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

I bought COP before this and was very happy with the purchase. Actually the game play and story line in this is better though more buggy. I never once had COP crash but have had several in this game and some that require modifying the ITX files after extraction to fix. Other than that the game is just a BLAST to play. You will NOT be disappointed with this purchase.

Folks say this is the worst of the trilogy, but for me it was the best! It's definitely the hardest but maybe that is what does it for me.

So let me just start out by saying this, this is my first time jumping into the STALKER series. I wanted to play the games in order so Clear Sky would have been the first game I was going to play anyway even though people told me it was the worse in the series. But I'm kind of a nerd when it comes to the order of a series and I never liked starting in the middle and going to the beginning of something. Gunplay is broken and only mods can fix it, the story is actually ok but I feel like that's the cherry on a shit cake. There is no open world from what I saw and that's why most people have thousand of hours on the first game and only 20 to 30 in this game. They let you join factions in this game which is really awesome but it's a lot more cooler if you just stayed as the lone merc who worked for whoever was paying you. The only thing this game adds to me is the story aspects that you don't know while playing the first game, and honestly that isn't enough to save this game. It is sadly a mess of a game but I would still recommend you give it a try when it's on sale or something like that.

fine tuned by modders!

This game is fine until you are past the Garbage, when it turns into a rail shooter with infinite spawn points that pay no attention to being beside the player. The immersion is easily shattered, and the COD run & gun is about as anti-stalker as it gets. At that point it completely abandons the open world exploration that SoC and CoP are lauded for. The worst aspect of CS is the lack of balance or any character development after the Cordon. I was able to finish the game without gear that was all available in that early in the game (AN-94 and SEVA suit). The regularity of crashes with a fully patched (including fan patches in the latest stable version of ZRP - avoid "complete" as it is far less complete or upto date as ZRP is) version is also a major knock against it. I will concede that this is the most optimized of the three, and looks great under the video setting: Dynamic Lighting (aka DX9). While DX10/DX10.1 mode looks even better, the significant increase in crashes prevented it from being used for more than a few minutes. The greatest disappointment is that GSC did not import the the maps, architecture, and optimizations into CoP. For the record, I have play SoC 20+ times, and CoP 14+. This was my first, and last CS playthrough, and makes me regret having caved in after all these years to try it. If I had never known how good their level design could be, I would be more satisfied. CoP now looks even more rushed and unfinished than I previously thought (though CoP is still a 4.5/5 with mods).