I'm really in a talking mood tonight, maybe because I kept my mouth shut for several months not playing stalker at all, just observing the forums.
So here are my thoughts on Clear Sky so far:
Little introduction:
After reading several extremely negative reviews and of course all the negative feedback, complaints and desperate calls for help, I decided to buy the game anyway. As far as I can remember, STALKER SHOC never caused much trouble (modding aside) except for some performance issues in the beginning but that was fixed by switching to different drivers. So although I hoped Clear Sky would be the same, I tried not to expect too much.
Thank god I didn't! I installed it, started it up and was shocked by the poor performance. (Q6600 Quad Core, 8800GT, 2GB of ram, WinXP). After turning down some settings the game crashed on me after two minutes. While having a good laugh about that I started it up again and tried to load my quicksave right after the intro (I somehow knew it'd be necessary). The result was another crash so I had to start a new game and watch the intro again.
Well, it kept going, completely unplayable. Random crashes, corrupted savegames, all inclusive. So I waited for the (latest) patch which luckily was released soon.
Guess what? The game is completely playable now, I only had two crashes so far, in about 10 hours of playing. That's not so bad. There are still some gameplay bugs like sidequests automatically failing or not being completable but it doesn't happen often.
I actually enjoyed it very much so far. Although it's really similar to SHOC, it kinda feels new to me. The zone is finally interesting and dangerous again, you just don't know what's gonna happen. And there's new stuff to explore, new stashes to find.
Levels: I only played the swamps, cordon, garbage, dark valley and agroprom so far and although they are mostly old levels they feel fresh. It's funny to see what the zone was like, one year earlier.
Atmosphere: Still great. Ambient sounds are awesome, the level design is fantastic and the graphics (DX9) are pretty sweet. Especially sunrises are a beauty!
One thing they still didn't fix: sometimes rain makes no sound. Only saving and quickloading fixes that. Boooh!
Enemies: At first I was a little irritated because most of the time I was fighting humans, except for some dogs and boars here and there. But then I realized that the mutants do indeed come out at night. And the nights are pitch black so I didn't go out at night until I upgraded my leather jacket with night vision.
Anomalies/Artifacts: I love how they changed the system. Anomalies are scarce and a lot more dangerous if you're not well protected. Artifacts are really really rare and very valuable, so far not necessarily because of their properties but because of the money they'll earn you.
The "searching for artifacts" system is great in my opinion, I really feel like I have to risk my life to get one of those precious glowing things. But the need for money and my curiosity of what artifact is hiding inside the anomaly is making me try every time...
Resources: In my opinion Clear Sky really is the survival game that STALKER was supposed to be. I struggled a lot for ammunition, medkits, bandages and money. Traders really rip you off, their prices are very high. This is probably what I like most about CS, you really have to decide what to spend your money on and I'm always tempted to collect every single weapon of the enemy to sell it off to a trader so I can afford one more bandage. :lol:
Combat: It's very hard in the beginning. I was running around in my puny leather jacket for a long time because I couldn't afford anything better. At least on veteran difficulty that means dying after two hits with full health. It can get frustrating sometimes, especially because of the grenades, you usually don't have time to run away. But if you listen closely to your enemies, you can hear them announcing their grenade, so start running!
Just so you know: It gets a lot easier once you have better armor. That's probably the most important investment of money early in the game.
I didn't like the way medical supplies were changed:
Medkits stop almost no bleeding while bandages don't heal. Bandages do stop bleeding but not 100%. Sometimes you need 2-4 bandages to stop it. If you run out of bandages and still bleed, you're most probably going to die which is very annoying. So that's when I started "modding" again (if you wanna call it that) and I edited the items.ltx to rebalance the medical supplies and food. I'm gonna post it in the mod section.
Weapons Handling: Until yesterday I didn't like the feel of the weapons at all. Way too inaccurate and the bullet drop off is too exaggerated. I have the feeling they put it in there just for the sake of having it in the game.
Yesterday I realized that doing a low crouch while shooting really helps. Thankfully, so does using ironsights. After that it was a lot better, low crouching behind cover, taking enemies out with headshots, almost like in SHOC. Just don't do it for too long, grenades tend to land right between your legs.
Faction Wars: I'm not sure if I like it or not. Gotta play some more. The first time I entered the swamps, I was overwhelmed by 5 missions popping up, people calling for help and objectives to capture certain points. I didn't like that, I want to set my own pacing.
Also I captured the bandit base three times now, I kill all the bandits, walk to the trader after that to resupply and sell loot and in the meantime 10 bandits take the base back. Not a single stalker tried to hold or retake it. Really pointless.
Story: In my opinion the way of story telling was really improved. In SHOC I had problems to follow the storyline with journal entries, PDAs, voice overs that were too short and so on.
In Clear Sky a lot more of the main characters have voice overs and everything is explained a lot better and makes sense.
It was also nice to see some familiar faces.
A couple of Tips: At one point, when you get out of the swamps, GSC decided to create a situation for the player that can require quite a high amount of quickloading before you get through. No idea why it's in there, really one of the most stupid and unnecessary things I've seen in a game so far. I had to look for some help on the forums and see if there was some kind of trick to it, turned out you just have to run a certain way to make it.
People have been complaining a lot about the poor performance. One of the reasons is that the game starts out in the morning with the sun rising. Sun shafts are the main performance killer, even if you don't see them. I turned them down to low and got a huge boost FPS wise. Visually they look almost the same to me.
So even if you kinda have low FPS at the beginning of the game, it gets better once the sun is high enough and the sunshafts disappear.
I also disabled SSAO (screen space ambient occlusion), that's the second performance killer. I didn't notice a difference in image quality, but also I haven't been looking too closely... ;)
Alright, that should be enough, hope this helps some people in their decision making whether to buy the game or not.
Overall I'd give it
8/10 (for
version 1.5.04 only! Any previous version doesn't deserve a rating at all.)
-1 for the rather annoying side quests that get auto-failed or can't be completed (had two of them)
-0.5 because of the two crashes
-0.5 because of some frustrating design decisions (like medkits/bandages)
P.S.
My hands are cold now. :(