After spending the last two weeks playing Clear Sky, the follow up to STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, I thought I would give a few impressions of the game and maybe do a bit of ranting while I'm at it. When the original game came out I wasn't quite sure what to expect after only seeing screen shots and reading a hand full of reviews, but as the second release, Clear Sky has a lot to live up to. The first game wasn't exactly a mind blowing experience, but it was innovative and overall had some amazing atmosphere to it. There were many points in the game where I was actually scared or felt completely emotionally involved because of the wonderfully created environment. Simply put, I enjoyed playing it and Clear Sky promised to be just as good, if not better.

Unfortunately, after about thirty hours of game play I have to say that Clear Sky fails to deliver and disappoints in a huge way, but more on that in a bit. First, I want to point out all the ways that the game succeeds or at least attempts to succeed in delivering what we all expected. Without a doubt, one of the most impressive features has to be the world's weather and day/night system. The game literally convinces you on many occasions that you are in a living and breathing world through its use of an actively clocked in-game time. The sun rises and sets with stunning beauty, complete with DX10 god rays and volumetric lighting.

The dynamic nature of the sky is really something to behold. I found myself staring at sunsets and even lightening storms on more than one occasion. Rain and wind storms will regularly pick up and really make you believe that the Zone is a living world. As far the night, I have to say this is one of the first games that has gotten it right. It's dark as all hell! Light acts like you'd expect for once as the daylight of the world seemingly blends in and out with your flashlight becoming as important as your gun. Clear Sky rules the day and weather cycle over any game I have ever played, hands down. When it starts getting dark I actually found my self saying "oh shit" because I knew within ten minutes the game was going to get a lot harder. Very cool. Thanks to wherever I pinched the screen shot from. Sorry, I was too lazy to go hunt some really nice ones of my own. ;) I can say though, that with full eye candy on in DX10 it really does look just about that good.

On the down side, the graphics engine is a hog. Similar to experiences with Crysis, it looks freaking amazing, but in order to have all the eye candy on you'll need a top of the line video card. There are also still some buggy issues with the graphics choices. There are noticeable and massive frame rate hits for a few of the choices, with little to no visual difference, and on *many* occasions I ended up getting loads of graphical display glitches randomly when playing.

So, what about the actual game play? Well, here things start to get ugly. This game has SO MUCH FREAKING POTENTIAL, and it just shits on it. No, you can't have a good game play experience, not yours. The mechanics of the game are almost the same as the first game, but in trying to reinvent some aspects they totally fucked up what wasn't broken. First off, this game is HARD, and not in a good way. I actually like playing most of my games on a more difficult setting. It seems more realistic and keeps me from being able to rush through it, but there is a line where it starts to become un-fucking-enjoyable. Clear Sky is essentially programmed to always put you at a disadvantage, sometimes so serious that I found myself getting frustrated enough to walk away for awhile. The balancing is just f'ed from start to finish. Take the enemies for instance. They have god damn sniper scopes for eyes, xray/night vision, super human health/hearing, and motor skills that would make Michael Phelps flinch... and all of this from the first moment of the game. You start out with a two round piece of shit shotgun that misses enemies at almost point blank range, which they also have, yet, somehow they can snipe you from three hundred yards away with perfect accuracy. Oh, and did I mention they're amazingly good at doing this through 100 yards of trees in the pitch black dark as well! I can't even see them and I'm being slaughtered. Fighting back is interesting as well. Especially in the beginning of the game, you'll be lucky if you can land 25% of your shots because of the low quality weapons, but they seem to be marksman with the same gear.

It gets even better though, and this has to be one of the biggest bitches I have about the game play: the fucking grenades. Whoever designed the AI for grenade use obviously never once tested it. Somehow every single NPC has shit loads of grenades and the uncanny ability to land them two inches from your feet each and every throw in every single environment from hundreds of yards away. I'm serious. They never miss, even when it's pitch dark out and I'm behind cover. What's even worse is that the NPC's *love* throwing them at you. Sometimes I would start a battle with three or four guys, only to watch them all throw grenades at me, all at the same time, and all with perfect accuracy. W.T.F. Another good one is their ability to throw grenades farther than you can. I'd be so far away that I had to snipe them with a scope, yet they can land a grenade at your feet every time. So, I figured I'd try throwing one back and it barely made it half the distance which definitely seemed more human.

Finally, there's a huge imbalance in health, especially in the beginning. While your character only needs two or three good hits to die, I've pumped 15-20 bullets into these guys before they finally go down. Head shots do work nicely, but it's a long time before you have gear that can do it reliably. Worse yet, the STALKER series allows you to bleed to death after being hit. So with every freaking nick you get you have to bandage it, or die, until you get the right artifacts later in the game. Take a guess whether or not the NPC's die from bleeding after 10 bullets to the stomach? Not a chance. Dumb.

