I'm about 10 hours into the game at the moment, so I figured I would let you guys know how it is.

1st off, I installed the latest patch before I even fired up the game, as I heard that is fixes a lot of bad issues the release version of the game had, and I am happy (and relieved) to report that I have had a crash free 10 hours of fun with this game :)

From what I can tell the game levels are made up from 50% entirely new areas and 50% revamped areas from SOC, the new areas are fantastic and full of atmosphere, while the old areas have been brushed up and repolished to come into line with the new standard. Things do feel more polished overall with better animations, ai, sound and a vastly improved PDA system that shows your inter-faction standing / quests / map / etc.

The new graphical options are very very nice, and the "enhanced full dynamic lighting" render is actually faster than the renderer in SOC despite all the new graphical features going on. Special mention must go to the "god rays" that the sun casts as it pops over the hill in the morning, these look absolutely fantastic and don't really hurt the framerate too much. Other additions are a depth of field effect that is activated when you reload or an explosive goes off near you. All good!

Gameplay has been enhanced but is still faithful to the original SOC, enemies now throw grenades at you (there is a grenade proximity warning on the UI now too) and take cover behind objects, blindfire around corners and over boxes etc. Mutants now work in packs much better and are very convincing.

Finding artifacts is now a little minigame in itself, and they are way more rare than in SOC, you have to equip special detectors to even find artifacts, and then strategically dodge into the anomaly holding them to retrieve them. You can buy better detectors as you make more money so that finding artifacts becomes easier, but retrieving them is still a tough job.

The other addition is you can upgrade your weapons and armour at a technican npc. There are tons of mods you can make and it works in a little tech-tree kind of way for each weapon / armour type. For example if you upgrade your weapon to fire a faster bullet and reduce its recoil by 20%, then the option to increase its rate of fire becomes available for purchase.

It seems like you are fighting other factions of humans now rather than mutants, I would say around 70 / 30 if you want a percentage. This is mainly because of the new faction alignment gameplay. Joining 1 faction will make you an enemy of certain other factions and you will receive dynamic objectives to take opposing faction bases as your teams move up and get pushed back. Its very involving stuff and enhances the replay value as there are like 7-8 factions in the game.

Some annoyances do remain, night time is now almost pitch black, and a real pain to see where you are going until you get a suit capable of night vision, sometimes the ai screws up and enemies will wiggle on the spot and not really do much, and pointing at a friendly stalker will make them say something to you and after 100 times hearing this line you will start to go a little bit mad.

The initial weapon set is really really inaccurate, to the point where the 1st few assault rifles you get are basicly useless beyond 40 meters or so, and watching as your perfectly aligned headshot bullet flies 2 meters wide of the target is a real source of frustration, but the later guns feel much better and are fun to use. 

i loved the first few hours of stalker with the low precision weapons. really made fights nice and dynamic, because you had to get so close at them to kill them. 

http://daz.quaddicted.com/clearsky.html 

Looks "tasty" :) 

what kind of rig are you running? i'm glad to hear not everyone is getting back to back crashes... i haven't picked this up yet because of the initial talk of crashes (and i've been replaying soc with some mods too).

i've got an e6300 cpu and an ati x1950 but only 1gb of ram which i think is the major chokepoint atm because i run out of ram for textures. :( 

hmmm in those screens it looks a little bland for a 2008 game. the lighting is nice, but level design average 

My rig is getting fairly old now... amd 2.8ghz (not dual core) 2gb ram and a 8800gts 320mb. Necros I would not try and run the game with 1gb of ram, it just wouldn't be worth it :)

The game runs great at medium but really chugs on high, im guessing the gpu runs out of memory :)

[Kona], I know what you mean. This is the strange thing about the developer... They can create this utterly absorbing gameworld with a great atmosphere but there are things about it which just dont feel right or simply just do not work.

Sadly, there are some quite sloppy game design decisions in there too, as I found out last night, once you enter Limansk (think Pripjyat from SOC) you can't go back as the exit is blocked. This means that if you had just done the story missions and wanted to go back and join a stalker faction and play that part of the game you cant, which is totally unforgivable on GSC's part. I can't see any reason to block the player from leaving Limansk...

Apart from these annoyances, I'm still having a blast though :) 

I started playing it, have a few hours in, and haven't had a single crash. I think I've just started coming across bugs though, some missions don't appear in my PDA, and at the moment I have no idea what to do as the people I'm supposed to kill just aren't there.
I had to put the settings on low for it to run on my 7600GTS (my 8800GT fried a while back) so it's kind of ugly.
Feels ok for now anyways, Stalker improved really. 

How the hell did you get your 8800GT to fry? I got one of those. I want to put in a second 1 just for added boost.

PS. who remembers Chaser (2003)? I just bought it so will be playing it next I think :) 

I heard most of the recent Nvidia cars 8x, and 9x mostly, have had lots of problems with faulty components... =\ 

Not quite sure what to think of it so far. On one hand, there's great visuals, lots of small improvements and upgrades, and the game is far less buggy than it's predecessor. On the other, the flavour and charm of SoC seems to have largely been lost.

Clear Sky is not as fun as SoC. Combat is more annoying, weapons less effective, many of the voice overs are completely inappropriate, there's increased pressure on resources, and getting hold of artifacts is an exercise in waiting for the last quicksave to load. If that wasn't enough, the brilliantly creepy underground levels that were my favourite part of SoC are gone.

