S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky - not for pussies comments and suggestions
I just completed S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, the fairly long-awaited expansion to the Gamespot "Special Achievement Best Atmosphere 2007" award-winning game, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl.

Since I've posted up the links regarding these games, I won't say much more about the basic premises and all that cal... the idea is awesome, it's a System Shock 2-like interface coupled with a world created by the Strugatsky brothers. The game itself was... well... epic. Epic in that it was long (took me over a week to beat, playing several to many hours per day, sometimes the entire day), but the length wasn't only attributed to the storyline and possibilities therein, but also to the enormous amount of bugs I encountered trying to beat it.

This game was a pinnacle to lack of QA testing of your software. Seriously. I'm using the latest patch here (which is the fourth patch to come out in like... a week?), and if I weren't brilliant, or good at Googling (which I should have tried first, really), I would not have finished this game thanks to crashes and bugs preventing my progress.

This LJ post, being very Googleable, is intended for people who are frustrated with this game. It's not really a walkthrough, though you may find some parts are total spoilers. If you don't want any spoilers, don't read it. If you want to offload your frustration on a beer and someone else's writing, then you've come to the right spot. Additionally, you may find some of the stuff I post here is useful to you in actually finishing the game. Some is also just discussion. By the time I scrolled back up to this paragraph, this had gotten fucking LONG. So by now I feel it's also a good primer regarding the question "do I want to play?" Read the article. See how involved it is. Without further ado, I'm going to get to typing about my impressions and such in the game, feel free to chuckle along. Oh, this isn't organized at all, I just realized. Oops.

First of all, difficulty. If you're starting a new game, it's pretty much the only decision you have to make. I played the game on the hardest difficulty, Master. That's right, lower difficulties are for nursing babies and pregnant mothers, and if you're reading an article about a videogame, chances are you're neither. The difficulties' descriptions represented nothing to me, laid out on four lines of text, anyway, so I figured start right at the top. I kept this on the highest difficulty for the whole game (yes, as innovative as it is, Clear Sky - from now on abbreviated CS - allows you to modify the difficulty while you're playing). Sometimes, I wish in retrospect I hadn't, because I might have enjoyed some portions of the game more. Let me discuss this in some detail.

If you've played the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - from now on referred to as Stalker, even though it's actually an (idiotic) acronym, because the periods and capitalization piss me off - you know that the gunfights in the game are astoundingly cool. Enemies move as squads; they have leaders who give orders, grunts who move up and flank you. They use cover. They duck. They go prone (even though you can't, how lame). They alert their buddies to your location. They are hard to kill. This is exacerbated by the fact that the game developers rightfully decided to make you equivalent to your enemies; what kills them kills you. No more Jedi Knight-like "you take about 100 blaster rifle hits but a Stormtrooper goes down in 2" hypocrisy. Here, a headshot just kills you. If you're not wearing armor, which, at least in the beginning, you practically won't be, prepare to be owned by any enemy with a remotely reasonable weapon (at least, given what range he engages you at).

