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It's a lot of fun with friends and has enough content and ways to play to keep you doing varied stuff for a good while, but don't expect anyone you meet to do anything other than try to kill you.

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Shadow of Chernobyl is the first game in the STALKER series. Like the others in the series, it's an atmospheric open world FPS with somewhat of a reputation for difficulty, great quality, and some bugginess and instability. I'll come back to that last one soon.

I'll go ahead and say right away, if you are interested in STALKER, enjoy exploration, like atmospheric games, or something else here appeals to you, get this game. It's rock solid mechanically, has a large map that avoids being too big to navigate, there's plenty of content, and if that's not enough it has a large modding scene just like the other games. I can't offer any info on what mods are good or not, but they do exist.

This is by far the game I have the most experience with, having just barely run out of steam on my first playthrough at the very end and actually completing it on the second. On both playthroughs I set the game to Master difficulty, start to finish, since I had heard enemies being damage sponges on lower difficulties was a possible issue. I had a lot of fun throughout both playthroughs exploring the Zone, following the story, and fighting the many enemies it has to offer. The difficulty throughout was enough to keep me on my toes, largely from enemies' dangerous but manageable damage output, but never crushing. I had plenty of resources like bandages or medkits since I spent a lot of time screwing around and looting stashes or doing side missions, so I only ever died if I made a stupid enough mistake. If you burn through the story you might run into trouble with resources.

I will say that my second playthrough had some weird stability issues I didn't encounter the first time around. Nothing game breaking, but definitely weird. Immediately after completing a major story mission the game was telling me both to move on to the next mission AND to repeat the one I just finished. It was ultimately a non-issue since I could progress just fine, but still, weird.

What was far more troublesome and strange was an encounter I had with what might as well have been a warlock who disguised himself as a normal stalker. He was just some side character who was wounded and trapped in a building with a dangerous mutant, and you can choose to help him for some reward, but for whatever reason regardless of choosing to help him or not I would get a crash to desktop if I tried to walk away from him, like he cursed me or something stupid. I resolved this issue by just killing him, because of course that would help, but it was pretty scary since I thought I was screwed.

I mention these anomalies (haha) as examples of how this game can be unpredictable with how unstable it is. Your mileage will almost definitely vary from mine, so be forewarned. If your issues prove to be game-breaking or just annoying, there are community-made patches to help fight off the chaos or fix minor issues and inconsistencies.

TL;DR: It's an open world FPS with great atmosphere, good mechanics, a strong modding scene, and unpredictable bugs and other issues. If you can look past the rougher edges of this game, it's a fantastic experience.

Note: I am writing this review from the perspective of having played ~20 hours vanilla, and any time after that with the Sky Reclamation Project mod and some of its optional features. I couldn't make it to the end with vanilla Clear Sky.

STALKER: Clear Sky is the second game in the STALKER series of atmospheric open world FPS games, and is a prequel to the first game, Shadow of Chernobyl. It's particularly noteworthy in the series for being the one to try to change the gameplay style SoC establishes, but still has a lot of the mechanics, locations, and story elements that pop up across each game.

However, this game is often regarded as the weakest entry in the STALKER series, and while I haven't played Call Of Pripyat, nor have I played fully through this game, I'm going to agree with that claim. The murderous difficulty is something to behold, and the vaguely off-kilter gunplay doesn't help. It also seems to be more unstable than Shadow of Chernobyl, since I've had multiple crashes since I first wrote this review. I had some trouble trying to adapt.

Here's an example: I beat Shadow of Chernobyl on Master from start to finish without too much pain and without many crashes, so I decided my first attempted playthrough would be on Master, as God intended. I gave up on it when I got stuck trying to get back into the swamps from the Cordon since I was broke. The route I was taking did NOT have a military-operated machine gun that would rip me to shreds, but it did have approximately fifty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bandits and I did not have enough bullets or drugs to win against them.

My second playthrough was on Stalker difficulty for a while since I didn't want to relive death by poverty and mass gunfire, and after building a stock of equipment and changing to Master, I'm barely hanging on. On multiple occasions I've caught around five grenades to the face simultaneously. It's cartoonish how eagerly the AI will throw frags at you.

With all of that in mind, this is still a pretty good game. It's still got that atmosphere the STALKER series is known for, in addition to a lot of changes to gameplay that don't all work perfectly, but do make an interesting change of pace from Shadow of Chernobyl. For example, the change from artifacts quite literally being something you could just trip over at times to hidden from sight, requiring you to creep through anomaly fields trying to zero in on the artifact really makes finding them an achievement (and far more dangerous). There's also much more encouragement to involve yourself with factions or take jobs from random stalkers, and much more to be gained or lost by doing so.

