IGN UK Clear Sky Review

[geoffry]

http://pc.ign.com/articles/906/906864p1.html

 

[ja1484]

People still pay attention to IGN?

PC Gamer UK loved it. The only reviews I really care about will come from EuroGamer and 1UP anyway.

 

[geoffry]

Its the first review I had seen on it.

I'll be picking it up no matter what, but IGN voiced some concerns I had on whether the story will suffer on bringing in the faction fighting sand box.

 

[450R]

All of the personal opinions I've seen basically mirror what IGN said: no atmosphere. It sounds like they took Clear Sky in the wrong direction by adding more enemies and more combat, and less... well, it's actually hard to put into words. Exploration of a desolate world? Creep factor? I'm not exactly sure, but STALKER had a unique charm, no doubt about it.

I'll wait for more reviews but this game is slowly sinking down to a rainy-day purchase.

 

[TheVrolok]

Originally posted by: 450R
All of the personal opinions I've seen basically mirror what IGN said: no atmosphere. It sounds like they took Clear Sky in the wrong direction by adding more enemies and more combat, and less... well, it's actually hard to put into words. Exploration of a desolate world? Creep factor? I'm not exactly sure, but STALKER had a unique charm, no doubt about it.

I'll wait for more reviews but this game is slowly sinking down to a rainy-day purchase.

Ew, that's exactly what I DIDN'T want to happen. I wanted another atmospheric/story shooter, not a move to a run and gun shooter. Maybe I'll be holding off a bit, too.

 

[Elcs]

Yes, I mentioned this in the Best games of 2008 thread.

Everything I had read on Clear Sky exactly mirrors this IGN review.

 

[imported_Imp]

Well, Stalker: Shadows of Chernobyl only got an 8-ish. It was buggy and not well polished to begin with. To forget that and go into Clear Sky would be a mistake; I mean, I would have hoped they learned their lesson and did better this time, but what are you going to do. Looks like the reviewer did consider previous failings. I liked the original, I will like the "pre-quel".

 

[ibex333]

Don't just read the review. Read the comments under it...

 

[Nebor]

Stalker? That game where my AK-47 couldn't score a hit at 100 yards? Didn't much care for it, can't imagine buying an expansion.

 

[Zenoth]

I've seen a play through of the first two levels of the final Russian version of Clear Sky, and as a big Shadow of Chernobyl fan I can safely say that Clear Sky is "alright". By that I mean that, so far, it does fail at forcing a heavy and intense atmosphere on the player like SoC did, simply because there's indeed just too many enemies and just too much "life" around to say the least, for a post-apocalyptic and rotten zone of lethal dangers. In terms of atmosphere and spookiness, from what I saw, Shadow of Chernobyl is better. But there's also a very good thing in Clear Sky which I noticed right away, and it is the artifacts system. In Shadow of Chernobyl mere exploration never lead to anything worthwhile to justify the very possibility of doing it, other than finding a few treasures that were spawned in a scripted manner when you were looting dead corpses around. And the artifacts in Shadow of Chernobyl were scattered to some extent, but still far too easy to come by and it never felt "special" to get your hands on one of those.

That has been fixed and enhanced a hundred fold in Clear Sky for sure. Just wanting to go on a search for a single one of those objects should immediately result in a "buy all of the health packs and ammo you can find" reflex, because you may well need those items, for looking for them is one thing, but actually finding them seems not to be free at all, either costing lots of health, or lots of stamina due to having a horde of mutants running at you (that's where the "get more ammo" part comes into play). So getting one artifact in Clear Sky will certainly be a nice little side quest by itself whenever the player feels like doing it. The one thing I don't know about for sure is if those artifacts are still scripted and spawned at exactly the same place every time, the video I saw didn't "test" that of course, the guy playing was his first time as well I believe.

Overall (I'm skipping lots of stuff here) I'd say that just out-of-the-box Clear Sky is sufficiently good to justify buying it, it seems bigger (the first level, the Swamp, is BIG, I mean really big) although still limited by fences, indeed, than SoC was, and the new features are a welcome addition, the weapons upgrade system was something that would have made SoC even better, and Clear Sky has it, so that's a definitive plus. Let's not forget that Shadow of Chernobyl wasn't all that impressive under its unpatched vanilla condition when it first came out. But to conclude this I'd feel safe to say that, at the moment, Shadow of Chernobyl is still a better game when we take into consideration the patches that came for it but also its modding community who of course had a good year and more to make a number of very impressive modifications for it. But I would see Clear Sky as a winner given the same time for the community to work on it and the developers to fix the bugs and various mishaps. To put it simply, Clear Sky has more potential than SoC ever had, let's just wait and see how far it goes over time.

 

[Vehemence]

Originally posted by: Nebor
Stalker? That game where my AK-47 couldn't score a hit at 100 yards? Didn't much care for it, can't imagine buying an expansion.

Couldn't stand STALKER either, not sure what all the love regarding it is about. To each their own, eh.

 

[Zenoth]

Originally posted by: Nebor
Stalker? That game where my AK-47 couldn't score a hit at 100 yards? Didn't much care for it, can't imagine buying an expansion.

Have you returned it for a refund? If you still own it then I suggest you don't forget about an entire game because of something that has been long fixed with modifications which I would guess you've never bothered trying either. Just one thing that doesn't do it and boom, let's forget about the whole game, some of you out there are harsh with yourselves.

But, yeah, to each their own tastes I guess.

 

[Munky]

Originally posted by: Nebor
Stalker? That game where my AK-47 couldn't score a hit at 100 yards? Didn't much care for it, can't imagine buying an expansion.

I beat the game twice and never had that "problem." But I'm glad it wasn't one of those "run around, spray at the guy's feet and score a headshot. Rinse. Repeat." type of games.

 

[Arglebargle]

Originally posted by: Nebor
Stalker? That game where my AK-47 couldn't score a hit at 100 yards? Didn't much care for it, can't imagine buying an expansion.

Didn't the game come without an AK47 at all? Have you looked at the actual statistics of rounds fired vs hits scored in real combat situations?

 

[imported_Imp]

Originally posted by: Arglebargle

Originally posted by: Nebor
Stalker? That game where my AK-47 couldn't score a hit at 100 yards? Didn't much care for it, can't imagine buying an expansion.

Didn't the game come without an AK47 at all? Have you looked at the actual statistics of rounds fired vs hits scored in real combat situations?

Well, it was actually an AK74, AKM and some 'advanced' version, IIRC. Gotta admit the dispersion was a bit high, but not high enough to miss people at 100 yards. The main problem was that the AK series of weapons had some of the lowest damage values and no stopping power (not sure if they had this stat, but it sure felt this way). So chances are, hits were being scored, just not enough to do jackshit. Attach a scope if you want to see. That or you're using an AK that came off someone who was fragged.

For this reason alone, I traded my AK in for the unique 'Duty' main weapon, which was modded to use AK rounds. It was a bit buggy though; dispersion was high as hell, and the gun's condition never went down graphically (stat-bar wise), while jams occurred more and more frequently with use. Still held onto it till near the end though.

 

[mindcycle]

It sucks to hear that there might be a few bugs, but that's ok, i'm sure it's nothing that won't be fixed eventually. I'm still really looking forward to clear sky.