With all this in mind, you'll want to seriously consider the 'hard' difficulty. I had a few problems with this:
- First of all, I should mention that CS gives you the ability, unlike the original Stalker, to mod your weapons. This is mighty insanely cool. Depending on the weapon, different mods are available, though very generally, there are two 'classes' of mutually exclusive mods (ie. the mods in one class make some of those in the other class inaccessible; you can only get one type of 'barrel replacement' for instance): 'turn your weapon into a close combat behemoth' or 'turn your weapon into a precision sniper rifle.' OK, for shotguns there is just 'make it slightly more accurate at the cost of not being able to use 12x70 shot rounds' or 'make it the lethal monster it's supposed to be.' Depending on the weapon, the modifications might be minimal or extreme; ie. with the "SGI 5k" rifle (real-life SIG SG 550), turning it into a sniper rifle reduces your rate of fire by something like 30%, with something like 100% accuracy. Pretty sweet.
- OK, that point being made, on the Master difficulty, I wouldn't bother investing too much into the 'close range assault weapons' upgrades. This is a bit sad, as the idea of heroically charging into a fray blasting bullets seems like a pretty cool idea; however, thanks to some idiotic decisions, this won't really be happening. The programmers seem to have decided that, in order to make the AI difficult, they would greatly increase its ability to lob grenades at you. While (thankfully, dear god thankfully) they added an indicator on-screen to show you where, relative to you, a grenade is landing, this doesn't really address the fact that the AI throws with pin-point accuracy directly under your feet. Grenades are lethal. If they land within a few metres of you, you will die. My observations suggest that the AI will throw them at you while you're within about 200 metres of them, especially, of course, when you use cover. This is perfectly fine, again, I do the same thing to them. That said, in the heat of battle and given things like night conditions, I just make the best estimate I can and throw. The AI throws it right at my feet. The only solution for this, of course, is to immediately start running one way or another when the grenade is thrown (usually you'll know this by audio cues like "here's an artifact for you!" or "Why don't we all say hello to my GRENADE!"), and watch it harmlessly explode off to one side. This will be made more difficult when you think you're safe, but in fact, the AI launched 2 grenades 2 seconds apart, the second one detonating much closer to you. D'oh.
- The AI also has ridiculous accuracy. You'll get to a point in the game where, in the "Duty" base, you'll find a mini-game where you get to shoot at targets with certain weapons, and you need to reach certain scores by hitting bullseyes. Try this game with the PMm pistol (real-life Makarov PM). See how you keep missing those targets, because the Makarov is just that damn inaccurate at ranges over 20 metres? Well, just because you can audibly detect that an opponent is using a Makarov, doesn't mean you should engage him unless you've got armor that can stop 9x18 mm or 9x19 mm rounds. The AI has absolutely unnerving accuracy with all weapons (except, empirically, shotguns at above 30 metres or so, as it should be), and will take off your head if they can get a clear shot.
- Keeping all of the above in mind, it basically means you'll be hitting the AI from 200 metres most of the time, controlled burst-firing and aiming at their heads (if you're a cheap bastard like me, you'll be using the cheap, non-armor-piercing variants of 5.45x39 mm rounds for the vast majority - read: near-entirety - of the game, you'll need to aim for the head or waste entire clips with armored baddies staying on their feet). This means that assault weapons are pretty much out; I'll discuss my personal weapon selections later, as the rationale for them is probably pretty good. Use a scope for those headshots. Upgrade your weapons' trajectory flatness and accuracy. The only real loss of this upgrade path is that, on most guns, you'll be lamenting over the lack of grenade launcher. I'll be honest; I didn't even really consider that until the third-to-last map of the game. That's right, I didn't use a grenade launcher at all by that point. Hint to the wise (!!!SPOILER!!!) if you look with half-an-eye open on said map, you'll find a Bulldog 6 launcher anyways. Get those VOG-25 grenades ready and forget about modding your guns to carry launchers.
- You'll still get hit a lot... and this means you'll be using tons of bandages. At least, at first. You'll eventually find artifacts to help you stop bleeding, but until then, stock up on a very healthy (always carry 20 ) bandage count. This is no fun sometimes, especially when you have to shell out money for the crap.
- Despite this, you'll still load the game a lot. Yep. You will get killed. You will get grenaded. You will fall down a cliff. You will run into a billion bugs. The reasons are endless. I wish I had kept a counter of the amount of loads I did, but let me tell you... having a tea kettle handy? Oh does it ever improve your mood.

OK, so now you've started a game. I think I'm done talking difficulty. Let's talk about things that deviate from the original Stalker game. As you'll (hopefully) find on the very first level, you can find artifacts in this game too. Hurrah! However, the effort required to do so? Much higher. Skirt close to those anomalies and pick the suckers out, using your detector to find them. The detector, while a sweet-ass idea, is kind of Doom 3-ish. I mean... you can't duct-tape the sucker onto the side of your gun? It's a little nonsensical that you have to run around in a zone sporting cutthroat bandits, mutants, and other shit that could kill you in an instant brandishing only a pistol and a detector, when you could mount it onto your shiny assault rifle and feel safe in your sleep. M'eh. On the very first level, you'll be rewarded with a Jellyfish (which, you'll note, has totally different statistics than in the original Stalker, as they reworked the artifact system entirely). Eventually, I strongly suggest you just buy the better model detectors... ones that can actually show you which direction (not just proximity) to go in, and eventually, ones with LCD displays which can show you very specific information and pop up multiple artifacts on the display. Handy.

