Challenging Friction and Underlying Greatness in STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl

A certain kind of friction can go a long way in creating a challenging and punishing game that’s also gripping. When developers leave you to figure things out for yourself amid dangerous enemies that can kill you on a moment’s notice, rarely giving you an easy way out of a mess, it becomes clear that the survival instincts embedded in the STALKER series are very much alive in the long-awaited STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl. Then there’s the type of friction that prevents you from engaging with it in earnest, like poor technical performance, bugs that are sometimes hilarious but at others game-breaking, or nonsensical enemy behavior. STALKER 2 has both kinds of friction in equal measure. It just can’t stop getting in its own way, but for all that’s working against it, there’s an underlying greatness that surfaces every now and then.

A Massive Game with Endless Possibilities in The Zone

STALKER 2 is a massive game; as of this writing, I’m about 20 hours into my playthrough and still have so much left to do in The Zone in both the main story questline and in side missions that I’m having to squint to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Due to the review copy coming in just a week before launch and a progress-halting bug in the main mission (which cost me a day of playtime and required me to reload a previous save that made me lose about four hours of progress in order to avoid it), I haven’t been able to finish it in time to give you a final verdict at launch. And for a series like STALKER, where the resolutions to the story’s mysteries are inherent to how it’s earned its cult following, seeing it to the end is of utmost importance, regardless of the roadblocks I have to truck through to get there.

STALKER 2 retains a lot of the design principles of the series – for better and worse.

The Chornobyl Exclusion Zone – the site around the tragic, real-world 1986 nuclear meltdown – remains the heart of STALKER, both as a brutal and sometimes stunning open world, and a fascinating setting that’s integral to Ukrainian history. Physics-defying anomalies work as deadly hazards scattered around its huge map, while equally dangerous mutated wildlife lurk about and supernatural phenomena amid the nuclear fallout instill a sense of danger around every corner. Stalkers – mercenaries who make a living in The Zone taking on risky jobs – from various factions are also on the hunt throughout; it’s a harsh place to eke out a living.

The Masterclass in Atmosphere

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 keep things both eerie and threatening in different ways over time. Even something as small as hearing the patter of rain from inside a dilapidated ship pulls you into Chornobyl’s wasteland. It’s familiar to anyone who’s played the original STALKER series (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.

Exploring The Zone and Facing Challenges

Games like STALKER are quite rare to see at this 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…

Reflecting on the Past: STALKER: Shadow of Chornobyl

What we said about STALKER: Shadow of Chornobyl in 2007

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a brave game, and offers gamers a chance to experience something genuinely new. GSC Game World’s creation exudes such a powerful mood, you likely won’t care about the A.I. issues and bugs that will crop up. While the story fails to dazzle, the excellent gun battles will keep you hooked, and the curious dread that suffuses every section of The Zone is enough to keep you exploring, at least until you start bumping against the constraints of The Zone’s open ended design. If there were more interesting side quests, a more developed arena, and a deeper faction system, this game could have been truly incredible. As it is, it’s still an entirely worthwhile experience. Chances are you’ve never played a game like this before, or experienced this kind of disquieting ambience. What’s present in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is the truss work for an absolutely stellar sequel with larger zones, more character customization, better quest rewards, and stronger NPC personalities. By itself, the game is a fascinating achievement, even if you trip over technical cracks more than you should. – Charles Onyett, March 19, 2007

Score: 8.2

Read the full STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl review.

Navigating The Zone and Overcoming Technical Hurdles

Much like in a harsh world like 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 trek with rogue Stalkers, anomalies, and mutants who can stop you in your tracks. (Not going to lie: save scumming will stave off some of that potential frustration, and I’m not too proud to make use of it.) This isn’t an RPG in a gameplay sense either, so there are no progression systems or skills to unlock other than the constant hunt to find good gear, upgrade it at shops, and pack just enough items to survive while staying nimble. 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 the exploration of The Zone, even if only a handful of those side quests have actually been worthwhile.

The Ups and Downs of Combat in STALKER 2

Combat has bounced between being intense, high-stakes shootouts or unsatisfyingling unfair futility. The main difference between those two scenarios is in the bizarre behavior of the enemy AI. Regardless of the difficulty setting, enemies are often dumb as rocks, walking in nonsensical patterns while engaged and completely unaware of their surroundings. Yet their immediate pinpoint accuracy and near-perfect vision (even in pitch darkness) still make things tough, and not in ways that make sense. Erratic mutant movement is more annoying than it is challenging, and takes off a bit of the horror-ish edge that they sometimes instill. I’ve seen more believable and consistent enemy behavior from the old STALKER games, so it’s disappointing to see steps backward more than a decade later.

Solid gunplay picks up a lot of the slack in the combat’s faults.

There are bright spots within those combat encounters, though. I’ve learned to work within the confines of the sporadic bad guys, always ready to patch up and heal to survive and take precise shots from smart positions. Sometimes fights break out from dialogue 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 in its combat’s 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.

Within those highs, however, is the frequent reminder that STALKER 2 isn’t in great technical shape. 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).

Improvements with a Day-One Patch

STALKER 2 received numerous bug fixes and performance improvements with the massive day-one patch. Upon loading my most recent save, several notifications for objectives from previously bugged missions popped up and were marked as complete. Although there are still drops in frame rate and ocassional hitches, performance has been noticeably more consistent as well. Those are my initial impressions after about five hours with the day-one patch. As I play more and complete the main story, I will continue to take note of whether or not other bugs experienced before the patch have been resolved and if new ones occur.

Concluding Thoughts on STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl

It’s hard to say whether or not things will be patched by the time it’s released into the wild today, I just hope that the worst game-breaking bugs I encountered can be resolved in due time. During my playthrough, I once had an objective to meet with an NPC inside a building, only to find I could not interact with any of the doors to get in. After a minute of being in the area I was teleported inside the building, but there were no dialogue options that could progress the mission with the NPC in question. The only way to work around this was to go back to a save from four hours prior and make a different story decision so the proper triggers would initiate in subsequent quests. There have been other instances like this with sidequests, but those are less critical since I could just ignore them and move on if an objective didn’t trigger or change after completing what I was tasked with, but that’s an aggravating way to play a game. It’s bugs like that that truly keep STALKER 2 from really coming together. It feels as though it’s held together by duct tape – and given the stories about its development, it’s not hard to understand why.

There are times when everything is working – or working well enough, at least – when STALKER 2 is a rare treat that scratches the same itch of those older PC games, where the onus was on you to figure out how to survive and thrive in an unforgiving place that doesn’t care about you. Considering that there’s so much more left to play, I still have hope that it’ll be somewhat smoother sailing ahead, because as I’ve gotten further in the main story, the more intriguing its dilemmas and combat encounters have become. So far, however, I’ve had to fight against STALKER 2 itself as much as I’ve had to fight against all the enemies and anomalies that litter The Zone. Sometimes it makes no damn sense; it compels me, though, and I’ll see this through to the end and get back to you with a final review as soon as I can.