I really should not be writing this review. I am angry, frustrated, and clearly not in the right mood to give anyone an objective opinion about S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, so that is not what you are going to get. What you are about to receive is a rant by a pissed off gamer with limited time and even more limited forgiveness for stupid shit. The first S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was one of the best games I played last year. It was atmospheric, terrifying, brutally difficult at its outset and rewarding all at the same time. It was always buggy and un-optimized, but never to the point of me giving up and stomping away to play a 3rd string JRPG just because I knew it would run for longer than five minutes at a time. Clear Sky may be all these things and more, but I certainly won’t be finding out until it has been patched to death.

Clear Sky serves as a prequel to Shadow of Chernobyl, revisiting many of the same locations. They all look better, of course, but they are all very recognizable, to the point of knowing where to go before you have been told how to get there; déjà vu at a higher resolution and better textures, if you like. This may be in part to running in a new machine, but the lighting really stood out as better than the first game. Running around at night is completely terrifying. There is a flashlight, and it works OK, but knowing what kind of monsters are wandering around the irradiated woods and what they like to eat had me sneaking even when there was no one around. What little of the game I saw had the same oppressive atmosphere as the first, and I would have really liked to have seen the rest.

So why the anger? Nothing that was broken in the first game has been fixed, and a few new things have gone awry. Combat is still much harder at the beginning of the game than it is later on. I spent 30 minutes retrying one mandatory, unwinnable encounter very near the beginning of the game. Even after I decided to just run away, I died over and over to soldiers with impeccable aim, the ability to see through solid objects, and super hearing. Maybe it was scripted this way, but it was more frustrating than fun, and it did not serve as a good introduction to the open world part of the game. Once I escaped and found a gun with a scope, the tables were turned: combat at a distance made things suddenly easy. There is no balance. Clear Sky punishes you for playing, and the only reward is things becoming too easy later on.

Just bad combat is not enough to make me walk away from a game, though. Shadow of Chernobyl had the same problems, but there was more than enough to do and explore in the environment to keep me going. Clear Sky finally broke me because I simply could not play it. Crashes to the desktop were common and unexplained. I tried opening my case and pointing a fan at it to prevent overheating, though I played through Crysis while dangerously over-clocked without any problems. I updated drivers, changed settings, ran it in DX9 instead of DX10, and even let the damn thing sit for a day or two just to let it rest, and nothing helped. When I realized I had spent more time out of the game being pissed off then in the game being pissed off that was it; power down, walk away, next game please.

I do not think that my refusal to put up with game halting errors is a condemnation of PC gaming in general; Clear Sky is just an extreme example of a shoddy release. There have been games that were supposedly un-unplayable that I forged right on through because nothing was game breaking; Temple of Elemental Evil comes to mind, as does Vampire: Bloodlines. Perhaps there is a good comparison to be had with the developer of those games, Troika. Troika had huge ideas but rotten execution, and GSC Game World seems to be following the same pattern. Troika is gone now, so that’s where it can lead. I wanted to play Clear Sky. Hell, I still do, but I will not play a game that dumps me out to my desktop every five minutes. Clear Sky will get a second try, but it won’t be until I have nothing else to play, and that almost never happens.