You'll also find yourself embroiled in a "Faction war." Hmm. Faction wars sound pretty cool on the outside, I mean, you have these factions, and you know Duty and Freedom hate each other; so you presume that if you join them they'd have some dreams and domination goals? I think the idea is pretty cool, though the implementation turned out shoddy. First of all, every faction only fights one other faction. What the crap? Lebedev's opening speech to you is that Clear Sky, the faction you start working with, doesn't like and actively avoids the other factions. However, they only ever fight a faction called the Renegades (who are not the 'Bandits' though they seem to have very similar properties). Second of all, I experienced more bugs here than in any other system in the game. I'll talk about those in short order. Well, no. Maybe I'll talk about them now.
- The factional warfare system basically means you get a set of objectives to fulfill so that your current faction maintains dominance over another one. There are (sigh) only 5 factions in the game, and you can't join one (the Renegades), since you start hostile to them and therefore can never get in their good graces. The objectives are always of the following type: 'protect our base,' 'capture all the outposts around our base,' 'capture random territory between our bases,' 'capture routes to their base,' 'capture their base.'
- The system is buggy because, though you might think just fulfilling all of these objectives is a good idea, in truth, you have to be very careful what order you fulfill them in, in order to get anything done. Let me be more detailed:
-- Every one of the 5 'objective types' has a set of points associated with it. Let's say, for example, you're aligned with Freedom, and your objective is "Gain a foothold at the Agropom (where Duty's base is in CS)." There are two points, both on trails leading to the Garbage, which satisfy this bullet. Let's call them "south" and "north", since those happen to be the geographical locations of said points.
-- The game maintains an ORDERED LIST of the points somehow. You can't see the order, and I wasn't able to find it anywhere within the files I extracted, but trust me, it's there. What this means to you is that you have to capture all the points that you're expected to in order, or else the AI will get confused and have no clue what to do.
-- Let's give an example of how the game can screw up. Let's assume (because I discovered this emprically) that you have to capture "south" before "north." You're the ignorant player, and the missions you get is "capture and hold south" and "capture and hold north." Since you've been playing for a bit, you translate "capture and hold" as "I go and wipe out all the guys, and pray that the game scripts aren't buggy and a squad is actually dispatched to hold this point."
-- So, you come charging into the Agropom, and wipe out the squad at "south." Yay! You notice, when you hit your PDA, that the game AI is actually working, and though they take a few real-life minutes to get there, sure enough a squad takes control of the point and you get the credit.
-- Alright! Let's move on to North! Duty.... eliminated! Squad... coming! Yes! But... wait. While that squad is enroute to my point North, Duty counter-attacks south, and with you swiftly running (but ultimately unable to make it) to try to help your Freedom fighters, eliminates them. The squad moving for North makes it there. You get the credit. You wipe out Duty at South and... fuck. There you have it, no squad will ever be sent to South, since you already control North, the follow-up. UGH.
-- The sad solution to this problem is to KILL YOUR OWN MEN AT NORTH. That's right. Go shoot each of their heads off. They'll turn hostile, but your clan (assuming you've already helped them out a bit) will still love you, so not much lost. Killing them will re-set the list of points, and a squad will be sent down to South again, and another one to North.
-- This is of course just one variation of problems that can happen, and I ran into it. You'll sometimes get wonderful bugs like squads helping other squads and then just piling up on their point, not moving to the point they were supposed to, which will require murder. You'll get squads which run in circles between two points and never get any shit done. The friendly squads will be a nightmare. Then when you've finally slaughtered enough (friend or foe) to capture an enemy base, prepare yourself for when the enemies eventually just respawn (at least, in the case of the Duty base, there was an in-game justification that they "came in on their choppers and killed everything at the Agropom". This won't be the case, with, say, the bandit base.).
-- Moral of the story? The point-capturing system is very much one of "jiggling the handle" where by "jiggling" I mean "opening fire on" and the "handle" is "your clan-mates."

More hints regarding the factional system: You can join non-opposing factions. That means that you can join up to 3 factions in the game; Clear Sky (at first, you start on them), and then Stalkers (I wasn't able to join Bandits; hitting "I want to join you" on their boss resulted in a blank screen of text, and the dialogue option never came up again. I'm told that if you let the bandits rob you once, it does work, though, but who wants to be robbed? I'm also not convinced that after joining Bandits, you can join another faction), and then one of Duty or Freedom. I joined Freedom. Every faction gives you something for joining; the Stalkers give you a detector that you can buy for pretty cheap anyways, so they kind of suck, and they also don't reward you with much money for completed objectives, but it's better than nothing. Also, you'll have access to much better buy/sell rates at their trader at the Cordon, which is good because you'll want a lot of money to play with your weapon loadout and armour. Freedom gives you their "Guardian of Freedom" armour, which is better than your standard bulletproof suit, therefore excellent. They also give you a modded SIG SG 550, which is cool though it suffers from a particular modding problem... I'll talk about that in equipment later. Duty gives you their basic Duty armour, which sucks, and some other crap, so forget them. However, in retrospect, I shouldn't have joined against them so fast. Let me discuss another annoyance: mechanics.

