I've had this game l lieing around for a year now, but I've never really bothered playing it till now. I've played through Shadow of Chernobyl twice, so a lot of the content was fairly familiar, but there's a lot of new stuff around too. In addition to the new zones and faction wars, the new way to aqcuire artifacts was quite interesting (and deadly annoying at times). Also the possibility to repair and upgrade weapons and armor is awesome.
I have yet to finish the game as I like to wander around before the "point of no return" stage. Will probably go for it now that I've eliminated Duty
Thoughts?

tldr: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/271-S-T-A-L-K-E-R-Clear-Sky

Oh, and I'm really looking forward to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat which will be released next month, according to Wikipedia.

I LOVED stalker: soc. CS though was slightly boring and annoying with the bugged fraction wars.
I got a little wet when you mentioned there was going to be another stalker game though.

The latest version of the Faction Commander mod sorts out the faction war issues and makes the whole dynamic 10x better.

I definitely recommend it, though I seem to remember having to do something with text files to enable a particular UI menu.