The only truly remarkable part of Clear Sky so far has been the trip through Red Forest. I turned up at night, low on medkits and antirad, and stumbling alone and terrified through that pitch black radioactive forest was some of the most enjoyably tense gaming I've ever done. And then just as I left the treeline, dawn was breaking.

That was pretty cool. I'm going to reserve judgement until I've played more. 

On the other, the flavour and charm of SoC seems to have largely been lost.

100% agree, and it is a shame. It is still a very atmospheric game but the atmosphere certainly isn't as deep and brooding as SoC.

the brilliantly creepy underground levels that were my favourite part of SoC are gone.

Yes this is a real shame, as they were my favourite areas also. Clear sky doe's add a couple of new indoor/underground areas but nothing approaching SoC.

One of the other major annoyances I have with Clear Sky is that every single enemy is shown on your map, so you know exactly where they all are at all times, I mean wtf was GSC Gameworld thinking? It really doe's totally remove the suspense of mutant attacks as you know they are in the area way before you even get near it.

I'll bet there is a mod that removes this "feature" already, I must go and look for it.

The random attacks / encounters involving other npc's seem to happen much less in CS also, almost to the point where they never happen at all. in SoC I loved being able to load in a new area and not being totally sure what I was going to find, even though I had been through it 40 times before. In CS there seems to be nothing happening at all in 99% of the areas, occasionally a bandit raid will attack a group of stalkers or a herd of mutants will get too close to an outpost and cause a shootout, but these are exceptions rather than the norm...

I'm sure there will be mods to breathe some life back into areas too, its just a shame that mods are needed at all for these kind of things.

Still loving the game though :D 

Very much looking forward to what modders do with the material in Clear Sky.

Unfortunately the game is now crashing upon entry to the Warehouses. I might have to play through from an earlier save. :( 

The ending fucking sucked. As did the last few levels.

Meh. 

How fucking ridiculously hard are the Sacred Grounds? :D
That was really not worth the xth playthrough I think. 

So I reached a point where I've done quite a few missions, but I can never complete any of them cause no NPC seems to accept the fact that I have whatever bloody PDA they want in my inventory, so I stopped playing.

Fuck you stalker. =( 

Stalker is short for Shit Talker. Cuz apparently every one who plays it talks shit about it afterwards. 

That's what makes Clear Sky so disappointing. It's not just a crap game, it's a wasted opportunity to improve on the flawed gem that was SoC. 

I lost interest after reaching the Cordon. Maybe I'll give it another try when the next patch comes out (tomorrow?).

One should think GSC have learned their lesson, but as it turns out they even put some icing on everything that's wrong with the industry these days. 

it seems that this is a game that's worth playing, but patience while they patch up stuff would probably be worth it. 

Medal Of Honor, and in fact the entire realistic war-setting FPS sub-genre, flew under the radar for me. I like pure action, fantasy, medieval. Having to use realistic strategy and tactics in order to avoid the one or two hits it takes to put you down is not what I'm used to. Until MOD:AA, I'd never actually played a game from this genre. But having played through it, it's in fact very similar to the Soldier Of Fortune and NOLF series'. And in those games I actually enjoyed sneaking around corners and trying to make every press of the trigger a headshot. This is the same, only even more emphasised.

You can take a number of hits before hitting dirt, but there is more reloading in this game than any I've ever played. At times this can be slightly annoying, especially in the sniper town where you'll have to reload many times over before you figure out where the next sniper is hiding. Nonetheless, this was my personal favourite part of the game. The comparison to Saving Private Ryan was obvious; and a smart move as it made it even more realistic actually pitting yourself in a destroyed town with snipers everywhere, pretending your actually in Saving Private Ryan.

The other highlight was, of course, Omaha Beach, again from Saving Private Ryan. It was a very difficult level to begin with. I ended up getting through with 4% health left, even with many, many reloads. But while it was a highlight, it could have been much more on a grand scale - the feature of the game. I'd love to see the battle remade in a newer engine.

The gameplay was surprisingly enjoyable and well-paced throughout the game. But while it was very fun, MOD:AA does have some drawbacks. Firstly, it's far too short. The ending was very abrupt, with no big battle at all. The entire game I completed in just two days, 3-4 sittings. Other games would only be reaching the halfway point by this stage. Fortunately, there are two mission packs available for extra playtime.

The other disappointment for me was the design. While this is a 2002 game, getting on six years old now, the Quake3/IDTech3 engine is capable of better. Games that come to mind: RTCW, American McGee's Alice, FAKK2; all of which were released well before MOH:AA. However, it was probably slightly better than Soldier Of Fortune II, which used the same engine and was released only months later.

Having said that, some of the design was great for 2002 - the war-battered sniper-town, the dark snowy forests, small villages set among countryside. But there were other levels looking very flat and plain such as the submarine and Omaha Beach itself.

Overall though, the design was good enough and even for a short game, MOD:AA was a load of fun. Probably not quite as fun as Soldier Of Fortune 2, but I'll be sure to play the two mission packs and look forward to the two PC sequels released since MOH:AA. 

i worked on Breakthrough, let me know what you think. 

oh sweet, what did u do on it?

i'll probably review both the mission packs next :) 

i'll tell you after the reviews :P 

I could never get that to run on my old gfx card, should try it now.