A certain kind of friction can go a long way in creating a challenging and punishing game that’s also Not that a lot of post-apocalyptic first-person shooters are, but STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is especially not for the faint of heart. It’s built to generate the kind of friction that goes a long way in creating a challenging and punishing game that’s also captivating. When you’re left to figure things out for yourself amid myriad dangers that can kill you in a moment’s notice, rarely having an easy way out of a mess, it becomes clear that the survival instincts embedded in the STALKER series are very much alive in this long-awaited sequel. But there’s also an equal and opposite force at play: the type of friction that hinders you from engaging with it in earnest, like poor technical performance, bugs that are sometimes hilarious but mostly frustrating, and nonsensical enemy behavior. Yet for all that’s working against it, there’s an underlying greatness in how STALKER 2 immerses you into the mysteries within its massive and brutal wasteland.
The Chornobyl Exclusion Zone – the site around the tragic, real-world nuclear disaster in 1986 – remains the heart of STALKER, both as a harsh and often stunning open world, and a fascinating setting that’s integral to Ukrainian history. In this fictionalized version, physics-defying anomalies work as deadly hazards scattered around its huge map, while equally dangerous mutated wildlife lurks about and supernatural phenomena amid the nuclear fallout instill a sense of danger around every corner. Various factions of Stalkers – mercenaries who make their risky living in The Zone – are also on the hunt throughout; when it’s hard to tell who’s friend or foe, it’s a harsh place to survive in, much less thrive.
In that respect, STALKER 2 is a masterclass in atmosphere: stunning dynamic weather, pitch-dark nights, and radioactive storms that paint the sky a hellish red or toxic green are as visually striking as they are petrifying. From the vistas of a sprawling wasteland you get on long, on-foot treks between missions to the dark corridors of abandoned facilities, the designers at GSC Game World create a distinct sense of place and in great detail. Even something as small as hearing the patter of rain from inside the hull of a dilapidated ship, or the strum of a guitar while sitting around a campfire, I was easily pulled into the life of a Stalker. All of that should be familiar to anyone who’s played the original STALKER games (Shadow of Chornobyl in 2007, Clear Sky in 2009, and Call of Pripyat in 2010) and as a veteran of those games myself, it’s an odd comfort to be back in The Zone and see how much it’s changed in the years since.
The main story provides a throughline to follow, but it isn’t the kind of thing that’s going to light a fire under you in its early hours. Skif – our character – is set up and betrayed in the opening mission, which leads him down a rabbit hole of finding a guy who knows where to find another guy, leading to a continuous chain of finding more guys in hopes of finally finding the actual guy you’re looking for. But once it starts to rope in the scientific organization SIRCAA and the Zone’s de facto military known as The Ward, STALKER 2 begins to show you what it’s really about. It weaves in the familiar themes seen in the previous games, such as the dangers of chasing the truth about mind-bending psi emissions, the deadly risks with research in the Zone, and the futility of cultish groups clashing with governmental organizations vying for control. While familiarity with the originals is not required to understand this new story, it was enticing to see all the ways the old STALKERs were tied-in and referenced as well.
I’m glad it drew me in because STALKER 2 is a long game – and at times, it can be exhausting since you’re constantly fighting for your life. It took me 45 hours to finish its main story, along with a good chunk of side missions and free-form exploration. Side quests can bring in some much-needed cash or lead to rare loot, or they may not even pay off in a tangible way. However, there is sometimes an intrinsic value in seeing where they take you or learning more about the world and the people. And much like how a majority of Red Dead Redemption 2 was spent horseback riding while soaking in its world, STALKER 2’s long runs across The Zone evoke a similar feeling in that lengthy runtime.
Within the main questline are some critical choices that affect the path you take along the way, mainly moments where I decided to either share or withhold important information at certain turning points, or straight-up pick a side when my back was against the wall. Although they largely lead to the same destination, the way the story context and mission objectives change makes those choices feel impactful, especially because they come up very naturally. Rarely are there explicit telegraphs for what the outcomes or consequences may be, and understanding what each choice implies requires you to really pay attention to what characters say in dialogue. And so, STALKER 2 is a suspenseful thriller with some impressive cutscenes and performances that bring the series to a new height.
Games like this are quite rare to see at such a scale these days, and even 14 years since its last iteration, STALKER 2 retains a lot of the design principles of the series – for better and worse. It leans into mechanics we commonly see in hardcore survival games nowadays, putting you into situations where you must make deliberate decisions on how to engage enemies and which environments to explore. There’s gear wear that can cause malfunctions, high damage in combat so just a few hits can kill you, bleeding wounds if you survive that, hunger to keep at bay, radiation levels to hold down, limited inventory weight to manage, and constant looting in order to survive. Learning how to pack for the missions ahead was one of my favorite aspects, bringing just enough healing items and specific ammo types while still leaving room for loot I may find without getting overencumbered. These systems are inelegant, though at times I mean that as a compliment because I actually admire how very little is streamlined. It doesn’t hold your hand so when you figure out your own approach that works, it’s all the more rewarding. I started to see how its mechanics come together after enough poking and prodding and managed to find the type of friction I enjoy.
