STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl Review in Progress

Yes, I’ve played STALKER 2’s final version. It’s real, and yet it feels surreal to write this review after all the problems this project has gone through across more than a decade. This could have easily gone the way of Duke Nukem Forever, and I’m glad it didn’t.

We first heard the name STALKER 2 fourteen years ago, just a few months after the launch of Call of Pripyat. GSC Game World founder and CEO Sergiy Grygorovych commented that the franchise’s four million sales more than warranted a proper sequel, which the developer estimated to be coming in 2012. Unfortunately, the Ukrainian team faced financial hardships and had to be dissolved in late 2011. At that point, everyone thought STALKER 2 would never be made, but the team was put back together three years later.

GSC Game World’s first order of business was releasing a new entry in their real-time strategy series Cossacks, but their true objective was to make the next STALKER title. The second announcement came in 2018, with a tentative release window set for 2021. Of course, game development is complicated, and the studio was never particularly famous for its punctuality. As such, there were two entirely unsurprising delays to April 2022 and then to December 2022, with a bonus NFT-based controversy (the idea was quickly set aside following the community’s massive backlash) spruced in the middle for good measure.

The real problems were yet to begin, though. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, GSC Game World was forced to stop working on STALKER 2 for a few months before relocating to Prague. Still, even after that, the impact of the nearby war inevitably slowed the Ukrainian developers. There were also more incidents, such as a cyberattack from Russian hackers and an office fire caused by an electrical malfunction. Still, the team persevered throughout this veritable ordeal, and we can now play the game at long last. Is it any good, though? I would say mostly, with some fairly sizable caveats.

If you’re unfamiliar with the STALKER series, the first thing to understand is that this is not your average shooter game. The protagonist of this sequel, Skif, is not some sort of superhero or even an incredibly hardened veteran soldier. He’s just another stalker who had happily returned to the Mainland from the Zone but is forced to go back to the irradiated Chornobyl area after an anomaly inexplicably destroys his home.

In gameplay terms, this means you’ll not be murdering foes left and right with incredible ease and a nearly infinite amount of ammunition at your disposal. Quite the contrary. It could be said that STALKER is the Soulslike of shooters, although the original game predates Demon’s Souls by two years, making such a definition incorrect from a chronological standpoint. Even so, it gets the point across: you’re going to have a hard time in this game compared to most single player shooters.

There’s tons of things that can kill you in the Zone, such as various mutated monsters and humanoids, bandits and enemy stalkers, several anomalies scattered throughout the map, intense radiation pockets, mere fall damage from a sufficient height, and more. To give even more credit to the Souls comparison, GSC Game World actually included an actual death count on the game over screen, as you can see below. I swear most of mine were probably caused by dog and rat packs, which are arguably the most dangerous enemies in this game due to their erratic movement patterns that make them difficult to shoot at.

Thankfully, unlike FromSoftware, the studio behind this game added three difficulty settings to make the experience more accessible. While I play most games, including shooters, at least on Hard settings, here I had to switch to Rookie (the lowest available) after a little while due to sheer frustration. I mentioned that the game is difficult, but it’s not just because of the sheer challenge provided by the AI. There’s also the whole injury system and the stamina-based inventory system that add layers of complexity, perhaps too much.

When you’re hit in STALKER 2, there’s a decent chance you’ll not only lose health (which does not regenerate on its own), but you’ll also start bleeding. While medkits restore health, you need bandages to stem the bleeding. Similarly, you need to bring food and drinks, anti-rads, and enough ammunition whenever you venture out of the safe zones. You’ll want to stock up on all these things because there is no fast travel in this game, and there’s no telling when you might need them while roaming the ever-dangerous Zone. However, everything has its own weight; even quest items have weight, and the more you carry, the quicker the stamina drops.

While that is perfectly understandable within the context of the game’s design, I feel that it is absolutely overtuned and ends up being too penalizing. Even when the inventory’s weight is in the green range, it only takes a little sprint to deplete the stamina, leading to fairly slow and long treks to travel across the map. I literally wished there was some kind of auto-run functionality, as you’re just pushing the forward button for minutes at a time on certain occasions with nothing else to do. A modular approach to difficulty, which is becoming more common in recent game releases, would have been preferable to set the challenge level of combat, travel, injuries and survival separately depending on the player’s preferences.

