Making fun of any given MMO = Thumbs up!

In Left 4 Dead, however, the achievements are great. Generally they award and bring attention to a particular tactic, so they help to encourage you to play the game properly, and are little nudges to say “that’s right, you’re doing well!” Flukey tactics that you might have done once by accident and never again instead get noticed. It’s a cool mixture of training and reward.

After a rough start with Clear Sky, I utilised one or two fan fixes which prevented any more crashing, but as for the game itself… it’s a bit like Far Cry 2, in that, depending how you phrase it, there aren’t that many problems to enumerate, but these problems are infuriating..

The main thing is that faction wars are a huge chunk of the game, and they are broken in too many ways to count — squads almost never show up, and when they do, they’ll usually come from home base — the faction will rarely do anything so sensible as to send the nearest squad; they won’t continue warring if they own certain outposts and not others; they’ll ask or assign missions for you to kill outposts full of FRIENDLY stalkers; but what I think is worst is that, should your idiot faction actually bumble its way all the way to the enemy base, you can mount an attack there (on your own, since your teammates will easily be cut down at the front door), and if you win… it turns out to have been pointless. Post-patch, you’ll get some neat guns and supplies for the job, but 10 minutes after leaving the vanquished base… they ALL respawn, and your faction leader freaks out, imploring you and your faction mates to do what you just did all over again. And you’ll probably ignore this idiotic call and go pick up your new gear, but since you’ve finally coaxed your teammates into camping around that base, they will be locked in a front-door struggle with the enemy forever more. Which in some playthroughs mean a constant series of PDA popups every 3-4 minutes FOR THE REST OF THE GAME. “New task: Clear enemy HQ.”. Seconds later, “Task cancelled: Clear enemy HQ.”. A few minutes later, “New task: Clear enemy HQ.”…

A lot of the weapons are borked — much like the original STALKER, shotguns, explosives and pistols like the Desert Eagle have all the disadvantages of their type (short range, small mag, low accuracy), but don’t actually have the high-damage, spread or blast radius that are their very reason for being — you have to edit the gun files yourself if you want them to be anything more than red herrings with triggers (I remember it taking me about seven point blank shots with a Desert Eagle to kill a mid-level bandit once; that’s almost ‘Fallout 3′ bad). The AI is no better than the original — turning your lights off and sneaking by in pitch darkness from several hills away won’t save you, the bad guys waver between ignorance and omnipotence, and silencers are purely cosmetic.

And, though I don’t have a huge problem with most of the story (the original’s wasn’t a mindblower, but it was a great game regardless), it really falls apart at the end. I don’t normally mind when open-world games get ‘funnelled’ towards the end — it’s nigh-inevitable with a narrative-based game — but the last THREE maps? You go through them like shit through a goose, as they’re purely linear and not that big — you can literally complete the final map without budging from the spot! Even Pripyat from STALKER was more open than that. The sheer… lack of inspiration in the endgame frequently gives CS the lower hand when I’m tossing up what game to play — “Why bother?”, I ask myself. “I’m just bringing myself closer to the shit part.” That’s not to say there’s nothing enjoyable about the game — like Far Cry 2, there’s fun to be had there — but I find with CS I’m scrounging for fun around the edges of the major elements that don’t work, and as the game advances, those elements steadily become less and less avoidable.

I think I might have to go pin my hopes on Metro 2033 — apparently that’s where most of the original STALKER devs went, rather than working on Clear Sky.

Really? Maybe I’m too cynical, but I think that’s the exact opposite of what they’re doing (or were with that manifesto). It was just a big ‘We’re a lovely publisher, not like those evil DRM-ing, non-post-launch-supporting big companies’ advert, surely.

As for achievements, I love ‘em, but I couldn’t give a toss about my Gamerscore or even high score talbes. I like the acknowledgement of having done something tricky or cool, and I like it when they either teach you to play the game well (eg TF2) or extend its life by encouraging you to do interesting things that you might miss by ploughing through the story (eg Crackdown).

I really enjoyed having to figure out how to transport the thing, having to plan ahead. Although I also did a lot of cursing.

It was a shame, because I was enjoying it up to that point, and had found some very nice artifacts.