S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky (PC)

Once fully patched, this ambitious PC shooter will no doubt impress.
9/23/2008 6:16 PM | 6 Comments | Page 1 of 2

GSC Game World's S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky is a lot like hanging out with your relatives over the holidays: You find yourself having a better time than you expected, but every once in a while something happens that makes you think, "Why am I here?"

OK, forgive the lame pre-Thanksgiving analogy, but while this prequel to the 2 million unit-selling S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is for the most part a gratifyingly gritty first-person shooter, it suffers from a few glaring issues that can mar the experience.

Published by Deep Silver, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky once again paints a "what-if" scenario that surrounds a disastrous second Chernobyl nuclear power plant incident in 2006. In the year 2011, one full year before the events in Shadow of Chernobyl, you play as Scar, a mercenary who braves the irradiated sectors of the Zone to survive amongst warring factions and bizarre anomalies. Along with taking down rabid creatures and avoiding mysterious emissions called "burnouts," which look like heat shimmering off asphalt, you'll begin to interact with various factions and hear about their plight before deciding which side to fight on.

As with its predecessor, the game is played from a first-person perspective, which helps with the fear factor, and as with most other shooters you'll toggle between available weapons -- such as knife, pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, grenades, bazooka and sniper rifles -- with the mouse's middle scroll wheel or by tapping one of the numbers on the keyboard. But unlike the original game, Clear Sky offers a role-playing game-like twist that also lets you repair or upgrade weapons by visiting key people in their base. Early in the game, you also get a fancy PDA that displays info such as mission objectives, past dialogue and an overhead map that shows bases, enemies, points of interest and even the location of artifacts (think power-ups) that can enhance your performance in a myriad of ways. Some of this information might be too much if you prefer to explore and discover on your own, rather than be spoon-fed, but you don't need to glance at your PDA if you don't want to.

Most of the locations are outdoors and include swamps, wooded areas, abandoned farms, burned-out buildings surrounded by barbed wire, lookout towers, a demolished hospital, streets and heavily guarded bases. Some of these areas will be familiar to Shadow of Chernobyl players. Your main missions are usually assigned from within your faction base and will be fairly clear: escort someone to this point, stifle the resistance, take down the helicopter, or retrieve such-and-such artifact or other items. But you'll often come across a non-player character, perhaps on a darkened road, who may ask you to perform a task such as distract an enemy while others flank its squad, or trade information for a med kit.

The artificial intelligence is particularly good, as events usually don't play out the same way twice --you'll see this often if you don't save the game regularly (see below). Skirmishes can break out differently between rival factions, and enemies will try different ways to take you down (be it tossing grenades or running a half-circle around you while firing a rifle). Mutants will attack from different angles in one game or leave you alone in another. You might notice small touches, like allies who strum a guitar by a roaring campfire and then get up and walk around. There are some scripted events, but the majority of the game is free-form.