Top Five Most Disappointing Games of 2008

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

Publisher: Deep Silver
Platform: PC Exclusive
[b]Full Review Here…And Here

Again, an odd one – though this time because it was the only game we’ve ever reviewed twice, first shortly after release, then again a few months later in its post-patch state.

Clear Sky’s problem you see is more detectable and obvious than any of the other games on this list. Clear Sky doesn’t suffer from poor game design, a repetitive and over-simplified nature or from included bloatware. Or, it isn’t fatally faulted with any of these things anyway.

With Clear Sky the problem is the bugs. Crippling, unavoidable and unpredictable bugs that totally ruin the game experience and reduce this bleak and oppressive adventure into something torturous.


Actually a prequel to the first game, Clear Sky starts with players deep in the Zone – a physics defying area surrounding the old Chernobyl power plant. Caused by God-knows-what, the Zone has become home to all sorts of rebels and scientists who try to eke out a meagre existence by selling the artefacts they find within the Zone.

When your character, named Scar, is hit by a massive energy blast when adventuring in the Zone he is taken in by a secretive research group called Clear Sky. Dedicated to understanding and researching the Zone for benefit of mankind, Clear Sky needs Scar’s help to resist attacks from the other clans and bandit groups within the area.

At the same time though, Scar has an agenda of his own to follow – one supplied by the Zone itself, which has become connected to Scar and is compelling him to protect it.

All that is well and good of course, proving interesting enough if you can force yourself to wrap your head around the dense and over-wordy story, but it was also pretty irrelevant. The simple fact for most players when they got the game was that it was just utterly unplayable, crashing to the desktop every few minutes, blue-screening and freezing mid-save.


Naturally there were patches when the game was released, but they failed to address the problem for many players and destroyed all savegames from previous versions. Great.

How To Fix It

What Clear Sky really needed from the start was a lot more play testing and tweaking before release, though it’s very interesting to see that the Russian version of the game was a lot more stable on release than other versions, apparently.

Nowadays, with the latest patches, Clear Sky is a lot more stable, just as it always should have been. What keeps us being disappointed though is the fact that it’s taken more than four months for us to get to this stage when the simple fact is that the game was never suitable for release in its original form.

Just as with the PlayStation 3 release of Alone in the Dark though, Clear Sky isn’t perfect even now, though those flaws are more to do with the game itself rather than any bugs. Even when all the crashes and blue-screens have been dealt with the game still needs some tweaking – adjusting the difficulty settings, making the story easier to understand and giving some variation to the enemies are other enhancements the game requires.