TL;DR: If you like STALKER already and can accept that Master difficulty is insane, or that a lot of gameplay mechanics are different and kind of weird, you're in. I've also heard this game in particular pairs very well with modding, and if you're as unfortunate as me, you might be forced to if the instability proves too extreme.
If you're new to STALKER, I strongly recommend you play one of the other games first.

Update: I've tweaked some parts of the review to better explain what this game is, and my second playthrough was abandoned due to repeated crashes at the Garbage that I couldn't successfully resolve. I'm not at all sure why this was happening, but it was enough to push me to get the Sky Reclamation Project mod since it was claiming to offer a ton of bug fixes and improvements to stability. I'll update this review if I ever bother with a playthrough as close to vanilla as possible.

i beat the game by climbing with a hammer and now i will beat myself with a hammer

Why haven't you bought this game yet?

No, really. Tell me why. Do you hate fun?

'Cos if you don't hate fun, this is THE game to get. It's like War of the Worlds + Starship Troopers + so much B-movie cheesiness it hurts. On top of that you get 4 player co-op waging just short of nuclear war on giant legions of giant insects, with an added spice of giant robots. It's nuts.

Get it, then get your friends to get it, then get them to play it with you. The co-op is legendary, and allows for some truly magical moments. Nothing is quite as fun as forming Voltron and beating the hell out of giant aliens with it. Or beating up not-Godzilla with a giant robot. Or calling in laser fire from satellites and nuclear bombardment.

TL;DR kill bugs with friends.

Best summarized as "Drug-addled laser cannon-wielding kleptomaniac cowboy terrorist simulator."

This game is nuts and you are missing out if you have not played it yet. Expect to enjoy hours of roaming an irradiated and desolate wasteland in search of things to kill, things to kill things with, food and water to prevent death by dehydration while killing things, and I've heard there's a main storyline you're supposed to follow somewhere.

Pretty fun overall. Pick it up if you like open world mayhem.
Do be forewarned: this game is kinda old, kinda buggy, and kinda janky. There's plenty of mods out there for fixes, though, and a lot of fanmade content too.

Hilariously gory, pretty damn hard on the higher difficulties, and extremely fast-paced. Highly recommended if one of your favorite pastimes is blasting the everloving hell out of, well, hell. I won't mention the multiplayer as I've never actually played it, but I've heard it's not really all that noteworthy.

Pros
+Gore-geous
+Fast paced
+Difficult
+Huge guts
+Only one hitscan enemy

Cons
-Rather weak map creator
-Lower end PCs may struggle to run it smoothly
-The glory kill system can feel rather repetitive at times

Overall, id did a spectacular job with this latest installation in the Doom series. People expected, wanted, and were promised a return to the classic shooter formula of gunning down hordes of enemies with ridiculous guns, and that is precisely what we were given.

I absolutely adore this game and the sheer freedom of design it gives to the player. You can build practically anything. Realistic warships, flying castles, sea monster submarines, laser-spewing hovercraft, the list goes on for ages.

With that said, it's not perfect. The controls are difficult to learn at best, with two options of a mouse-based control scheme that's easy to use but can make building difficult at times, and a keyboard-based scheme that is vastly superior to the mouse-based scheme for building, but much harder to learn and use. The learning curve is very harsh as well, considering just how much stuff there is to build with and how complex building effectively can get.

Pros/Cons:

Pros:
-Allows an unreal degree of design freedom
-Great fun once you get the hang of it
-The build mode has a lot of useful features like mirroring and the ability to copy and paste subobjects (turrets/rotating parts).
-Absurd skill ceiling, you will never stop learning clever tricks or new methods
-Updates fairly frequently
-Combat is hilariously destructive, in some cases with weapons blasting entire chunks of enemy vehicles off
-Vehicles can be fitted with customizable AI that allow the ship to be controlled automatically

Cons:
-Battles can cause massive drops in performance if the fight is big enough (huge vehicles/lots of vehicles).
-Difficult to get the hang of.
-Difficult, period. Enemy vehicles WILL give you trouble when you start out.

Overall, it's a very good game and can be a lot of fun once you get the hang of it, but the difficulty and learning curve are pretty intense. Highly recommended for anyone that enjoys designing their own vehicles, as this game allows you to do precisely that.