There’s more. The equipment’s durability depletes over time, as you’d expect given the realistic theme. Tech NPCs can repair them in the safe zones, provided you’ve got enough coupons to spare. The problem is that, in some cases, the cost is simply outrageous. I had found an extremely effective armor suit that was worth over 20K coupons. However, when I went to repair it, I was appalled by the NPC requesting 70K coupons – far more than I had available. When repairing something costs over three times its worth, you know something’s wrong. I also believe that the side missions could be more rewarding at handing coupons; you don’t loot coupons from fallen foes, as they are transmitted digitally to your PDA. You could gather items and then sell them, but there’s the little problem mentioned above with taking on too much weight. In short, the economy needs a balance pass, too.

Moreover, it might be helpful to allow players to wait time everywhere, even at the peril of hostile encounters. This is because the day/night cycle is slower than most open-world games, and at nighttime, it is sometimes nearly impossible to find things in certain quests. In one instance, I had to leave the game running while I waited for the sun to rise.

Speaking of gunplay, STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is solid in this area, although not quite the best in the business. I noticed that weapon sounds do not always seem to play properly, sometimes giving a muffled sound to the bullets that was inappropriate for the weapon. A proper sound is critical to enjoying firing a gun, but it may have been a bug, so I won’t dwell on this too much.

The game offers a leaning feature to poke around angles when in cover. You better use it with care, as it doesn’t take long to die from gunshots, especially if you’re playing on Medium or High difficulty, and the same is generally true for your foes. There’s not a great amount of weapons, although that’s understandable given the lore – there wouldn’t be that many choices in the Zone. You can improve them with several attachments, though they’re not that much of a common find.

As with everything, they require maintenance; a nearly-broken weapon could very well jam at the wrong time, leaving you at the mercy of your enemies. I did appreciate that being on the receiving end of a grenade not only damages Skif but also stuns him for a couple of seconds due to the explosion. Overall, the most interesting fights are those against other humans, as that’s where the AI really shines, while encounters with mutants and especially animals may be more annoying than anything.

The best part of STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is easily the Zone and its exploration. The developers referred to the world as its own character in the review guide, and they were not wrong. All the design choices—even those that I consider currently unbalanced—certainly contribute to the feeling of the Zone as a huge, hostile, and hauntingly beautiful environment that players can explore without loadings from the get-go. But the atmosphere is also perfectly nailed down from both a visual and audio standpoint, providing maximum immersion in this post-apocalyptic setting.

Epic’s Unreal Engine 5 renders the Zone with excellent fidelity, and Lumen doesn’t disappoint even without the hardware ray tracing option that might be added post-launch. I did notice a little pop-in on the trees occasionally, probably because GSC did not use Nanite-powered trees, but it wasn’t too distracting anyway. On the other hand, the repetitive visual appearance of most NPCs is a little distracting; the developers could have definitely done a better job in this regard, as in some cases you’re left wondering if they’re all genetically related.

Overall, performance was acceptable on my rig (7800X3D, RTX 4090) when playing at 4K, max settings, NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution set to Balanced, and Frame Generation turned on (by the way, all upscalers are supported, including AMD FSR FG). There were a few stutters here and there, but compared to most of the UE games we’ve seen recently, it wasn’t too problematic.

I did not have enough time to complete a full playthrough of STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl. That’s partly because GSC only shared review codes a week ago for a game that lasts an average of 35 to 40 hours and partly because I encountered many bugs that slowed down my playthrough, even blocking progress to the main quest. Yes, this sequel is buggy, too. Perhaps not like the original, but not too far off, at least for the time being. GSC says they’ve fixed 1125 issues since sharing the review build, including the critical path bug that got me stuck for a couple of days. Still, it will clearly be an ongoing project for them post-launch for quite a while, which is not unexpected for such a big open-world game.

For now, here’s my current take on STALKER 2: this is a game that knows precisely what it wants to be, although that doesn’t mean it is balanced enough to be fun all the time. The feeling of playing a stalker thrust into this inhospitable world against seemingly impossible odds is always present, for better or worse. However, unless you’re really dying to enter the Zone right away, I would recommend waiting a little longer while the developers (and possibly modders) fix and improve the game further. After all, you’ve waited this long; what’s a few more?

Reviewed on PC (code provided by the publisher).

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