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

Factions

The first part can be seen as a small tutorial that shows you the way you can interact with a faction, how to make them your friends, and how to get assignments so you can earn money. You can take control of certain points on the map by talking with a person from the faction you’re helping. They will then tag along and together you can attack the strongpoint more easily. You could do it alone but a little extra firepower doesn’t hurt, and although the AI isn’t that good, it’s good enough to serve as cannon fodder. Make sure you don’t hit your friends, or your relations with the faction will suffer badly because of it!

Once you’ve killed all the enemies, the strong point belongs to you and you can move on to the next one. Sometimes the opposing faction will attack a strongpoint and you will be asked to help defend it, and if you succeed you earn a little money. A few flaws popped up here as well; sometimes your faction seems to be waiting for a counterattack that never comes. If you decide to take the next strongpoint by yourself, your faction won’t come to you and the strongpoint will fall into enemy hands as soon as you leave it.

Looking for artifacts

When leaving the swamps you run into another minor flaw of the game. The place where you enter the map is covered by a Army heavy machine gun and there’s no way to sneak past it. After some cursing and some googling, I discovered that you could simply go back to the swamps, and choose a different point of entrance into the new map, one not covered by a heavy machine gun. With this over, you have to start befriending new factions otherwise you will not get the clues necessary to continue the main story. You can often do side quests as well and roam around freely looking for loot; Clear Sky is a free roaming shooter, after all. You’ll get to shoot mutated monsters for a change, instead of armed humans. Often other stalkers you’ve saved, helped or killed will have information hidden on their body concerning stashes scattered throughout the map, which you can loot for valuable items.

With all its hostility and dangerous places, the Zone must have something that attracts all the stalkers. These things they are looking for en masse are called artifacts; they grant benefits like reduced bleeding, extra stamina or the ability to carry more weight, or you could of course sell them for a fair amount of money. All these benefits come at a personal price; you will receive radiation from these artifacts. Luckily enough, there is an artifact that negates the effects of radiation, so if you use that particular artifact you can use the other ones without having to drink enormous amounts of vodka to survive. The problem here is that artifacts are hard to find – I like to think of them as needles in a radioactive haystack. You do have a tool that allows you to find the artifacts, and just like a metal detector it will beep if you come close to one. More advanced versions show you in what direction the artifact is, but you will still have to look very closely to find it.

Free roaming vs scripted action

Free roaming or not, there’s plenty of scripted action to go around and to keep things moving. At one point for example, you have to capture a strongpoint with a radar installation. Before you even get close, you’ll hear the gunfire and see tracer rounds flying overhead. I played this particular bit during the night with a big thunderstorm overhead. The lightning flashes lit up the night sky, showing the surroundings in a brilliant white light. With all the gunfire around me – exploding grenades and Russians taunting each other – I truly felt immersed in the game. Not often have I played a game with a better atmosphere then this. A bit later in the game you will have to fight in the streets, running and gunning, clearing out buildings and taking down heavy machine gun entrenchments. You’re still playing pretty much solo, but it does keep the action going and your heart pumping faster than normal.

From the scripted events, you’ll be thrown right back into free roaming goodness. It all depends on how fast you want to finish the story as you can sidetrack after almost any mission, doing as you please. Near the end of the game you get dragged along in a strong current, which inevitably leads you right to the ending of the game. The flaw here is that it’s unannounced, and your armor might need repairs or you might be running low on ammo for your favorite weapon. But there’s no way to get to a trader at this point. I wish this were made a little clearer, so you could get at least stock up on the necessary equipment. Especially so, since at the end of the game you’re fighting against the clock, and there isn’t much time to loot your enemies for ammo.