapons are weak, yeah, but that quickly changes.

Indeed, by which I mean they were weak, inaccurate and fell apart. Annoying!

The 1st STALKER was probably the best game I ever hated. I was REALLY hoping they'd get it right this time, but I'm not surprised to hear the prequel is also flawed. 7/10 is about where I'd rate the 1st one, after honestly considering everything that was great about it, and everything that was broken or just sorta weird about it. I wish the critics had been as hard on the original as this reviewer is here. I always felt like STALKER got a bit of a pass on some very poor design decisions.

I actually built a new PC (for the 1st time in a couple of years) hoping this would be good, but considering how much the last game ticked me off (with everyone calling it an 8 or a 9/10), a 7 is not compelling.

Oooooh. I JUST, less than an hour ago, came back home from a trip to Ukraine and a photo expedition to Chernobyl and Pripyat. On the flight home I was thinking that I maybe should play S.T.A.L.K.E.R but I had no idea there was a new one out.
EXCELLENT.

Not as good as MGS4, then.

"Oh and are the guns as shocking terrible as they were in the first game?"

Try getting a bit further, nobody judged HLē's general gun feeling by its awful first pistol and spray-rifle either.

Hmm. Well i'm disappointed at these flaws. But like many I'm such a fan of the first I will probably still get this off steam. It odes annoy me when people say the "gun feel" was bad in stalker. In fact I thought it was excellent, you just need to get some slightly better guns and be accurate. Played really well. This open world FPS has a character unlike any other, and is something I would love to see more of so I will support the creators. With the design decisions stripping your kit, that's not great.

I like the review to a point but some of the detail on missions and also the structure of the map (the first one was tiled together in quite a linear fashion I felt) would be nice. Are all the locations from the first available as well as new ones..

Also how much of the first did I miss if I just stormed though and pwned everyone first time? I remember the zombie bit being the best, but i think I may have missed the poltergeist oir maybe I forgot.. Aslo some milatry base that I stormed through but think I could have done on stealth if i was cleverer - not sure? Also it ended really abruptly and I seemed to have to just peg at the end to just survive..

I agree with the reviewer about the quick save option. I hate to see that GSC left it in. Free Roaming games should NOT have quicksave, because it turns the game too much in a trail and error game instead of an open world experience. I loved the OL mod - dispite the quick save option - so I don't know... I am going to wait before buying it and see what mods come out...

GTA, Diablo are the most succesfull offline open world series and they didn't have quick save too. But much better saving systems that increased the open world experience.

I think that that is the first fundamental design fault that GSC made..

stalker was the best open ended pc shooter of the last 5 years, easy. i think of it as the heir to classics like dues ex and system shock. superb ballistics, weapons, atmosphere, storyline, graphics, and darn good ai. and what's more, it's not one of these "let's pamper the attention span deficient console mentality gamer." leave it to the eastern european game designers not to babysit lazy gamers, but instead to challenge them and make them think and work...bring it on!

and what's more, it's not one of these "let's pamper the attention span deficient console mentality gamer." leave it to the eastern european game designers not to babysit lazy gamers, but instead to challenge them and make them think and work...

"Console mentality"? There's no such thing. PC-gaming handicap can console him/herself believing in his/her mental superiority, but playing PC games doesn't make one less handicapped, than playing console games.
If you enjoy getting stuck in some gloomy anus of game's world, frantically wondering what the hell did you miss and where the bloody hell it was (because now, to finish the game, you must backtracking aroud, licking evry single corner of every location - fool's errand, one can say - unless you give up and read the solution), play Super Metroid (SNES game, pretty much ancestor of Thief, Deus Ex and so on). Implying that console games generally lack challenge, reveals lack of knowlege.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. surely is PC-game-like PC game (no wonder, considering it was developed exclusively for PC), but it's also underdone in PC-game-like manner. Reading about all content supposed to be there, I was (heck, I still am) hyped up, expecting no less than Fallout, Deus Ex and Gothic in one package. Early screenshots impressed me even more. In fact I'm familiar with post-Soviet (middle)Eastern European landscapes (and I must admit - H-L2 designers, despite being Americans, did incredibly good job), Strugatskys' books and Tarkovsky's movies, and all those elements "in my head" still fit perfectly to each other. Then the game was released and appeared to be mainly FPS. Still good to hear/read it's at least playable and not short of proper atmosphere. For me S.T.A.L.K.E.R. remains only good reason to bulid new PC. I've yet to play, but I've seen it running with details set on medium-to-low; looks and sounds great in my opinion (human bevaviour could be more polished though, and I don't mean AI).

