S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky Reviews

Good old Stalker now with more anamolies that will crash the game(sometimes)

Played nearly as much of this one as Stalker 2. First one i ever got and it scared the shit out of me as a tween but i got through that because of how badly i wanted to play this game (and metro 2033 first) and it helped me grow as a person. At the time of the review going back to play it again. unmodded or not. prequel to the first game. feels to me that it has a really good intro to the stalker universe for new players.

bro wtf is wrong with this game AI and grenades.they keep spamming grenades man,i was fightting 12 bandits and 12 of them throw grenades at me AT THE SAME TIME.not to mention the shit ass accuracy of your guns and how little damage they deal.youre telling me that a guy wearing trench coat can take on 3 7.62s to the chest?while if i get hit once or twice my HP deplete imediately.i have no comment about the story but the gunplay sucks.save your money for call of pripyat and install gunslinger mod on it

Clear Sky feels half-baked. It's still plenty enjoyable, especially the middle part - running around grabbing artifacts and causing issues is always a treat - but the gameplay feels disjointed, split between its more atmospheric play and the shooters it's emulating and catching an awkward valley in between them. Its ending was a mighty difficulty spike and oddly paced, rushing you through and through to an ultimately unsatisfying final fight. Worth grabbing on sale for a shorter romp, but it's the jankiest (and, in my experience, the buggiest) of the original STALKER trio.

Worst of the trilogy. After you enter Limansk, it becomes worse by every minute. The game is very good until Limansk, sadly the AI is far worse than in SoC or CoP, but it helps a lot during the last section. Exploring, artifact hunting and the gunplay is good, the bleeding is terrible (you can bleed out from 3 bullets, and ofc most of the time 1 bandage isn't enough to stop the bleeding). Enemies love grenades, you won't be able to kill anyone with it though... I wasn't able to finish the game, gave up after the hospital section, it was just too repetitive and unfair (enemies spawning behind you, allies do nothing, etc.). Overall, I had a good time with the game for the first ~29 hours, after I reached the Red Forest, it went downhill, after Limansk, it just sucked ass. It shows that Clear Sky came out after the first game about a year later, it was rushed. If it wasn't for the last few missions, I would recommend it. The new zones are far better, than the ones in CoP. It isn't so much worse than the other 2 game and FAR BETTER, than the Heart of Chernobyl. If you are interested in the story, I don't recommend it, if you just want to explore, I do recommend it, just buy it when it is on sale. The best option is to play Call of Chernobyl, which has every zone from the first 3 games, so you can experience the red forest, limansk and the swamps of course.

This game is pretty much just a worse Shadow Of Chernobyl with the highlight of it the entire game definitely being Limansk. The faction system is cool but isn't fleshed out nearly enough to be that interesting. I enjoyed the prequel feel of exploring a map I already knew but at times thought it was a bit lazy. Limansk made the entire game worth playing, the depraved and hopeless feeling of it was palpable throughout the entire experience. It was similar to Pripyat but a much heavier feeling of it being over. I feel like the story could have been much more interesting if we had seen some sign of clear sky in SOC or COP (besides the body armor) but since we don't it's pretty hard to care about the story or lore of a faction in the zone that never shows up again. Overall Clear Sky is not a bad game but it is certainly the middle child of this franchise. It has neither the amazing story of SOC nor the refined gameplay of COP, regardless of this it's still worth playing just for some of that classic stalker kino.

I'm not a tech savvy person and I haven't researched how to make this game playable. It's glitchy and buggy to the extreme. Whenever I get around to this game again, maybe I'll change the review.

It must be hard to not make a modern stalker not feel like a unity asset dump, og stalker is where its at

Zombie got stuck in scientist base, cant get in anymore and i have to play trough the game all over again. Best game ever!

For anyone who's thinking of buying this game, I highly recommend installing the latest version of (at the time of me writing this) The Sky Reclamation Project (SRP) community patch + the Optional Features recommended by the developer marked with an asterisx (*) in the corresponding text file. And after you've done that, go into gamedata/config/weapons, open every file starting with "w_" with Notepad++ or whatever text editor you use, look for a line called "time_to_aim" and set the number to "0", that'll fix the horrid gunplay. Trust me, if you play Clear Sky without this, you're gonna have a miserable as hell experience. With that all said, this isn't as great as Shadow of Chernobyl or Call of Pripyat, but it's still worth checking out.