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

Playtime: 19.2 Hours

Played the game through entirely on Veteran difficulty - one step below Master, which doesn't actually make too much of a difference in game. This is a mostly vanilla playthrough, with just a few texture packs to make the game look better and SRP for stability and a couple of QoL changes (less grenade spam, better ballistics). I've tried to play the STALKER games a very long time ago, and I'm generally quite familiar with the series, but this is the first time I've every actually completed one myself.

I decided to start playing through the trilogy with this game first for a couple of reasons. Firstly, unlike the other two games, I have almost no experience or knowledge of this game at all - most content of the series tends to focus on the other two games, SoC and CoP. Secondly, since this game has a reputation for being the black sheep of the bunch, I wanted to play through this one first to get a more vanilla experience (not as many mods exist, just a few fixes) and to get the "worst" entry over with. An additional bonus is that I'll be playing through the series in chronological order; Clear Sky is a prequel to Shadow of Chernobyl.

Based on my experiences in this game, I think I'll definitely bump the difficulty up to Master in the other games, since Veteran didn't feel quite difficult enough for me. Also, after Clear Sky I think I'll want to try a heavier modlist for SoC and CoP to keep the series fresh & interesting for me. Given that all three of the games pretty much released on adjacent years, playing them all vanilla would feel a bit too much like playing the same thing thrice.

Out of all the games that I've ever played, I think the STALKER trilogy embodies the spirit of the "Eurojank" term the most, in both the good ways and the bad. It's an extremely ambitious series, especially given the scope of the world and the freedom of gameplay compared against the technological limitations of its time and the tight development schedule & resources - all of the games were released over the course of a 3-and-a-half-year span. Because of that, the jank left behind from disfunctional or cut features is ubiquitous and inescapable when playing - yet outside of issues with stability and performance, lots of little glitches and oddities somehow only add to the charm of the game, rather than detracting from the overall experience. This is true for all of the games in the series, including Clear Sky; even though it's typically panned pretty heavily in comparison to the other two, at the core of this game is still a very entertaining experience that holds up very well to my interests today over 15 years later. It also looks quite good too!

With that said, I'll start discussing the myriad issues that I have with this game. Some of them are unique to systems introduced in CS itself, while others are common throughout the entire series; as mentioned, because of the short development cycle of these games, many bugs and quirks were never properly fixed between releases. Probably the biggest one I can think of immediately is the relatively flat curve of weapon progression throughout the game. The only major upgrade occurs very close to the beginning of the game, when finally getting an upgrade from the cruddy pistol-shotgun combo up to a proper rifle - usually the AK74. At that poing you have a workhorse rifle that can easily take you through the majority of the game; weapons are generally quite lethal in both the player's and the enemies' hands, so further upgrades tend not to feel particularly significant. Moreover, in Clear Sky, the first pathway out of the Swamps takes you directly into the sightline of the Cordon's outpost with a mounted machine gun... with no other real choice, I ended up slowly scumming my way up to the base and killing all of the personnel so I wouldn't die instantly to the MG. That gave me a giant pile of Obokan (AN-94) rifles and thousands of spare rounds (both normal and AP) at the very beginning of the actual game, which I ended up using all the way up until the point of no return. While I loved using that weapon, I still found it strange how a game with so much variety would frontload you with very good gear just like that; it kind of takes some of the purpose out of scavenging for better gear throughout your journey. Once I picked up a top-class SEVA suit from an early-game faction war, I pretty much had everything I needed to beat the game.

There's a few other issues with the weapon upgrade systems, which were newly released in vanilla CS (most mods for SoC will add these mechanics retroactively). Firstly, the upgrade tree system for weapons is quite poorly implemented and designed in the wrong direction, with lots of different upgrades at the first tier gradually leading into a selection of just a few at the third, kind of like a pyramid. Where this system particularly does wrong is that the higher-level upgrades require multiple specific upgrades from the lower tiers that forces all fully tricked out weapons to fall into just a couple of possible categories - usually a binary selection between building a bullet hose or a DMR pretty much. If you want to walk somewhere in the middle (for example, a high fire-rate but accurate weapon), both types of higher-tier upgrades are inaccessible. A second, somewhat-related point to this is the ubiquity of annoying USB upgrade quests; each mechanic will ask you to find a few upgrade USBs to unlock some upgrades for specific weapons. These tend to be annoying to find (you need to find specific stashes, or pick them up off of key enemies... that can despawn) and only apply to a few select weapons when worked on by specific mechanics, so I quickly realized that this is kind of a useless task outside of the measly few rubles you get for turning in the ones you happen upon naturally when playing the game. Lastly, to push a previous point further, different mechanics (characters) in this game have different "skill levels" that aren't displayed anywhere, so only some are skilled enough to work on certain weapons. I didn't realize this at first, so for a while I thought the Obokan couldn't be upgraded, and switched to the AK74 instead; I think it's rather silly to completely hide this from the player, so it's quite fortunate that they fixed this in CoP.