If you want to upgrade your stuff or repair it (yes, thank fucking Christ you can finally repair your armour and weapons in CS), you have to find a mechanic. Every faction has one (the Stalkers actually have 3), and every mechanic in the game can upgrade a different set of stuff (note: they can all repair everything). As long as you're neutral or friendly with a faction, you'll have access to their mechanics. That might be important. Let me describe what I mean: the mechanic for the Bandit faction is, as far as I've been able to tell, the only one that can fully upgrade an SEVA suit. The Duty mechanic and Freedom mechanic can upgrade almost all of the suit, but the "psy protection" upgrade is unavailable with them. Ergo, if you piss off the bandits, you'll be unable to upgrade your suit to the max. Not that this matters, since there are only two or three points in the entire game (and not even at the end) where you're bombasted with psy attacks and need medkits. Only one 'controller' to kill in CS, and you're close enough that you can unleash on him semi- or full- auto.

OK, why don't I talk about equipment a bit. I'm getting tired.

Armour:
When you start off, you'll have a leather jacket. Oh boy. Stick around and do some missions for Clear Sky. They'll give you their own custom armor, which, honestly, you'll probably hold on to for a while. With the option to slot in kevlar plates up to 2 times, it can have a bullet protection value of 45 (out of a maximum 100), which isn't anything to snort at until near the end of the game. It won't protect you from anomalies much, but hey, that's what quick-load is for, assuming you get stuck inside one. Artifacts can help with this too.

OH! I should mention: in CS, artifacts can only be worn in 'slots' in your armour. Depending on your armour type, you'll have different amounts of slots. For instance, the "Bulat" military suit (the "Military armoured suit" in Stalker), can't carry any artifacts, while the SEVA suit can carry 2, and can be upgraded to carry up to 3 more. This, if you find useful artifacts (I searched a lot, and yes, I found useful artifacts; I'll talk about those later), can make or break your suit choice.

I was dumb and bought a Stalker ("Sunrise") suit. I thought this was a great idea, but if you actually compare it to the Clear Sky suit, you might as well save the money. You can carry some more artifacts, it's marginally better anomaly protection, but you waste so much money. Use it to upgrade the Clear Sky suit and keep the change for your next big purchase...

A military jacket. OK, let's discuss my ideas on armour. I'm a big fan of having 2 different kinds of armour: one to handle radiation anomalies, one to handle gunfights. In the original Stalker, this wasn't that necessary, because your SEVA suit had reasonable protection, throw some artifacts on there that increase your bulletproof cap, done. Here, the SEVA suit, while naturally protecting you from radiation, etc., only has a 15/100 bullet protection value. No good. For the better part of the game, therefore, I had a SEVA suit and and a Berill-5M armoured suit for gunfights. Really, though, pick your poison here:
- With a 2-suit system, you're switching armours, they have different maximum artifact numbers, etc. Lots of mouse clicking and hassle.
- You can't have a non-bulletproof suit for most of the game. You'll just keep loading all the time since stray bullets will kill you.
- If you only have a bulletproof suit which doesn't protect well from radiation and can't carry enough artifacts to help you with that (hint: Berill-5M), you're going to be using extra medkits and radiation packs at stupid times, frequently.

Like I said... pick your poison. Whatever time-wasting function you want. The advantage of the armoured suit anomaly suit approach is that the only one in the latter category that you want is the SEVA. Everything else sucks (there doesn't appear to be a nice and cheap SSP-99 Ecologist armour in this game). Once you have that, you know you're only going to be upgrading your bullet armour.

If you join Freedom, you'll just get a Guardian of Freedom jacket, which is better than the Berill-5M in all respects, including artifact carrying. Thus, if you plan on joining Freedom, just do it sooner rather than later, so that you don't keep loading due to stray bullets. If you don't join Freedom, you won't be able to get said jacket; it's not lying around anywhere that I can see, and their trader won't sell it to you unless you join them.

The Bulat armour can't carry artifacts, thus, I didn't use it. I needed 2 artifacts minimum; one to lower radiation, another which adds radiation but increases my carrying capacity. While I applaud the game not allowing me to carry an infinite amount of items, this was so tedious as the game went on. Ferrying guns between the field and store back and forth to sell for cash. Is there anything more worthy in life?

