{"id":6,"date":"2008-10-12T19:16:04","date_gmt":"2008-10-12T19:16:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alienbabeltech.com\/?p=712"},"modified":"2013-04-26T06:37:45","modified_gmt":"2013-04-26T05:37:45","slug":"stalker-clear-sky-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/alienbabeltech.com\/main\/stalker-clear-sky-review\/","title":{"rendered":"S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Prologue<\/strong><\/p>\n

Getting drunk on vodka to cure radiation sickness? Yep, it’s one of those things I learned in S.T.A.L.K.E.R<\/em>, which lesson was repeated in its newly released 2008 expansion, Clear Sky<\/em>. For those who don’t know, Clear Sky<\/em> is the prequel to the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl<\/em> – the much lauded but often bug ridden 2007 game from GSC Gameworld. What else did I learn from playing Clear Sky<\/em>?\u00a0 Well, you still need a beefy gaming rig to play this game with all the eye-candy turned on; but what do you expect from a game that won the best graphics award at 2008\u2019s biggest gaming show, E3?\u00a0 Clear Sky<\/em> is also still infested with bugs, but not as bad as the original game when it was first released. <\/span>Last but not least, I learned that this game is a lot of fun to play and has an incredible atmosphere that you can get lost in.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Clear
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

The Story<\/strong>
<\/p>\n

Clear Sky<\/span><\/em> starts with some kind of mysterious blowout, which turns most humans into zombies, except for you, because you are special – who would have thought? <\/span>The problem is that the blowout, which keeps repeating itself with increased frequency, does affect you.<\/em> <\/span>To save all the other stalkers and yourself, you have to stop these blowouts from reoccurring, and that\u2019s when the shooting starts. The story will basically revolve around you chasing some guy who is accessing a part of the Zone that doesn\u2019t take kindly to strangers, and as a defensive mechanism, it causes these blowouts. <\/span><\/p>\n

You will have to work your way through various parts of the Zone including some familiar places many of you will recognize from the original game. This could be considered lazy, but there are plenty of new places, and a familiar place does link the game more strongly to the original. <\/span>You start out in a new area, called the Swamps, which is under attack by mercenaries. The people that saved you during the first blowout, which left your rendered unconscious, are called the Clear Sky Faction. Before they will show you the road out of the swamps, you have to help them take control of the swamps.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Clear
\n <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Factions<\/strong><\/p>\n

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. <\/span>You can take control of certain points on the map by talking with a person from the faction you\u2019re helping. <\/span>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\u2019t hurt, and although the AI isn\u2019t that good, it\u2019s good enough to serve as cannon fodder. Make sure you don\u2019t hit your friends, or your relations with the faction will suffer badly because of it!<\/span><\/p>\n

Once you\u2019ve killed all the enemies, the strong point belongs to you and you can move on to the next one. <\/span>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. <\/span>A few flaws popped up here as well; sometimes your faction seems to be waiting for a counterattack that never comes. <\/span>If you decide to take the next strongpoint by yourself, your faction won\u2019t come to you and the strongpoint will fall into enemy hands as soon as you leave it.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Clear
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

Looking for artifacts<\/strong><\/p>\n

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 <\/span>heavy machine gun and there\u2019s 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. <\/span>You can often do side quests as well and roam around freely looking for loot; Clear Sky<\/em> is a free roaming shooter, after all. <\/span>You\u2019ll get to shoot mutated monsters for a change, instead of armed humans. Often other stalkers you\u2019ve saved, helped or killed will have information <\/em>hidden on their body <\/em>concerning stashes scattered throughout the map, which you can loot for valuable items.<\/span><\/p>\n

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. <\/span>All these benefits come at a personal price; you will receive radiation from these artifacts. <\/span>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. <\/span>The problem here is that artifacts are hard to find – I like to think of them as needles in a radioactive haystack. <\/span>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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Clear
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

Free roaming vs scripted action<\/strong><\/p>\n

Free roaming or not, there\u2019s 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\u2019ll 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. <\/span>Not often have I played a game with a better atmosphere then this. <\/span>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\u2019re still playing pretty much solo, but it does keep the action going and your heart pumping faster than normal.<\/span><\/p>\n