Smelly HATED the first game.. boring as hell!

sounds a bit like the reviewer got stuck in the initial slog part and got disheartened.
strange nothing mentioned about the much heralded factions system?

I got some of my questions answered at the stalker thread at the EG forum.

Snooz wrote:
@bad_english

Cool

Questions:

1.Are the areas larger than the original?
2.Are there bottleneck-places you have to go to enter the neighbouring area?
3.Do you need sleep?
4.Does food still heal you?
5.Are there vehicles?
6.Are there random blowouts?


1. I have not yet finished the game ... There are very interesting and atmospheric places. And quite large
2. Yes. Tne ZOne have a lot of "bottleneck-places" in different parts. We also have companions, who quickly brought to the correct part ZONE for money.
3. No:( Can not sleep. This is bad, personally I wait to modifications.
4. Yes. A little
5. No
6. I have very rarely. But many plyng peoples complain it.
Maybe in your release some bugs already fixed

Oh and are the guns as shocking terrible as they were in the first game?

You didn't play very far, did you? :D Some of the AK variants are already pretty good, but once you get to the NATO weapons, they're fantastic. And you've obviously never fired the Vintar before :D Easily one of the most fun weapons in any game ever.

But I can fully understand where you're coming from. The first couple of hours, your weapons are admittedly absolute rubbish, but I actually liked that. It gave the whole thing a sense of progression and achievement without resorting to experience points and stat bumping.

I expect CS will be a grower and really shine with the first patch and some mods. Should be good.

I must admit I gave up on the single player game after crossing the railway tracks at the beginning of the game, standing 10ft from a soldier, the crosshair saying that I am aiming in their head (or chest) putting 10-20 bullets in them only to have the soldier not flinch and kill me. RUbbish

Multiplayer was good though, might give this one a try as it is cheapish on play.com

@jmg123

I believe many of us have quite different expectations to what guns do in reality. Yes in Counter Strike etc you will hit where you aim, but in AmericasArmy, operation flash point and stalker, single shots and burst are the best ways to fire. Not that I have fired many guns in my life, but hitting anything form more than 20m starts getting tricky enough with single shot rifles.

And crossing that railroad was really where the game begun.... first time i crossed it it was night and i could see gunfights between stalkers, bandits and some mutant animals.

Multiplayer in my opinion was a major disappointment no matter how hard I really wanted to like it.

Oh man....

The reviewer is... how to say? A total asshole that had only played with an atari in the 80īs...
Havenīt any one noticed that he started the review whith a story of a flying bucked in the underground that suddenly was thrown to his head!!! And later on the review he states that the sensation of survival horror was pulled down...I feel so sorry but for me horror is when unsuspected things happens...
and that the game is hard as hell because of the possibility of losing all your equipment at once if you decide to stand in front of a camp of bandits; also for the lack of money, armor, healing kits and artifacts... well that can be a good definition of survivalism... Oh, wait, first I said HORROR and later on SURVIVAL, that word reminds me of something... wait that is Survival Horror!!!

What I said the reviewer was not at all the correct person to evaluate this kind of game. Mainly, the criticism of the review is only about how damm hard can it be. That could be true if the game was Super Mario or Gears of War, but we are talking about a simulation of the zone and if anyone has seen the original movie he will now of what I am talking about (if you liked Stalker and havenīt seen it and like european cinema with philosophic content look for it and wonīt regret it) mainly the idea of the game is that you are in a contaminated zone where weird things happens... you shouldnīt complain because you cannot find the artifacts (the zone is not disneyland whinner!!!)