Naturally, I got an exoskeleton when it came out. The exoskeleton is the shit..... very bullet-resistant while being "quite" good at dealing with anomalies. Not quite as good as the SEVA though, so I kept the latter as well. It also increases your carrying capacity. After upgrading, my capacity (with no artifacts on) and an exoskeleton was 100 kg. Whee! Like guns, armour in the game can be upgraded, and usually has two kinds of upgrade path: 'bullet resistant and tough' or 'anomaly/radioactivity/poison/etc. resistant and weak.' Naturally, since I suggest you have two armours, I suggest you upgrade one against bullets, the other against anomalies. The exoskeleton is slightly unique in that it allows you to mix and match your choices a little (it's not entirely clear what the optimal mix for the exoskeleton is), but I still ended up choosing a purely bullet-resistant path, and saved some cash since upgrading that way allows for the same upgrade to be applied twice via two different tech paths; forget wasting money on the second one!

Let's talk about what you're going to fill up that capacity with.
- A lot of people I've found online either couldn't find artifacts (chumps) or found them useless. Not so. Want to save medkit money when running through psy/fire/poison/electricity? Use artifacts. I kept two around of every anomaly resistance type and, lo and behold, I could just run through fields of poison completely untouched. This is super useful when you're hunting for more artifacts, and just for running around at night when you're too lazy to use bolts to see where the extent of an anomaly is.
- Your guns. Duh. More on those soon.
- Medkits, rad packs, bandages, tons of bandages, extra ammo, a whole slew of flash cards with weapon upgrade data that you'll find and bring to mechanics (speaking of those, I found several which no mechanic could use, all to do with sniper rifles. Meant for some unfinished mechanic who never appeared in the game?), grenades, token food.
- Loot. After all of the above, you'll have surprisingly little left over for this. Specifically, weapons and ammo will dominate your inventory.

Weapons:
Yay, CS still has a whole bunch of real-world weapons, except called by made-up names so that they wouldn't have to pay royalties! Yay! Some stupid things about the weapons in CS vs. Stalker were: they included a few more pistols (yay?) that basically meant you had to choose between a bunch of pointless side-arms all the way, since all of them were fairly close to each other (and naturally, the Black Kite - aka Desert Eagle chambered to fire .45 ACP rounds - is the weapon of choice here anyway). Also, while they claim the GP 37 (real-life Heckler & Koch G36) is in the game, I was unable to find it in CS, which resulted in interesting weapon choices. Unlike the original stalker, I managed to get an FT 200M (real-life FN F2000) this time around, in fact, twice, since for some reason on the last level an extra one just appeared in my inventory. That was dumb, since I was overweight as a result, couldn't move, and was being fired on. Great going, guys.

They also added a weapon which I did make some use of, the RP-74 light machine gun (in real-life, the PKM general-purpose machine gun), the game developers even put in a cheap variant of the 7.62x54 mm ammunition for this puppy, which is great because otherwise I'd be ranting about how the SVDm2 (real life Dragunov SVD) does not use the same cheap ammo as a GPMG.

So... now let's talk about how the game restricts your weapon selection.

Upgrades cost money. Armour costs money. Fixing your stuff costs money. Finding caches costs money (you can buy cache information from some guys in CS). One thing you won't have a lot of throughout the game, especially if you're eagerly following the storyline and have a lot of unspent money at the point where you get robbed by bandits and all your stuff and money is gone (the game developers actually introduced, in the latest patch, the ability to get back your stuff so that you're not set into the stone age for equipment, but taking my money too? Seriously.), is money. So, one thing that you won't want to spend it on is ammunition. Let me break down all the ammo types in the game, and roughly how much I found of it.