From the scripted events, you\u2019ll be thrown right back into free roaming goodness. <\/span>It all depends on how fast you want to finish the story as you can sidetrack after almost any mission, doing as you please. <\/span>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\u2019s unannounced, and your armor might need repairs or you might be running low on ammo for your favorite weapon. But there\u2019s no way to get to a trader at this point. <\/span>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\u2019re fighting against the clock, and there isn\u2019t much time to loot your enemies for ammo.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

Shooting the bad guys<\/strong><\/p>\n

What I remember from the original game was that the action was slow to get into, and you couldn\u2019t hit an enemy even when you were about to shoot him in the head point-blank.\u00a0 Ammunition was few and far between, especially if you had a semi-decent weapon that you could actually hit enemies with. <\/span>Fortunately, it is not so this time. <\/span>If you take aim while <\/em>not bunny hopping around, you can shoot your opponents with a decent amount of accuracy. <\/span>During all the shooting I noticed a few positives and negatives; grenades for example, are pretty powerful if thrown correctly.\u00a0 The enemy AI seems to be particularly good at this, because more often than not you\u2019ll find yourself reloading a save because you got blown to smithereens by a dozen grenades. <\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Guns also jam if you used them for too long, and some weapons are known for jamming more often than others.\u00a0 Som<\/span>etimes you’ll find yourself having to unjam during a big firefight. Unjamming\u00a0is done by reloading, which\u00a0means you gotta duck for cover right\u00a0away.\u00a0You can also upgrade your weapons, thus improving their damage, and even reducing their recoil and improving their accuracy.\u00a0 The first time I finished the game I didn\u2019t even use all the different weapons, nor did I manage to find all the data slates that contain upgrade information.<\/span><\/p>\n


<\/p>\n

\"Clear
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Pure atmosphere<\/strong><\/p>\n

Maybe some of you were surprised to read that Clear Sky<\/em> won the award for best graphics during 2008 E3, instead of Crysis: Warhead<\/em>. <\/span>Crysis<\/em> might have top notch shadows and insane amounts of detail, but Clear Sky<\/em> uses its graphical eye-candy to create atmosphere<\/em>.\u00a0 Instead of a continuously glaring sun and bright colors, Clear Sky<\/em> has a darker look to it; only rarely will you be out in the open feeling it\u2019s a regular spring or summer day. You will have to judge for yourself, there\u2019s plenty of screenshots and trailers to be found, but I tend to like the graphics in Clear Sky<\/em> more than I do in Crysis<\/em>. <\/span>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 <\/em>for these features, is highly recommended.<\/span><\/p>\n

With atmosphere being the key word, and with the graphics playing into this quite nicely, the sound can\u2019t lag behind or no amount of eye-candy will be able to keep up immersion. The sound does keep up, but it\u2019s not as stellar as the graphics. The music score is decent enough, and the voice acting isn\u2019t 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\u2019ll just stand there and you will wonder why they just won\u2019t shut up. Guns sound real enough, and so do the explosions, with different sounds for the different grenades that you have at your disposal.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Clear
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n

All in all, there came a point in Clear Sky <\/em>at which I didn\u2019t want to stop playing.\u00a0 When that happens, I think a game has succeeded in drawing and keeping my attention. <\/span>In fact, I\u2019ve played it all over again because the first time I missed a few weapons and didn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 People seem content paying $30 for Crysis: Warhead<\/em>, which might have a pretty big multiplayer, but it doesn\u2019t come close to the single player content Clear Sky<\/em> has to offer.\u00a0 So in comparison, your $30 is just as easily justifiable for Clear Sky<\/em> as for Crysis: Warhead<\/em>, if not more so.<\/span><\/p>\n

-Marc Rademaker<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

ABT Gaming Editor<\/span><\/p>\n


<\/p>\n

\"Stars\"
\n <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Clear Sky scores 4 out of 5 ABT Stars.\u00a0 Buy it!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

ED:<\/strong> <\/span><\/span>For some systems, Clear Sky might not run so well currently, causing frustration and a possibly lower opinion of it.\u00a0 When it is more fully patched, we will also update you<\/span> as the developers have committed themselves to making Clear Sky as bug-free as possible. <\/span><\/em><\/span>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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