Moving on... you'll find that gearing up in this game is also a waste of time. Every item is ridiculously expensive and because of their unique item wear feature, you constantly have to spend money on repairing what you already have. Not to mention that you can buy something for 10,000, only to try and sell it right back for 500-1000 if you're lucky. You'll be poor the entire game and pretty much live off of what you find. I ended up playing through the entire game with a suit of armor that I got from a mission because after a certain point affording anything better was impossible. There are weapon mods and armor mods you can get, but they once again are really expensive. The only way you can earn money is through faction missions or selling what you find, yet the only thing you can get any decent money for are artifacts, and they are rare. The faction mission rewards are ridiculously disproportionate to the amount of work you have to do. Perfect example: at one point you can take a mission to clear out the Bandit main base, which is long, hard, and difficult. I ended up using all of my ammo and wearing down all of my gear.... but after you finish you're rewarded with less than it is to repair the gear you have and restock the ammo you wasted. Awesome! To make it even worse, after you clear the base out, for whatever reason the game never takes it over for your faction and after walking ten steps away it was magically repopulated with another army of Bandits. :( What a waste of time...

I found missions like this over and over again. Little pay for a ridiculous amount of work and time, with no added benefit. Honestly, the best way to play the game is to completely ignore the stupid side quests and follow the main one. At a certain point you'll find yourself having to travel so far to get your "rewards" that it's not even worth it anymore. Suits will cost something like 25,000 and you'll get 2,000 for a mission that took an hour. Great.

Wow, this is quite the rant! Hadn't planned on writing this much, but after spending so much time on Clear Sky I guess I feel like I need to bitch. ;)

As I was saying, the game has serious issues. For all the fun in it, there is an equal amount of broken garbage. The one thing I haven't mentioned yet, and it's by far the most crippling, are the scripting bugs. Clear Sky is so bad with crashes, broken missions, and utterly fucked story lines that it's really unplayable. The developers have rushed out a couple of patches to fix the really bad problems, but it's far from patched. Just to give a few examples, I found that when trying to leave the first map that I couldn't. It would always bring me back where I started and then when I got through that I was behind an Army base where I couldn't leave and was promptly slaughtered on the spot. Thanks guys! I constantly found save games becoming corrupted as well. It seemed like one out of every three saves would actually crash to the desktop and then come up as corrupted when you reloaded to continue. So, for a game that requires constant saving that pretty much kills it right there. The developers decided to make things worse too by making all the new patches incompatible with old saves... so say bye to twenty hours of playing! Stupid. There are also a few places in the game where there are impassable script bugs that will crash the game every single time. Thankfully, one of the fans released his own patch pack to fix a bunch of these, but it really makes you wonder who the hell did QA on this game, if anyone.

One last rant and then I'm done I swear. I found the faction AI to be completely retarded and a waste of time. Clear Sky introduces a random mission idea where factions can suddenly get attacked and call for help, or decided to go invade another area. The problem is that the game doesn't base any of it off of you. What I mean is that on multiple occasions the AI scripts will start running and give you no chance to even make it to the area before they slaughter one another. Time and time again someone will call for help or ask you to do something, you'll run like mad to get there only to arrive and it's over. Worse yet, you get a failed message and no credit for it. Sucker. This happens so many times I lost count. You do have the advantage of being able to see everything on your PDA, but it's totally stupid because it shows you where all the known enemies are, including mutants. That's no fun now is it. I hate being able to pull up a screen and see where everything is in real time and it totally ruins the atmosphere or surprise. But I guess some of these missions would be impossible without it....

One change that I was fond of was the new artifact strategy. Unlike in the original game, artifacts are much more rare, and they're invisible unless you're very close. You actually have to hunt for them with a detector and scour the map for anomalies areas. They're also usually located in very deadly areas that are next to impossible to navigate. It was actually fun and a challenge looking for the best ones. Of course, once again, they sort fuck this up too. There are only a very limited amount of places that spawn artifacts, they're completely decided ahead of time, and the later half of the game basically is 100% artifact free. Honestly, I felt that last part was pretty stupid since you're constantly getting close to the center of the Zone. Suddenly there are barely any anomalies and artifacts in the last few maps, whereas in the beginning they are much more common.

While there are even more issues here and there (did I mention that Clear Sky's final level and ending are probably the shortest and most unsatisfying ever?) I'm done ranting for now. The game is obviously flawed and needs VERY heavy patching. So much so that I can't believe they released it in such an unfinished state.

After all I've said, there really is a good game waiting to be played, but the developers really need to tweak the shit out of it first. The game has a HUGE amount of potential once it's refined, but until then it's a bugged mess. All the bugs totally kill any atmosphere immersion and really take away from any enjoyment. Once fixed I'm sure it will feel amazing and totally be worthy of a replay, but not until it's much more mature. The original game had its issues as well that were eventually patched, but this game was barely beta upon release. It's a shame and I really wonder what all those game review sites were playing when on average it received a B. Considering the game is just about unplayable with the major scripting bugs that blocks the main story, they couldn't have gotten very far. Oh well, in a month or two it'll be better. Until then save your money or be prepare to become frustrated as all hell!