- 9x18 mm rounds: Everywhere, naturally. You'll find them at every point in the game, except the last few levels, where they're more sparse, but by that point, you've probably found like 10000 rounds.
- 9x18 mm P rounds: Rare. Didn't find them much. By the point at which they were common, I didn't need them at all.
- 9x19 mm rounds: Stupidly, about the only time you want them in high quantities is when your main weapon is a Viper 5 (real-life Heckler & Koch MP5), which is on the first level, where they're pretty hard to come by (of course, one of the cool things you can do is chamber an MP5 to fire 9x18 mm rounds. So yeah, that's pretty neat.). Obviously, most of your early pistols will use them, but I just didn't find pistols terribly useful at Master difficulty until I finally got the Desert Eagle, and even then only when I ran out of ammo, there was one guy left, he was already wounded, and I was close to him. In other words, past where you actually care about 9x19 mm rounds, you'll have plenty, too many.
- 9x19 mm PB1s rounds: Pretty rare, though you could buy them from traders if you wanted to waste money. I didn't really pay attention too much.
- 12x70 shot: You'll never want for this. It's everywhere. Shotguns, however, are of fairly limited use. Will discuss that more later.
- 12x76 slugs: See above. Of course, this is also pretty useless ammunition. More later.
- 12x76 darts: Just like the original Stalker, this ammo is harder to come by, most traders don't sell it, it's rare to find on corpses, but you get it for a bunch of quests... you get a lot of it. More than you'll ever need, since, let's face it, you just don't use shotguns against baddies at range. I had much more of this ammo than I'd ever need.
- .45 ACP: Especially later, when the enemies are using Kora-919 pistols (real-life Browning M1911 pistol), this ammunition is plentiful. You'll never want for it.
- .45 ACP Hydro-Shock (read: Hydra-Shok) rounds: Impossible to find. There is one cache which I didn't go to which purports to have some, and other than that, I found 48 rounds throughout the entire game. Use very sparingly. Unfortunately, lack of these makes all .45-chambered pistols less useful in the game, though they don't really help with armor piercing anyway.
- 5.45x39 mm rounds: Unloading any baddie's Akm-74/2U (real-life AKS-74U), Akm-74/2 (real-lfe AK-74), or AC-96/2 (real-life AN-94 "Abakan") will get you tons of these. You'll find tons. I had over 1000 spare rounds by the end of the game, and I used these all the time.
- 5.45x39 mm BP rounds: AP version of the standard 5.45x39 mm round. Also very plentiful, though almost never in guns, rather just on bodies you loot. Found in some crates. I had over 1000 rounds left by the end of the game.
- 5.56x45 mm rounds: Not nearly as plentiful as the ol' Warsaw Pact 5.45x39s. Near the end of the game, more baddies tend to have 'em, but in general, except for random crates you find at outposts which are stacked with this, there is not too much of this lying around.
- 5.56x45 mm AP rounds: Strangely, you'll find a lot of this lying around in crates. I thought I had relatively little NATO AP ammo left over, and so my weapon selection for the game was... interesting (outline of that to come soon). However, it turns out I had over 1500 of these rounds, when I checked my last cache before running off to finish the game. Oops. I guess, therefore, it's a pretty good round to finish the game with, especially as the FN F2000 uses them, and I wasn't able to find a mechanic to mod the gun to use any other ammo (or mod it at all, in fact), though this may have been since, by this point in the game, I had killed 2 of the better mechanics in the game.
- 9x39 mm PAB-9 rounds: While I believe Sakharov will sell them to you for ripoff prices, they're otherwise surprisingly hard to find. Uncommon even on baddies, who will much more likely carry the 9x39 mm SP-6 round.
- 9x39 mm SP-5 rounds: I did not find a single one, trader or elsewhere, throughout the entire game. Apparently CS has a strict superset of items over the original Stalker, so maybe they exist? Who knows.
- 9x39 mm SP-6 rounds: By the end of the game, I had a mere 300 of these, after scrounging out the cores of every Vintar BC (real-life VSS Vintorez) and VLA Special Assault Rifle (real-life AS VAL) I came across (and in CS, unlike original Stalker, quite a few baddies are using the Vintorez rifles). While it's kind of fun to do subsonic sniper rifling with the Vintorez, you just don't have enough bullets to make these guns (or, much more sadly, the Tunder S14 - real-life OTs-14 Groza-9/40) feasible common-purpose guns.
- 7.62x54 mm 7N1 rounds: Ah, so you've somehow obtained a Dragunov SVD and want to play with it (though I didn't miss it much, I was unable to find an SVUmk2 - real-life Dragunov SVU - throughout the entire game.). The good news is that there's enough ammo lying about that you can play with the gun. The bad news is that if you actually want to use it in combat, you'll have to buy 60-90 rounds, and you can only buy it from the Freedom trader, and only if you join Freedom. Of course, you can only buy the SVD from him, and only if you join Freedom, so that's somewhat moot, but you'll get to kill at least one Freedom guy holding an SVD if you fight them. I'm told that what traders carry depends on the 'resources' that a faction has, but I was unable to confirm this with anybody other than the Stalker faction (who did admittedly get SEVA suits when their resources jumped).
- 7.62x54 mm 7N14 rounds: Didn't find any, same as the SP-5 rounds. Oh well, the 7N1 does the job.
- 7.62x54 mm BP rounds: Same thing. Didn't find any. Not too much of an issue, since, if you've got the SVD, you might as well aim for the head.
- 7.62x54 mm round: The 'cheap' version (priced at 10 RU/round vs. the 7N1 at 15 RU/round) for machine guns. Sells in boxes of 100, so you can see it's quite expensive. Thankfully, once you reach the Red Forest, if after the (!!!SPOILER!!!) gunfight you have with mercenaries who try to take you down right after you reach the level, you veer right, save the Stalkers there from being killed by mutants, and talk to them, you'll get a quest for the 'Tank Machine Gun'. Now, chances are you won't want to complete this quest since the Stalkers who gave it to you will undoubtedly be wiped out a few minutes later by mutants anyways, the Tank Machine Gun sells for 67000 RU, and... you can use it :) This gun is semi-useful... I later found a PKM and used that instead since this one sold for tons of money, and the only difference between a PKM and the Tank Gun (not even appearance, sigh) is that the Tank Gun will hold up to 2000 rounds, while a PKM will only hold 100. Whatever. Not like you're going to ever unleash 100 rounds without reloading. The point regarding this spiel is that, where you find the tank gun, you'll also find 4000 rounds of 7.62x54 mm machine gun ammo. Fire away.
- VOG-25 grenades: You'll want these for the GP-25 "Kostyor" grenade launcher, if you actually plan to use assault rifles and mount said launcher, or the OTs-14 that you'll sniff at and not use, or the Bulldog 6 which you might use just for fun 2 levels before the end of the game. I had a GP-25, and I used it only after I had already found the bulldog. Hence, the fact that I 'only' found 50 of these grenades all game didn't matter.
- VOG-25R grenades: Another one of those things which I suppose should have been in the game, and I never found a single one? Bouncing grenades are awesome.
- M209 grenades: For the M203 grenade launcher you'll undoubtedly acquire from Freedom if you wish to make your NATO rifles true assault weapons, and the integrated grenade launcher in the FN F2000. I found five (5) in the whole game. Just not practical. Blech.
- OG-7V grenades: Used only with the RPG-7u (real-life RPG-7). I found 5 of them in the whole game, but that's fine since you're not really expected to use the RPG often. I never used it. There was never a situation where it was better than any weapon; any situations calling for grenades often meant an obstruction was in the way, and so the RPG was useless. They also weigh 2.0 kg each. Avoid.
- RGD-5 grenade: Plentiful, of course, since one of the major features of CS was that super-annoying habit of the AI to whip grenades at your feet. Almost all bandits and baddies will have either one of these, or the F1 grenade.
- F1 grenade: See above. Not as common, but if you were collecting them you'd still be in heaven.