Ending (all of you who didnīt pass to the next post I love you) keep in mind that except for the thing of losing all your equipment (thank you for spill a great moment for all of us!!! Thank you Experienced-Reviewer-Spoiler!!!) it seems that every aspect of the review was exactly what I was expecting for Clear Sky...

(I have cancelled all my social life for the weekend)

If y lilked the first Stalker you know you canīt miss the prequel....

I've played quite a bit of the game (on veteran, and subsequently master difficulties), and overlooking the lack of stability and the bugs, it feels like a significant improvement over Shadow of Chernobyl.

The newly added features (artifact detectors, and the need for them, fast travel, factional warfare and upgrades) all go twoards improving gameplay. Making enemies and anomalies more deadly goes much the same way (also, you can now shoot through trees, and probably other light cover, providing your calibre's high enough).

Money isn't an issue - by the time the plotline took my money (yes, i loaded and spent it!) I had in excess of 60,000 rubles, which upgraded my TR301 nicely into a sniper variant, as well as getting me a set of partially upgraded Military armor (with enough change for a fully upgraded Spas shotty, my sidearm, for blowing away all those pesky mutants).

Admittedly, the atrifacts are currently rather buggy - they just dont spawn as they ought to, leaving you trampling through deadly anomalies and malignant areas (which fry your brains, balls or burn you in various ways) while the so-so souvenir of the zone is pulled into our plane of existance. The guns, too, seem in need to a few tweaks - early on, an upgraded pistol will mean you can easily clear the first few levels just by using hard cover and leaning out for headshots.

The main issue for me are the NPCs - it's true, if you have a friendly (or not) faction in the area, they assault your PDA with calls for help or assistance in raiding their foe's outposts. Even clearing the enitre map of hostile groups doesn't help since the respawn rate is on the far side of unrealisic! (mutants in the area west of Garbage - I forget what it's called, and renegades in Swamps). Not to mention the AI which perhaps should be recalled for factory defects, or renamed AS - for Artificial Stupidity. Not only do vendours sometimes get spooked by enemies that aren't there and wander off, leaving you to twiddle your thumbs and make small talk with the "normal" NPCs while you wait for them to regain their "misplaced" gip on reality, or walk/fast travel to an alternative base. The enemy AI, again proves "interesting" and impressive in some aspects, and shockingly retarded in others. No sightings of the promised "bring fire" from them, either.

All in all, the game is a prequel, and follows in the shadow of... Shadow of Chernobyl, which made a big enough impact to make any followup look either as the work of Christ, or major disappointment. Happily, I'd say that Clear Sky falls somewhere between the two for me. It stood no chance of being Godsend, as it was just too much a "prequel" the engine and graphics are essentially the same, as are half the levels (and most of the guns and enemies)! The improved gameplay ascpects, however prevent it being a disappointment and the updated graphics mean that no one in their right mind will say "it should've just been an expansion".

Oh, on a side note, the properties of the artifacts have been changed - they may bear the appearance and name of those you are used to, but just make sure you read the stats (soul is my current favourite)!

As for the review itself, I'd say 7/10. It's an early version and you made as much of it as you could have. And in contrast to what you suggest, it seems that you are at fault, to some degreeat least, for not being industrious enough. That being said, the game is far from perfect, and feels like it's been released at least a month too early.

As a side note, the Russian collector's edition is brilliant: a glowing artifact, butane lighter, bandana, patches of various factions, story book,dog tags, etc. Whereas the european collector's edition is just disappointing... a tin, a poster and a map...

Hmm... So... In case in a fit of optimism I decide to buy this, here's a WILDLY optimistic question: Will it run under Vista x64?

That's... about what I figured. :/

Why would it not run under Vista 64?

The first one had graphical glitches and frequent crashes (esp when saving games, yum) under Vista 64-bit. Patches and hacks gradually fixed that.

I'm running unpatched CS on Vista 64-bit and it seems fine (though dynamic lighting at dawn and dusk taxes the machine)