STALKER Clear Sky is harder to run than Crysis; it has terrible English dialogue; and the plot is series of unrelated dots in a compartmentalized wasteland. And that is just fine.
GSC Game World makes games that (like most code spawned from the Eastern bloc) contain gameplay elements of greater intricacy and weight than their Western or Asian counterparts. These elements are what make trudging through the system errors and the poorly (if ever) checkpointed missions worthwhile. Clear Sky is full of the mechanics I play these games for, from variable statistics on armored suits to a specialty-dependent weapon upgrade system to the constant artifact scavenger hunt the game's mythos is wrapped around. I simply wish GSC had realized just how good Clear Sky was conceptually and had run with it farther.
Shadow of Chernobyl (Clear Sky's prequel) had factions. They fought amongst themselves, but there was never any real motion to the disputes during the story arc. In Clear Sky, you can not only affiliate with one faction or another to take on missions, but the borders of the various groups ebb and flow throughout the game, altering safe paths and places of refuge as they moved. But they didn't take this far enough; you can't ever permanently eliminate factions, even though you can clean out each and every relevant headquarters. The vanquished party simply shows back up after you leave.
Clear Sky is a creepy game, especially at night. After the sun goes down, visibility drops to almost nil and this leads to some genuine atmosphere in forests where you could be mauled by wild dogs and roving bandits at any moment. Even when the sun (and its blatant sun rays) are visible, a permanent brown and yellow color scheme make the Zone an unfriendly place to traverse. Even the less-than-stellar animation on most of the enemies tends to help this air rather than hurt it--after all, what is further down the uncanny valley: a mutilated human that moves like a dog or a mutilated human that moves like a stop-motion dog?
Anything good that could be said about Shadow of Chernobyl applies at least as ably to Clear Sky. Artifact hunting in a radioactive desert is as engaging as it ever was; the desolate setting lets the sound effects crew get carried away, giving Clear Sky the video game industry's most satisfying sniper rifle collection (seriously, the Dragunov is chill-inducing to fire); when wants to be creepy, it has it in spades between the harsh shading model and the unpredictable threat of anomalies. It is only disappointing they didn't treat Clear Sky like a real successor to SoC.
With the set of ideas the GSC crew assembled when making this game, an extra six or eight months could have made it a showstopper. As it stands, Clear Sky is still absolutely worth playing so long as your PC well exceeds the recommended specs.
