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

I'm stuck in a camp in the middle of Red Forest, it's pitch black. There are literally dozens of corpses around me at this point, some human, some not. One of them is a massive blob of hideously deformed features and spindly limbs poking out from odd angles. It took almost all my ammo to kill and I am down to four med packs, a handful of bandages, some sausage, a loaf of bread and two bottles of vodka. I had some strapping young Ukrainian lads with me, armed to the teeth, but I've almost used up all the ammo they dropped when they were torn to shreds by mutants and I've got to go. I can't stay put but leaving the relative safety of the fire and the cover of some nearby rocks feels like suicide too. I just wanted to explore the Zone, Slav squat with the homies and listen to acoustic jams. Now I might not make it out alive... Side Note - Get the Sky Reclamation Project mod. It fixes a lot of bugs and adds some really great QoL enhancements that you simply can't do without like IRL weapon names, iron sites for pistols and a sleeping bag that let's you rest through the night instead of getting stuck in some scary a** camp surrounded by monsters, provided you have a safe place to sleep.

This game goes into the same area as the first. As others have stated it reuses some of the same assets, most of them in fact. I liked the idea of being able to play the factions against each other, or siding with one exclusively. You get to see a little more of the zone than in the first game, but not much. There are just as many interesting interactions as the first game, but because most of the NPC's are reused it seems kind of stale. The replay value isn't as high as the first game, but it's still worth going through more than once to see how you can interact with certain factions in different ways. Altogether it's a pretty solid game, 90% of the bugs were fixed with patches, but some of them are still there. A solid addition to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise.

I tried really hard liking this title, but somehow this is a technical trainwreck. Constant client crashes occur random, you really need to save after every bit of progress. After playing for 3 days my game froze for like 40 times and then it did corrupt my save game and a huge part of progress was lost. I dont know if others got similar problems, but this game really refuses to work

This game had a tepid reception upon release, and even today it is often referred to as the weakest of the STALKER trilogy. And it's easy to see why. The STALKER games have never excelled in terms of polish, but this one takes the cake; glitches are rampant and a lot of the games defining features fall victim to poor implementation. The infamous faction war system had so much potential riding on it, but it is sadly broken by repetitive goals and an AI system that often refuses to cooperate. Speaking of the AI, the NPCs are more likely to get you killed than your enemies. The game is designed to bar the player from making physical contact with any NPCs - meaning that anytime an NPC wants to go through your character, they will literally PUSH you aside to get to where they're going. This often leads to certain death if you're in the middle of a tense firefight. It doesn't help that enemies shoot with surgical precision, and they tend to spawn in overwhelming waves. All in all, I feel like the difficulty curve has gone from immersive to genuinely frustrating. By the end of my playthrough, I had clocked in almost forty hours of gameplay, half of which (I can confidently say) was spent trying and retrying. Note: Keep in mind, I was playing on the hardest difficulty setting. But I don't want to hate on it too much. The story is very intriguing, even though it's more or less identical to the original game's plot. You are once again working to penetrate the center of the Zone while hounding an elusive stalker named Strelok (except this time you really are chasing Strelok). I also like how artifacts are more rare. In the original game, these things spawned by the boat load. Here, however, finding an artifact is a real event requiring expert diligence from the player. As I said, if you're looking for another immersive trek through the Zone, you'll get it. Just be warned: Things are a lot rougher around the edges this time.

You probably saw that, there are reviews on opposing ends but on the *same* curve: it's either bad or good, but somehow enjoyable. I myself cannot point out exactly the reason I enjoy the game, but I can enumerate some of them, as follows: - it expands on its predecessor's map, both aesthetically and size, and, at the same time, keeping it familiar, so, if you've played the first one, you will feel right at home; - there's always something to do and there's time limit for it, so, if you feel the need of urgency to do something, not a dull moment; - cleverly written dialogue that encompasses a variety range of emotions that fit the situation, including jokes that are really funny and don't feel out of place; - in the vast emptiness of the zone, there is value, meaning that the atmosphere is well built, albeit empty, in the sense of "life" (literally), but there's always a feeling of a dread intrusion that something bad happened there, and something is going to happen, I quite like it, it has that New Vegas vibe of the desert; - do you like cross over of important characters of another story? Well, this one has it. This no spoiler, you know it right at the start that you are after (in)famous Strelok. The best part is, is that, you backtrack his steps and his crew's, and you know that you are dealing with veterans; - although mostly broken, when not patched with third party mods, the faction system is very interesting, and it pulls me in, making me choose one every play-through; Some problems: - BUGS: yep, can't live without them, and make no mistake, there ARE many game breaking bugs in this one, so be forewarned, and remedy this by installing mods that address these issues, but don't change the core of the game (looking at you Complete mod, no offence); - weapon upgrade system: good but, not good enough, sometimes you have to choose between your bad ass gun, upgraded to its fullest, and a new better gun, that you have to upgrade once again, leaving you rubleless.