Recent reviews by urinal cheesecake

It's a bit buggy at times and the performance is middling, but the game itself is insanely fun.

The content in the bundle is fine. The price for it however, is not. It costing nearly half the price of the base game is unacceptable.

Beautifully crafted and fun to play, for the most part. But it's not worth $10.

The outfits are fine. Not worth $5 though.

The guns are good, but not $7 good.

The Amaroq 900 is fun to play with, but the Deimos shotgun is underwhelming and the Campbell 74 LMG is too strong for my taste. Still worth picking up if you want some new toys to play with.

It's fine, nothing too special in my eyes. Don't buy it on its own, buy the bundle instead.

A bit too easy IMO, but it's fun and the music is great.

Absolute best of the trilogy. Gunplay is great, side missions are fun and worth completing, story is compelling, voice acting is good, lots of unique camerawork, and it has different endings. They took what worked and refined it to create an amazing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. experience. What didn't work was either changed into something better or dropped altogether.

I recommend playing Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky first because what you learn will carry over and make you appreciate how good Call of Pripyat is.

Compared to Shadow of Chernobyl, it's a downgrade in almost every way besides graphics and dialogue. Guns and armor are useless without upgrades, artifacts are almost required for a decent experience, AI are pinpoint accurate with bad weapons, AI can snipe you with grenades and tend to spam them, and the story took a bit of dip.

I understand weapons and armor under performing without upgrades, but they are nearly useless. You won't hit anything outside sneezing distance and your armor is equivalent to a single piece of paper. Artifacts that boost healing, reduce bleeding, and increase endurance are needed if you don't want to have a bad time. You will bleed a lot more in this game and typically need 2-3 bandages to stop it. In longer, harder gun fights you will struggle to keep yourself from bleeding out. The AI are extremely proficient with their weapons, regardless of if they're using a common, early game AKM-74/2 or late game SA Avalanche. AI make quarterbacks blush with their ability to precisely throw a grenade at your feet from more 100 yards away and they've got a whole pocket of them with your name on it. The story isn't much worse, but it doesn't have the lure and mystery Shadow of Chernobyl's did.

Despite being worse in my eyes, there are things I believe Clear Sky does better. Firstly, they gave rubles a purpose. Since you need to upgrade your weapons and armor, money finally has a use. Looting, side-missions, etc. is now more appealing throughout the game. Secondly, artifacts aren't lying around the world waiting for you to pick them up. You need to use an artifacts detector. I really like this system since it was weird to walk around and see a floating rock waiting for you to pick it up. Thirdly, the visuals. It's a huge step up compared to Shadow of Chernobyl. However, it has it's issues, primarily the shadows which get pretty funky and performance tanking during the finale.

If you like Shadow of Chernobyl, I'd still recommend giving Clear Sky a try. But on it's own, this game is not worth playing.