STALKER SoC was the game of the decade of the 2000s. Completely original setting, compelling story, the immersive atmosphere sucked you in like a black hole. The world felt alive and menacing. The gameplay was brutal and unforgiving but that led to the high tension and true scariness that very few games have ever been able to pull off.
Name another game that has a level that is as pants-peeingly scary as X14, or when the Controller first showed up. The only one I can think of is the original Aliens vs Predator playing as a marine.
I never played Clear Sky but unfortunatly CoP was a step backwards and lost a lot of the magic of the original. It felt too academic and "planned out" while SoC felt organic and quirky and real. For instance very few of the CoP buildings were finished inside where as every SoC building had a detailed interior. Little things were missing in CoP like the ability to drag corpses or having loot stashed in breakable containers. The CoP "action zones" were particularly disappointing because marking everything interesting on the map took away a lot of the satisfaction of the "sandbox" exploration and moved the game more toward "theme park" status. Finally the CoP story wasn't nearly a modern day epic like SoC. It was mostly an excuse to move the player through a bunch of set pieces and didn't engender any interest in solving the mystery like SoC did. And finally CoP was just too easy even on the highest difficulty. The loot system changed from a desperate effort to conserve resources to a monty haul of medkits and ammo. The CoP fixed stash system traded trivially increased "realism" for replayability and fun.
