Product Description

The story of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky brings the players one year prior to the events of the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game in 2011.

A group of stalkers has for the first time reached the very heart of the Zone - Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, and brings about a cataclysm on the brink of a catastrophe. An immense blow-out of anomalous energy changes the Zone. There are no more reliable and relatively safe roads. The entire levels vanish in the outbursts of anomalies. Stalkers and even expeditions die or end up sealed on the lost territories. New areas, which remained unknown since the time of the Zone emergence, appear on the Zone map. The Zone continues to shake with blowouts. The Zone is unstable. The anomalous activity is at its maximum.

Changes of the Zone map known to stalkers shake the fragile balance of forces in the Zone. Among the groupings, there flare up hostilities for the new territories, artefact fields and spheres of influence. There are no more old enemies or friends - now everyone is for himself. The Factions War has started between the groupings.

• 10 hours of the main plotline gameplay
• 5 completely new levels - Swamps, Red Forest, Ruined Hospital, Limansk and Military Ordnance Yard
• 8 significantly re-designed levels from the original game - Cordon, Garbage, Dark Valley, Agroprom, Agroprom, Undergrounds, Yantar, Military and Station
• Weapon and armor upgrades
• Possibility to fix weapons
• Updated concepts of anomalies and artifacts - rare anomalies cannot be seen and are discovered using detectors
• 36 weapon types
• 4 multiplayer game modes
• 12 multiplayer maps

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1438 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Koch
• Released on: 2008-09-05
• ESRB Rating: Rating Pending
• Platform: Windows XP
• Original language: German

Manufacturer's Description
The story of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky brings the players one year prior to the events of the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game in 2011.

A group of stalkers has for the first time reached the very heart of the Zone - Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, and brings about a cataclysm on the brink of a catastrophe;An immense blowout of anomalous energy changes the zone;There are no more reliable and relatively safe roads;The entire levels vanish in the outbursts of anomalies;Stalkers and even expeditions die or end up sealed lost on the territories;New areas, which remained unknown since the time of the Zone emergence, appear on the Zone map;The Zone continues to shake with blowouts;The Zone is unstable;The anomalous activity is at it's maximum.

Changes of the Zone map known to stalkers shake the fragile balance of forces in the Zone;Among the groupings, there flare up hostilities for the new territories, artifact fields and spheres of influence;There are no more old enemies or friends - now everyone is for himself;The Factions War has started between the groupings.

Customer Reviews

Back in the zone (rev for patch 1.5.04)
No point in fussing around - if you liked the first outing, Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl (SOC), then you will like this, and it's worth getting. BUT, patch it straight away*

If on the other hand you prefer Call of Duty, or Doom, or those sort of very linear shooters, then avoid this like the plague - you will hate it!

* Patch it to 1.5.04 - only two patches - which gets rid of the stash management issue + seems more stable. For those who, understandibly, gave up at 1.5.01 - now might be a good time to give it another go!

This is a return to form for GCC - and not always in a good way, e.g. the essential patches, both invalidating the previous version's saved games! But on the BIG plus side, GSC care enough to turn out patches, and support a very active modding community.

More on the plus side - the graphics have evolved well and look lovely, and the weather, fog, evening mists, rain (of course), sun etc all work very well - going through the Red Forest at night in a thunderstorm, after fighting off a pack of dogs, was all amazingly intense. The sound-scape is excellent too and really works well. It's all very immersive - just what you'd expect and want.

Naturally there are issues/irritants - the stash management was a total farce - until patch 1.5.04 arrived - and it's now OK. The inventory is now 100% opaque, so you can't really use it on the move let alone in the middle of a fight, and it's tricky to easily compare the health of backpack items.

More... the NPC are still immovable, and displace you like bulldozers as they move. When you die (and you will!) the 'quick load' key doesn't work, forcing you through the main-menu 'load game' rigmarole.

And... the radiation detector is almost silent, which means... well you can work that one out, right!? And... you can't sleep, to hit the day/night cycle you want; you can't jump/run in even the shallowest water; some of the story event don't trigger if you don't follow the 'correct' path - so you have to loop back and find the invisible line to cross; you can't (seemingly) sell NPC's guns or ammo; one of my save games crashed the game every time I tried to load it - causing me to go back to a previous save (top tip - keep several saves!)

