The Zone was the best game place of last year. Sure, BioShock's Rapture had incredible architecture and a killer soundtrack, but it was more a system of artfully-decorated tubes than a world. The Zone, the Chernobyl-devastated wasteland in which the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was set, was huge and convincing. It had its restrictions (you can defeat entire armies, but you can't climb over a barbed wire fence?) and its linearity, but it also had the sense it was a fully-functioning environment. While primarily a first-person shooter, featuring the usual gunning down of mutants and militants, it was also a survival role-playing game of sorts. The Zone was dark and weird, inhabited by surly men, horrifying beasts and random occurrence -- a brilliantly harrowing holiday to somewhere only a videogame could realise.

Sequel Clear Sky doesn't achieve that. Its take on the Zone, though fundamentally very similar, is seriously overpopulated, cursed with awful writing and saddled with design madness that makes progression a cheerless chore rather than wow gold a survivalist joy. 'Atmosphere' is a dangerously vague word to apply to a game, but it's the touchstone description of what the original Stalker did best: spookiness, grimness, weird beauty. Atmosphere is what Clear Sky most critically lacks, and why it could be the most disappointing PC game of 2008.

It starts well and differently, with a Battlefield-like capture point tussle set in a huge swamp. As soon as you're out of there, though, it's business as usual. You're free to wander as much as the game allows -- that darned barbed wire remains indestructible -- but to feel like you're achieving anything and to unlock most of the brand new areas, you need to follow the core missions. The tale's a prequel to the first game, so you're hunting its protagonist as he sets up its events -- so there are few surprises, bar a little reshuffling of road and base locations. While the original managed mystery and suspense despite dodgy wow gold translation and incoherence, the narrative here is as engaging as a loft insulation conference.

Most disappointing of all is the factional war. Yes, you can sign up to one of multiple factions and wage ongoing territory war against their rivals. No, it doesn't mean anything, other than the opportunity for more missions and shop discounts. It's also depressingly artificial, represented as a bar graph and respawning enemies rather than a sense of actual conquest. It's at odds with the organic world the Zone's supposed to be, and instead just a sub-standard Battlefield clone tacked on as an optional mini-game. At the same time, wow powerleveling it lends a persistence of sorts to the game and enables you to stir up a fairly intense fight scene on demand. It might feel like you're beating a machine rather than a rival gang, but there's definitely some pride to seizing an area. Those deeply invested in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. -- and there are quite of few -- will thrill at the chance to revisit an expanded Zone and to have this excuse to simply spend more time there, but its mechanical and tokenistic nature will break the hearts of those who wanted to live there. There's going to be an inevitable war of opinion over this one, and it'll likely be those who adore the hugely challenging combat versus those who find their favourite spooky game-place is now a mess of constant, samey gun-fights and misjudged (or mistranslated) humour. You can sure kill a lot of men in this new Zone, but as a result of that you won't get much out of trying to explore it.

There's also a stack of bugs and balance issues, perhaps unsurprisingly given S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 1's messy gestation, and we suffered an AI failure at one point that broke the faction war system. As well as that, that aforementioned difficulty feels like wow powerleveling an over-enthusiastic mod -- enemies often turn up in ridiculous numbers and are almost always aware of exactly where you are -- plus there's those damnable grenades. A hardcore reward for the hardcore player, perhaps, but for the more casual Zone-wanderer or total newbie it gets too much like hard work, crushing the desire to press onwards.