Probably the first one, judging by how often he had to stop for a breather and a sausage roll while running cross country. Lying prone only drops your eye level another inch or so, so your character is either extremely fat or uncomfortably well endowed. Your character interprets “crouching” as ducking his head slightly, so it's very hard to effectively get behind low cower. The player uses some of the guns to store his chewing gum, so they jam with incredibly poor timing. Come to think of it, there are a lot of things you can't rely on. It's good that they're not totally dependent, but my impression was that my attention was urgently required, and I was kind of in the middle of shaking down corpses for baked beans.ĭon't think this means you can actually rely on your allies, though, because it seems like their IQ drops 50 points when you can actually see them. But halfway there I was suddenly congratulated for successfully seeing the blighters off, and by the time I arrived the wheelchair man had already installed a bar and croquet lawn. There was this bit where my allies were yelling my ear off telling me to help defend some control point somewhere, because black anorak wearers were closing in and our occupying forces numbered one guy in a wheelchair and a sock puppet. Especially early on in the game, missions sometimes have this alarming quality of solving themselves. Actually the various factions don't always seem to be totally clear on exactly how important you are. The player character is just one of many of these types, but every faction wants him to do jobs for them because he has mastery of the zone's most effective temporal anomaly: the mystical quick-save key. The zone's now the number one hangout for dudes with anoraks and acoustic guitars, who are all voiced by the same heavily-accented man, and who occupy their time by either shooting at people in slightly different-coloured anoraks and stealing their baked bean stock-piles or showing each other the best routes to get to people in slightly different-coloured anoraks to shoot at. Like make Atari release a decent game for once. They probably give you a water pistol and replace all the enemies with fire-breathing golden lions.Įss Tee Ay Ell Kay Ee Arr: Clear Sky is set in the area surrounding alternative post-disaster Chernobyl where the power station apparently ran on fairy dust before the meltdown and released a cloud of magic instead of boring old radiation, which transformed people and animals into super-powered mutants, as opposed to corpses, and created localized space-time anomalies that can do impossible things. I dread to think what the hardest setting is like. I had to press quick-save more often than the fire button and this was on medium difficulty. They can spot you in pitch darkness even with your flash-light off, and they can shoot you from half-way to Neverland, because their guns have magic accuracy that evaporates the instant you get your hands on them. The player can't survive more than a measly handful of bullets ripping through their flesh, while the armored enemies can take so many rounds to the torso you'd think there'd be nothing left but a spinal column and the corn flakes they had for breakfast. You know how in most FPSes you're some kind of hybrid of man and refrigerator who can take an entire munitions dump to the face, while the enemy all have armor made of whipped cream and skulls made of cake? Well it seems going into this game everyone got their character sheets mixed up. If you go into Ess Tee Ay Ell Kay Ee Arr: Clear Sky in the mind-set of, say, Half-Life 2 and run full-pelt into enemy strongholds gleefully spraying bullets, then your corpse will be strung up in their garden being used as a bird feeder before you can say “reload, Doctor Freeman!” With that in mind, here is Stalker: Clear Sky, or to give it its proper title Ess Tee Ay Ell Kay Ee Arr: Clear Sky. Reality is a cruel and unintuitive place with frustrating gameplay mechanics, which is why it's so odd that games try so hard to resemble it. And by the time my comrades has persuaded them to do that I'll have remembered that I'm a massive coward and legged it. Before I would willingly enter a gun-fight, the enemy are going to have to strap big, glowing, red arrows to their heads and promise to stand next to windows loudly vocalizing every thought that crosses their minds. I hate being shouted at, and I can't run very fast while wearing a backpack the size of a cow. I don't think I would do very well in a real-world combat scenario.
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