More atmospheric than Clear Sky, but not quite like Shadow of Chernobyl. Best of prior games rolled into one is nice.
However, no game is ever perfect, no matter what kind of lengths are being taken to provide a great game.
Some of the ups to CoP were the good aspects of SoC - the eerie atmosphere, the moments that make you jump when it's dark out and all of a sudden you're caught off guard during a moment when you thought you were safe.
Parts of CS that added great play value to CoP were the detectors needed to find artifacts, the improved upon optimization of overall graphics (even though, yes, so of the game felt dated....but that's not a hindering factor to the game for me), the ability to upgrade you're weapons and armor.
Newer things added to CoP; like the squad-based groups (though you do not control anyone else, the other NPCs just run and gun with you), the improved weapons and how they seem more real with how they kickback, the large anomalies throughout the maps you could traverse (if you dared) to try and gather artifacts and the brand new areas to explore.
If it wasn't for a handful of certain mutants that you come across in some areas, this addition to the STALKER series felt a lot easier over SoC and CS. You dealt a lot less with fighting other people in the game and you're much more focused fighting mutants. Also with the loss of the NPCs' ability to perfectly launch a grenade to your exact location while you're 50 yards out (like how NPCs could do this in Clear Sky), you die a lot less when battling NPCs. It's a nice change that was due, but the likeliness of dying by grenade in CoP is almost impossible.
Grips about the game come in a few forms.
1. The "improved" detector you eventually come across makes maneuvering through anomaly areas way too easy. The ease of how this detector helps you should have been toned done a bit. Also so much more could have been done to add to the game with this detector - seeing as how it's designed to see things normal detectors cannot.
2. Loss of the faction wars that made CS a lot of fun for me. A full fledged faction war wouldn't really fit the atmosphere of CoP, but a war between Duty and Freedom would have been nice...with the ability to side with one over the other and help wipe out or convert the opposing side to yours. I feel it's a shame that something like this couldn't have been worked into the game.
3. Pripyat - it was so vast of an area to be so void of life. I understand that Pripyat was supposed to be like that, but so much of the area was left unused from missions (main and side quests). You could explore the areas if you wanted, but nothing terribly exciting came from them. This area of the game sort of felt unfinished; almost as of the design team grew tired of building upon the game or they ran out of time to put more in.
4. Replay value, to me, doesn't really exist. So much more of this game was scripted over SoC and CS (obviously the main story is scripted, but that's not what I'm referring to). It's hard to explain, but upon playing an area and then maybe restarting from a previous save (or even starting a new game) and then going through the area again, you know what to expect and where to expect things to come from.
5. Lack of armor; maybe CS spoiled me, but I feel that CoP lacks decent armor. With the lack of armor also comes the lack of doing any major purchases. I always had 70K on me at any given time once I hit about midway point of the game. It didn't matter what I spent my money on, within 30-60 minutes of playing I could recoup what I spent and more.
There are so many other good and not so good aspects of the game that I could go into things for quite some time, but I don't have the patients to do something like that and nitpick.
I will leave on a good note, I did enjoy the fact that I had to work to be able to get improvements/upgrades done (you need to search out tool kits for the upgrade guys to use for making improvements) to my weapons and armor - though the cost of the upgrades once you were able to get them felt too low.
I really did enjoy the atmosphere and how eerie it was to be back in a place that made you second guess every step you made and every noise you heard. It was nice to see the SoC atmosphere brought back.
(I ran out of steam putting this review together, I'm too tired and scatter-brained to make this good and thoughtful so I'm going to kind of abruptly end things here.)