The last major topic that I can complain about in CS is the newly-introduced faction system, which brought along a number of fundamental changes in the tone of this particular game in the series that didn't work out too well. It's worth noting that CS has by far the least focus on the mutants and wildlife of the Zone within the three games (only a single controller, and few/no other forced mutant encounters), instead focusing on a number of inter-factional conflicts taking place throughout the explorable territories. As an added side effect of this, enemies are all grouped up into "squads" that are visible on both the main map and your minimap, which means that the player pretty much always knows when enemies are nearby. Both of these points kind of ruin the tension of the gameplay, since it applies to the entire game outside of a very short stint in the Agroprom Underground, even in the Red Forest. But as for the rest of the game, the faction conflicts and system overall feel very pointless, yet somehow necessary. Basically, by completing a faction's "questline" to take over territory, you are able to reap some rewards (which is where my SEVA suit came from), but even after finishing a war and crushing the opposition, the enemy faction will still randomly be able to regroup and attack, or even take over outposts you captured even without any resources or martial strength noted on your PDA tracker. It makes the conflict seem pointless, as all your effort put towards finishing the conflict doesn't solve anything; and even worse, for the entire rest of the game you'll get random radio messages broadcasting recent news about the war. However, since pretty much all factions (including the Bandits) start out as being neutral to the player, you need to actively side with someone in order to do some shooting in addition to all your looting for the first half of the game. Mutants tend to be rare around the Cordon and the Garbage, and the Military are a bit out of your league to fight. One final little annoyance is that all of your faction quest rewards MUST be picked up at HQ, and are rarely given directly by the questgiver; this can require a trek across several maps. I don't know why the stalker you helped can't just hand you a couple thousand rubles or a few spare medkits.

With all of my major complaints out of the way, I want to say the game is still an excellent experience and the issues that I've listed above mostly amount to a smattering of weird or annoying aspects of the game that I feel like could have been done better. Also, there's no shortage of positive points either - some considering the STALKER series overall, and others for Clear Sky's place in it. The foundations of the games are very sturdy, with a satisfying feel and an immersive atmosphere within an interesting world. As can be seen in the screenshots, the games are quite pretty despite their age, making great use of limited visual effects to portray a hauntingly-beautiful apocalyptic landscape. There's a very distinct feeling of loneliness that I've only ever experienced in this series - not METRO, which is a bit more claustrophobic and emphasizes paranoia, nor Fallout, which tends to be a bit more lively and comedic in nature. Exploring this world makes it feel alive, even if the scripting is obvious (you can literally hover over squads in the map to see their destination and actions) - fighting between factions and against mutants happens constantly all throughout the game world, and even some key NPCs are typically vulnerable to being killed out of the blue (though it's very rare). While the stories and conversations are largely text-only, they also provide interesting background information on the different factions, mutants, and the history of the Zone. Overall, this game feels very much like an ImmSimm, even if many people might disagree with the classification.

The gunplay in the STALKER games is also a general high point of the series, and contributes further to the popularity of the series. Especially compared to some of its relative contemporaries (DOOM 3 comes to mind, though that's a few years prior), the shotguns are VERY powerful & useful even at range - especially with the dart/slug rounds that work better in the other two entries. That's not to sell any of the other guns short either; rifles, pistols, and even the SMGs are satisfying to use, each feeling powerful yet diverse. The perfect balance of lethality between the player and enemies is a cornerstone of this; even in the early parts of the game, the weapons you have access to can punish enemies severely if you can consistently land accurate shots, yet enemies can also tear you up quickly if you're not careful. Maintaining good positioning and vigilance for enemy movements are very important, as well as being able to properly clear rooms quickly. In pure vanilla CS there are a couple of complaints on this front regarding enemy grenade spam and constant bleeding, but I didn't really have any trouble with them personally. With SRP, the grenades were reduced to a rational amount, and I never found myself short of bandages either (ending the game with a stack of 50+).

Clear Sky also has a couple other novel improvements from the other games. Firstly, starting out in the swamps was interesting and quite fun; the lengthy period in the beginning of the game being almost completely confined to a couple of crappy shotguns & pistols is quite fun due to the more aggressive and explosive gameplay, compared to the rifle shooting range later on. The environment is also quite different from the grimy industrial ruins found everywhere else, and generally represents a slower & simpler game. The other huge change is the massive changes to artifact hunting from vanilla SoC. Firstly, the artifacts themselves are absurdly powerful in this game - the Bubble artifact has an incredible -6 radiation, the Goldfish gives you a huge +30kg capacity, a single Snowflake lets you sprint forever, etc... more than both SoC and CoP, your artifacts are critical to morphing your playstyle (some of them suck though, like the resistive artifacts that might only give you ~6% extra, completely ignorable). On top of this, the process of hunting for these artifacts by diving into anomaly fields and using detectors to locate them is a really fun concept, and the different scanner tiers make this even more interesting. It gives you a reason to interact with (and accidentally fall victim to!) all of the different types of anomalous formations in this game - vortexes, flame geysers, electrical fields, even time & warp anomalies might be worth exploring.

I kind of knew what to expect walking into this game, and I feel like Clear Sky delivered pretty much everything that I hoped it would. In fact, since my initial expectations were already a little low just from knowing the very cold reputation that this game (somewhat deservedly) has in the community, I found this game ultimately surprisingly fun more often than not. While I imagine this will probably be the only experience I really care to have with a STALKER game this close to vanilla, I think my time with this proved to myself that the STALKER games are not just when modded to hell and back, but were based on a winning formula to begin with. With just SRP, performance was perfectly smooth and stability was rock solid, crashing maybe only once or twice during my entire playthrough. Naturally, I'll be playing the other two games in the future - hopefully sooner rather than later, but with enough of a gap that I won't get tired out from visiting the same maps again (in SoC).