What does this breakdown tell you? A healthy mix of RGD-5 and F1 grenades for flushing baddies out of cover, plus rifles firing 5.45x39 mm ammo, optionally with a handgun firing .45 ACP (you could go for the 9x19 mm if you really want, but all of those do less damage, so...) seems to be the optimal mix for me. Hence, my weapon selection, boring and pragmatic as it was, is probably different than your average Walkthrough writer... I used a Desert Eagle (fully upgraded) as a sidearm - I found this on exactly one (1) baddie before Limansk, which is kind of crucial if you want to use it, since (!!!SPOILER!!!) once you get to Limansk, you won't be able to go back to upgrade anything - two AN-94s; one fully modded as a sniper rifle, and one 'mostly' modded (I wasn't able to get the last upgrade, since no mechanic could do it) as an assault rifle. Yes, I didn't know better, and it was semi-useful on the last levels. I'll explain shortly. You'll also note that VOG-25 grenades are fairly plentiful, so it didn't hurt that I carried 10 of those around, and my close-assault AN-94 GP-25 could be turned into a hose of fiery grenade death at any moment.

The reason I say that the close-assault weapon is 'semi-useful' is that, as I've described before, you really can't get close to baddies. Well, except for mutants. However, mutants are unarmoured, and I strongly suggest that, for them you carry around a shotgun (I personally carried first a Chaser 13 - real life Mossberg 500 with no stock - and then a SPSA14 - real-life Franchi SPAS-12 - throughout a lot of the game.) and 20-30 12x70 shot rounds. This will even take out a bloodsucker in 2 or 3 hits, and the only upgrade money I'd throw into it is slightly upgrading the rate of fire and lowering the weight. Eventually, you'll probably get the PKM machine gun or Tank Gun, and at that point... well. You might as well ditch both the close-combat rifle and the shotgun, because the machine gun replaces both. Mind you, I did not do this; I carried both AN-94s and the PKM to Limansk, and used all three up to the last level. You're quite free to experiment with what works best for you, but this combination was quite fine by me, since the assault rifle has far less recoil and more accuracy than the machine gun at the expense of damage; but I aimed for the head anyway.