So I'm having a right old whinge, yet still gave it 4 stars?

Well it achieves the immersive trick of putting you a 'real space', leaving you to amble around the zone 'just having a nose' and bumping in to things - which is a hoot. And Entering the Forester's camp at night with lightning flashing all around was worth the money alone.

Worth noting though - there don't seem to be any significant underground missions - which seems like a real mistake to me, and I'm not convinced this is actually a better game than Stalker SOC - but if you liked the first game, get this one. Similarly, if you like this one, get SoC, patch it and apply the 'Oblivion Lost' mod - it's free and really v good - and similarly 'Priboi Story'!

Using both old and new parts of the Zone strangely delights, as the old areas are familiar yet different, and there's enough ammo lying around - you just have to rummage a bit.

So if you like games that you can take your own time with and that, despite all attempts to frustrate, do reward the time it takes to 'get into it' then buy it - once again GSC have produced very distinctive and genuinely immersive game.

Atmospheric - but flawed sequel
The original Stalker Shadow of Chernobyl is up there in my top 5. the pure atmosphere of the game coupled with its incredible storyline made it another relationship tester. I wanted to play on it rather than watch TV with the mrs. I was also lucky in that my PC didnt seem to rub the irritable game engine up the wrong way and make it crash, something which has afflicted many gamers playing it.

This sequel, Clear Sky has a lot more of the same. Atmosphere is there in spades, story is again good but there are too many similar aspects to the game, the weapons need more of an overhaul, they should have spent more time changing the levels of the zone. And the bugs... Well to me it takes the mickey out of your average paying gamer. The game kicks me out if my finger even hovers near the 'quickload' button, something that should be rock solid in any difficult first person shooter where you die quickly and often. The quests are a bit more diverse but again are quite unpredicatable on success due to bugs, however the upgrade aspect helps and the search for artifacts is testing. So not bad by any means, but a shame in that it could have been something approaching a classic if done properly.

a frustrating expansion pack.
Having played and quite enjoyed the original stalker, I thought I may enjoy this. My mistake.

First of all, in reality this is no more than an expansion, it certainly is not a new game. Adding in 2 new sectors and locking a few doors is not a new game. Whilst it adds the ability to mod and repair your weapons and armour (which should have been present in s.o.c), that is all it adds.

The graphics are the same bland graphics, the weapons are the same, the artifacts are the same, the items and most of the areas are the same, as well as the characters you meet - even the incidental music is the same for crying out loud.

They have added nade tossing enemies, which makes sense, except they can lob nades over impossible distances that seek you out behind cover and kill you instantly. Bloodsuckers still move too fast to track and have a damage range that exceeds physics. Psuedodogs now vanish like ghosts around you, killing you before you know they are there. Looking into stashes/back packs etc does not pause time, so as you are looking through a backpack a pack of dogs just appear and kill you without you even knowing it, invisible radiation fields, no way to sleep so have to play through the night cycle. They have even added a new frustration - emission blasts.

With reference to the upgrade repair system, everything is so damn expensive that you will need to spend a lot of hours just grinding back and forth to sell guns/equipment you have looted just to be able to afford simple repairs. Talking of guns even after 1 mark of wear it begins to jam and the aim becomes unreliable - leaving you dead once again.

To their credit they have now instituted a sort of quick travel system, but again the cost of using these guides, means you will usually travel the whole map back and forth on foot, fighting every step of the way against a non ending stream of enemies, and mutants, to pay a fortune in fees, for hours of your life, just to find a bug that renders further play impossible.

This means you have to reinstall the entire game, and pray that the bug has not been saved into your save file. If that happens then your only option is to restart the game from scratch.

Its almost as if the developers thought of everything that made s.o.c enjoyable or easy in any way, then decided to remove it or make it harder. You even still have to return to a base to collect a reward from submissions, which means more grinding back and forth on foot. Oh and even exploring the maps has gone as you can no longer find items in backpacks unless you have found (or paid a lot of money) for information about that stash, only to find after all the effort and cost it contains a couple of bandages.

If you enjoy the idea of grinding back and forth on mundane deathtrap style maps, completing dull repetitive missions, and fighting hordes of hard as nails enemies, then you may get more enjoyment from stalker than I did. If by some stroke of bad luck their is a third installment of this 'game' I shall not be wasting any more time or money on it.