This game was an instant classic for me when it came out, and the Stellar Jockeys have only made it better since then. Isometric cityscapes never looked so good. The soundtrack, by Makeup and Vanity Set, perfectly pumps your action sequences through the veins of the metropolis you have been hired to destroy. The sheer clarity and singular force of the game's vision encourages players to imagine its world, inhabit its characters, and idolize or demonize its weapons, vehicles, locales, and and foes. Gameplay consists of a deceptively simple set of maxims articulated across a dizzying array of scenarios, all with one goal: cause maximum carnage to make your dollar payout (aka your score) go up. These maxims are: 1. Everything can be destroyed, and you are here to make that happen. 2. Play to your vehicle and its loadout's strengths. 3. Risks have rewards. You are introduced to these maxims and their interesting ramifications over the course of a lengthy training and campaign track, providing players with the tantalizing outline of a plot that parallels the full-lenth novel published alongside this game For me, however, this was only ever going to be the surface of the game. Replayability and depth comes in the form of the freelance missions and the pilots you unlock, which help you set a myriad of difficulty curves and game lengths that can satisfy an itch 30 minutes in length, or several hours at a stretch. Before long you'll be eyeing the roguelike difficulty levels of the famed Closed Casket Special, playing for keeps over the course of dozens of maps, each one more difficult than the last thanks to your pilot's difficulty curve. But if you make it to the end, maybe you'll finally have enough money to unlock all those tantalizing lore blurbs that came to mean so much to you, somewhere along the line...
Didn't realize it lacked the DLC when I bought here. Still wouldn't have bought on Steam because they don't have DRM-free, but it's frustrating. I might have simply held off entirely had I known. GOG, go to Ubisoft and ask them for the DLCs to this. Please!
Let's get this out of the way - this game is the most buggy of the 3 stalker games, and yes, the story is not as good as the story in the first game. But if you want to see something in gaming that hasn't been attempted - much less accomplished - before, then you need to get Clear Sky. You may have heard about the A-Life system that much of the STALKER world is purportedly built on. This game is the apotheosis of that system; not only is all the wildlife subject to its whims, but also most of the human populations, too. Even if you do nothing as a player, you can watch as the AI struggles with itself to see which factions and creatures will control the Zone, leading to unexpected periods of calm punctuated by intense ferocity. You exist as a single person in the midst of this chaos, and you have to make your way through it. You might be allied with Freedom, but that won't stop Duty from deciding that they are going to invade your base and murder your faction - and if you don't help out your friends, you might find yourself a hunted man with nowhere to hide! Similarly, there are times when you can accompany your own faction's fighters into enemy territory and help them gain ground - remember, you're not a leader so you don't get to tell them when to do this - but if you pay attention, you can follow along and lend your gun to the struggle. The experience is incredible - the zone comes alive. Sometimes it's safe to hunt for artifacts in a given area - other times you need to watch the animals for signs that it might not be a good time. This, combined with new weapons, sleep, truly interesting level design, and blowouts make this game the most inventive of the 3, which makes it the most enjoyable - if you can get past the bugs that sometimes pop up and make your own story in this, the most "sandboxy" of the STALKER titles.
If this game had come out this year (with updated graphics), advertising terrain so deformable that you could literally burrow through the multiplayer levels, CREATING your battlefield as you went, it would still be a sensation. FPS games these days are only just now beginning to realize the incredible replayability value of emergent and procedural game mechanics; something this game and only a few others (Tribes comes to mind) hit upon in the late 90s. There's nothing quite like working through a CTF match to secretly burrow all the way to the other team's flag using missile launchers, or learning how to create a series of ratholes in a deathmatch game that allows you to maximize your access to key locations without being exposed. If this game were to have any cons, it would be that the weapon and movement mechanics all thoroughly place it in the 90s. The weapons are very exploitable and designed to avoid the pitfalls of high-latency gameplay, and the movement is so incredibly fast that you'll wonder how you ever hit anything back in the day. The answer is lots of rockets. And shooting campers through 120 meters of bedrock with a railgun.
