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

Shooting the bad guys

What I remember from the original game was that the action was slow to get into, and you couldn’t hit an enemy even when you were about to shoot him in the head point-blank.  Ammunition was few and far between, especially if you had a semi-decent weapon that you could actually hit enemies with. Fortunately, it is not so this time. If you take aim while not bunny hopping around, you can shoot your opponents with a decent amount of accuracy. During all the shooting I noticed a few positives and negatives; grenades for example, are pretty powerful if thrown correctly.  The enemy AI seems to be particularly good at this, because more often than not you’ll find yourself reloading a save because you got blown to smithereens by a dozen grenades.

One of the fun things was shooting long distances with a sniper rifle; you really have to aim above the target, because otherwise you will hit his feet instead of his head.  Guns also jam if you used them for too long, and some weapons are known for jamming more often than others.  Sometimes you’ll find yourself having to unjam during a big firefight. Unjamming is done by reloading, which means you gotta duck for cover right away. You can also upgrade your weapons, thus improving their damage, and even reducing their recoil and improving their accuracy.  The first time I finished the game I didn’t even use all the different weapons, nor did I manage to find all the data slates that contain upgrade information.

Pure atmosphere

Maybe some of you were surprised to read that Clear Sky won the award for best graphics during 2008 E3, instead of Crysis: Warhead. Crysis might have top notch shadows and insane amounts of detail, but Clear Sky uses its graphical eye-candy to create atmosphere.  Instead of a continuously glaring sun and bright colors, Clear Sky has a darker look to it; only rarely will you be out in the open feeling it’s a regular spring or summer day. You will have to judge for yourself, there’s plenty of screenshots and trailers to be found, but I tend to like the graphics in Clear Sky more than I do in Crysis. All that eye-candy and especially DX10 features like god rays, volumetric smoke and more of those fancy features take their toll on your frame rates. A beefy videocard, Geforce GTX260 or Radeon HD4870, as a mimimum for these features, is highly recommended.

With atmosphere being the key word, and with the graphics playing into this quite nicely, the sound can’t lag behind or no amount of eye-candy will be able to keep up immersion. The sound does keep up, but it’s not as stellar as the graphics. The music score is decent enough, and the voice acting isn’t too bad either; these NPCs really do sound like people with heavy Russian accents. Sounds of the surroundings add to the atmosphere as well, like rustling bushes in the wind, howling wolves and creepy noises from all kinds of mutated creatures. Too bad some of the phrases said by your companions can get repetitive, and often they’ll just stand there and you will wonder why they just won’t shut up. Guns sound real enough, and so do the explosions, with different sounds for the different grenades that you have at your disposal.

Conclusion

All in all, there came a point in Clear Sky at which I didn’t want to stop playing.  When that happens, I think a game has succeeded in drawing and keeping my attention. In fact, I’ve played it all over again because the first time I missed a few weapons and didn’t get to upgrade them fully, and I only found a few artifacts the first time around, so I went searching for them a little harder the second play through.  With the patches that have been released lately, many of the bugs have been fixed and performance has increased a little, making the game even more enjoyable.  People seem content paying $30 for Crysis: Warhead, which might have a pretty big multiplayer, but it doesn’t come close to the single player content Clear Sky has to offer.  So in comparison, your $30 is just as easily justifiable for Clear Sky as for Crysis: Warhead, if not more so.

-Marc Rademaker

ABT Gaming Editor

Clear Sky scores 4 out of 5 ABT Stars.  Buy it!

ED: For some systems, Clear Sky might not run so well currently, causing frustration and a possibly lower opinion of it.  When it is more fully patched, we will also update you as the developers have committed themselves to making Clear Sky as bug-free as possible.