Much like the harsh world of Dragon’s Dogma 2, there’s no easy fast travel around The Zone, so if you want to get from place to place quickly you need to find the right NPC and pay up. If you go on foot, you’re in for a long hike full of rogue Stalkers, anomalies, and mutants that can stop you in your tracks. (I’m not going to lie: save scumming will stave off some of that potential frustration, and I’m not afraid of what anyone thinks!) This isn’t an RPG in a gameplay sense either, so there are no progression systems or skills to unlock. You’re on the constant hunt to find good gear, upgrade it at shops, and maintain its condition. Artifacts work as rare armor attachments that can provide perks like better stamina or environmental protection at the expense of potential radiation poisoning, but they’re not necessarily as game-changing as having the right gun to shoot your way out of a sticky situation.
Combat bounces between intense, high-stakes shootouts or unsatisfyingling unfair wars of attrition. The main difference between those two scenarios is in the bizarre behavior of the enemy AI. Regardless of difficulty setting, enemies are often dumb as rocks, reacting in nonsensical patterns while engaged and completely unaware of their surroundings. Yet their immediate, pinpoint weapon accuracy and near-perfect vision (even in pitch darkness) still make things tough, and not in ways that entirely make sense. Erratic mutant movement is more annoying than it is challenging, and you’ll just bang your head against the wall trying to land shots on radiated rats and dogs chaotically lunging at you; it takes off some of the horror-ish edge that they can instill.
There are bright spots within those combat encounters, though. I’ve learned to work within the confines of sporadic enemy AI, always ready to patch up and heal to survive and take precise shots from smart positions. Sometimes fights break out from conversations gone awry and enemies are very quick on the draw, and I just had to concede the fact that I would take massive damage if I survived at all. STALKER 2’s solid gunplay picks up a lot of the slack of its combat faults. Whipping around a decked-out assault rifle with a nice red dot sight to make headshots easy or pumping shells into a mutant from a fully modded shotgun and slowing its charge with their impact had me looking forward to those high-stakes, kill-or-be-killed situations. The flow of those encounters doesn’t change drastically over time, but the tension stays consistent throughout. STALKER 2 also impresses with how it weaves in psychological horror with psi elements that genuinely mess with your perception of its world; there were moments both in and out of the main story where I was as surprised as I was shook by how vulnerable they left me, layering on a new level of danger.
Within those highs, however, is the frequent reminder that STALKER 2 isn’t in great technical shape – and this is after the day-one patch. Even on a PC with an RTX 3080, a 13th-gen Core i7 CPU, 32GB of RAM, and an NVMe SSD, it chugs on modest settings. Playing with everything on low graphics options and balanced DLSS gives me similar frame drops and large-scale hiccups as it would on medium-high settings and higher quality DLSS, even if the baseline frame rate is marginally better (but still well below a consistent 60fps). The patch definitely helped make performance somewhat more consistent compared to the pre-release version I began playing on, but my framerate still tanked to just barely playable levels in particularly dense and detailed areas with several NPCs around.
Poor technical performance isn’t the only respect in which STALKER 2 still needs work. The game-breaking bugs that halted my progress pre-patch are now gone, and I have not run into any more uncompletable quest objectives since then. However, several problems still persist that include (but are not limited to) NPCs walking through walls, glitched UI elements, textures artifacting, sound effects and dialogue happening out of place, and environmental details or objects clipping through each other. Inoffensive, non-critical bugs can be whimsical in some sense – like when an enemy’s body cartwheels into the sky after being shot – and simply accounted for as unexplained phenomena as you focus on the tasks at hand, but the frequency of these issues chipped away at my enthusiasm for STALKER 2.
It’s hard to say whether or not these things will be patched in due time, although developer GSC Game World has stated their commitment to continually working on them with future updates. The current technical performance and roster of bugs hold STALKER 2 back from fully coming together, as it still feels as though it’s held together by duct tape. Given the story of GSC Game World’s tumultuous development time, which has partially taken place amid an actual war zone in its home country of Ukraine, it’s not hard to understand why. It’s a miracle that STALKER 2 even exists, especially considering how ambitious its world is and how it executes its vision on a conceptual level. STALKER 2 is often bleak and oppressive from both gameplay and storytelling perspectives, and making it all work cohesively for a game on this scale is already an accomplishment.
