No more Jedi Knight-like "you take about 100 blaster rifle hits but a Stormtrooper goes down in 2" hypocrisy.
This is exacerbated by the fact that the game developers rightfully decided to make you equivalent to your enemies what kills them kills you. They alert their buddies to your location. They go prone (even though you can't, how lame). Enemies move as squads they have leaders who give orders, grunts who move up and flank you. from now on referred to as Stalker, even though it's actually an (idiotic) acronym, because the periods and capitalization piss me off - you know that the gunfights in the game are astoundingly cool. If you've played the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Sometimes, I wish in retrospect I hadn't, because I might have enjoyed some portions of the game more. I kept this on the highest difficulty for the whole game (yes, as innovative as it is, Clear Sky - from now on abbreviated CS - allows you to modify the difficulty while you're playing). The difficulties' descriptions represented nothing to me, laid out on four lines of text, anyway, so I figured start right at the top. That's right, lower difficulties are for nursing babies and pregnant mothers, and if you're reading an article about a videogame, chances are you're neither. I played the game on the hardest difficulty, Master. If you're starting a new game, it's pretty much the only decision you have to make. Oh, this isn't organized at all, I just realized.
Without further ado, I'm going to get to typing about my impressions and such in the game, feel free to chuckle along. So by now I feel it's also a good primer regarding the question "do I want to play?" Read the article. By the time I scrolled back up to this paragraph, this had gotten fucking LONG. Additionally, you may find some of the stuff I post here is useful to you in actually finishing the game. If you want to offload your frustration on a beer and someone else's writing, then you've come to the right spot. If you don't want any spoilers, don't read it. It's not really a walkthrough, though you may find some parts are total spoilers.
This LJ post, being very Googleable, is intended for people who are frustrated with this game.
a week?), and if I weren't brilliant, or good at Googling (which I should have tried first, really), I would not have finished this game thanks to crashes and bugs preventing my progress.
I'm using the latest patch here (which is the fourth patch to come out in like. This game was a pinnacle to lack of QA testing of your software. Epic in that it was long (took me over a week to beat, playing several to many hours per day, sometimes the entire day), but the length wasn't only attributed to the storyline and possibilities therein, but also to the enormous amount of bugs I encountered trying to beat it.
the idea is awesome, it's a System Shock 2-like interface coupled with a world created by the Strugatsky brothers. Since I've posted up the links regarding these games, I won't say much more about the basic premises and all that cal. I just completed S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, the fairly long-awaited expansion to the Gamespot "Special Achievement Best Atmosphere 2007" award-winning game, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl.