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

Conclusions

Scoring S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky is a difficult process and we don’t mean that in just a kind “Is it a six or a seven?" kind of way. Instead, it’s more a question of it either being a two or a seven.

There are two ways to look at Clear Sky. You can look at it in the way that a number of other sites and magazines seem to have done, judging Clear Sky sheerly on the gameplay and so forth. Or you can look at Clear Sky only as an entertainment product.

It’s important to decide how you think Clear Sky should be evaluated because if you look at it one way then it’s a decent, if slightly flawed game and if you look at it other way then you it’s just a waste of the amount of time it’ll take you to get your money back.

Judged on the merits of what it is, Clear Sky is a deeply involving singleplayer game with a lot going for it, though with some definite issues. It has a lot of cool features and the new faction system which lets you ally with different groups as you progress is definitely worth a look.


The gunplay itself is still excellent as well, with each firefight feeling like a test of skill and tactics rather than simple run and gun ability. Learning how to flank your opponents, control your firepower and use cover effectively is something which is critical to succeeding in Clear Sky and we love it.

The story meanwhile is something which holds Clear Sky back just as much as it did with Shadow of Chernobyl. The writing is verbose and overdone in the extreme and all of the critical conversations are so flabby they should come with information of how many calories they have. The plot itself is occasionally meandering too, though at least it’s easier to follow than it was in the first game.

The level design is something of a mixed bag too and although the ruined and gutted factories and farmsteads that litter The Zone are both stunningly creepy and awfully tempting for wannabe explorers. There’s plenty of things to climb on, under into or over and some of the simplest challenges from the game arise from nothing more than a decision to reach a set point on the map and explore it utterly. This also makes the levels perfectly suited to sniping and some truly exciting and varied fights.

Then comes the down side and if you look at the game the other way round as product which people might actually go out and spend money on, then S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky is utterly unacceptable. It just doesn’t work.


It crashes, it blue screens, it devours system resources, it uses outdated forms of bug submission which just don’t work, it doesn’t have great translation of the dialogue, there are many quests which can’t be completed and even if you avoid all this then elements of the game itself are shockingly designed. Why the hell can’t we see how much stamina we have without looking in the inventory?

Quite simply, the game itself may be OK (though not exceptional) but the actual experience you are buying is just awful. It doesn’t work and if we’d have paid for it instead of just getting a review sample then we’d feel angry, cheated and disappointed. We’d take the game back and get a refund straight away because this product is broken, however we're sure that a patch (or many) in the next few weeks to months to fix it into a playable state. The problem is, there's absolutely no guarantee of this.

Are there going to be patches released later to correct these issues? Probably, and the fanboys out there (like Rich, ha!) will wait blindly for it, but even then there’s no guarantee and anyone who throws an argument like that up as a defence is missing the point. Patches are acceptable to correct certain issues, but this isn't the case of a simple driver conflict affecting a minority of systems. We still found problems on a freshly created, clean system and under a variety of hardware configurations. These are constant, unpredictable and unavoidable errors in the code.

When you get right down to it our job is to tell people if this is something they might enjoy and should spend money on. Our experience with Clear Sky is that it rarely works and we wouldn’t spend money on it for exactly that reason, even if the game itself is OK. There are better games coming out to look forward to and splash the cash on, so look it up in a couple of months and see if the patches have arrived, but don’t touch it until then if you know what’s good for your sanity.

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