I also joined Freedom. Another gun I carried with me from that point on (yes, that means I was carrying at least 4 guns at any one time) was the Dragunov SVD. 90 sniper rounds for comfort. I didn't use this gun too much, since I was a fairly good shot with my sniper-modded AN-94, but sometimes, it was useful to get a guaranteed one-shot kill from a ridiculous range before engaging at 200-300 metres.

A lot of people online seem to love their TRs 301 (real-life Z-M Weapons LR 300), and sure, if you prefer that, and feel like modding it to use the 5.45x39 ammo, or just using it for the end-game in conjunction with a 2000F, sure, that makes sense. I didn't do this, purely I think because the AN-94 was lighter, and I was already carrying a lot of weight. In addition, while the LR 300 is slightly more accurate, and handles better (they really did get that "gun does not do upwards recoil" thing right in the game, as in real life, I'm told), it does less damage. Pick your poison here.

That's enough masturbation about the all the stuff I played with and liked in the game. Let's talk about the gameplay.

The game has "lean left" and "lean right." Buttons I remember from System Shock 2, but which, in that game, weren't too useful given its fairly bad combat semantics (to be fair, it wasn't really about combat). Here, you will use them. Want to hit those baddies without OUTRIGHT DYING. Hide behind a tree. Lean out from behind it and fire, rather than side-stepping. You'll want that. Besides these lean buttons, it's really a first person shooter with very poor binds. VERY poor. Remember how System Shock had the ridiculous amount of bind keys which allowed you to do every conceivable necessary action quickly? Well... no. Here, you can use medkits and bandages quickly. There are 3 types of medkits, and the game seems to fairly arbitrarily select what type it will use if you use the hotkey... which is really dumb, since chances are I'm saving my good medkits for when I need them, for instance the end of the game. What about vodka/radpacks for radiation? Food? Nope. Forget about it, for that, you have to go to your inventory and right-click and use... very frustrating if you're in combat in a radiation zone. Another reason to get an SVD.

I initially liked the idea that, if you were carrying more equipment than your maximum weight (and you could only carry 10 kg over), you couldn't sprint. Or rather, you could, but only for 50 metres or so before you became exhausted. However... the fact that the original '50 kg' limit seems to be the hard limit for such sprinting restrictions throughout the whole game is a real piss-off. So, you eventually find juicy artifacts that raise your maximum weight by 30 kg. Does that mean you can sprint with another 30 kg on your belt? Well... no. You still can't sprint once you're past 50 kg carrying weight. Sigh. This slows down the game a LOT. Of course, to mediate this, they put 'guides' in at various points in the game that can ferry you between one location and another. Except the guides charge money. As I pointed out before, you need that; wasting 4000 RU for a trip just isn't going to cut it. This really need to be fixed.

The stupid Cordon military base. Oh my fucking god. You finish up working for Clear Sky at the Great Swamps (level 1) and you prepare yourself to finally move to the Cordon (level 2). You come out and... BAM. Military machine gun mows you down. You try again... same result. I eventually discovered that, without enough speed and tons of wasted medpacks, you can make it past the gun. Alternately, you can come back to the Great Swamps, travel on foot all the way up to the top of the map, and take another exit out to the Cordon. Except... all this takes about 20 real-time minutes of walking. Ugh. What a waste of my time. Seriously, that machine gun added nothing to the game except a lot of frustration. Of course, what made it worse is that there wasn't even an AI manning it for you to kill. Unlike later mounted machine guns (all 1 of them) in the game, where you can actually kill guys manning them (though even that is only as of the latest patch), this one has no actual gunner, and thus, is impossible to disable. It also fires mighty quickly, and doesn't need to reload. I even went so far as to go into the military base and kill everyone in it and when I ran around behind the base later, naturally, that gun opens fire on me and kills me. What the fuck?

OK seriously... I'm going to continue this later. I've wasted a half a damn day writing this, and now I feel like getting some shit done. Expect the rest soon.... ish.

UPDATE: Part 2 now actually written and found here. Enjoy.