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The Exclusion Zone is a factory for imperfect but powerful things. From crumbling buildings and irradiated soil rise Bloodsuckers that eat up mags the way you eat up rads. The Zone’s mutants may be sun-addled sacks of sinew and teeth, but they’re still standing, defiant in their radioactive glory. Stalker 2 is that same kind of mutant, dramatic and compelling despite its weeping sores and wretchedness. Whether you’re a GAMMA veteran or are picking up a bolt for the first time, the Exclusion Zone is waiting with open arms.
Stalker 2 Review
Explore over 60km of irradiated, mutant-infested, militant-controlled wasteland. Analyze supernatural anomalies and collect valuable Artifacts. Collect, repair, and customize a huge arsenal of guns. Use that arsenal to kill or die trying. Stalker 2 features a linear main plot to rival anything in Clear Sky or Call of Prypiat, but it’s the game’s quality as a sandbox that distinguishes it. Forget the schemes of the warring factions. Forget the poor optimization while you’re at it. Stalker 2 is a compelling successor, even if its Geiger readings (and bug reports) are off the charts.
Story: Beyond Strelok
Emergent storytelling has always been Stalker‘s strength. The main plot, a linear railroad connecting uninteresting fetch quests to stilted dialogues, is the game at its weakest. Skif’s reluctant investigation into anomalous Artifacts (and those that hunt them) in the Exclusion Zone is often dull. The main plot’s paramilitary pageantry would fit neatly in the next CoD campaign, but it feels tacked on here. It’s not that the story’s themes of rusty history and rustier consciousness don’t hit. It’s that they’re an okay epilogue to saga that neither needs nor benefits from bow-wrapped exposition.
Central plot aside, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl tells a thousand little stories, most of them grim. A child’s doll rests in a crib in a farmhouse long abandoned. Mutant corpses fill a bar, slumped across the bodies of the drinkers who died defending it. Maybe you find loose ammo in that derailed train. Maybe it’s a note on a stolen PDA, guiding you to a stash hidden in some bushes by a stalker just like you. Every interaction is another paragraph in a story co-written by you and your ongoing suffering. It wouldn’t work if it wasn’t bleak.
Stalker 2 is, if nothing else, bleak. Stalkers complain about their worn-out guns, one jam away from being another body rotting amongst anonymous shrubs. It’s an all-pervading vibe. You can’t loot a factory or stroll through the crimson fields of Red Forest without sensing it. The Exclusion Zone doesn’t hate you, but only because it doesn’t think of you at all. If Stalker 2 is a triumph of storytelling, it’s because everything doubles down on this theme. The game even displays your death tally when you die, never letting you forget how often you’ve failed.
Gameplay: Headshots and Jams
Though less bloodthirsty than hardcore Stalker mods like Anomaly and GAMMA, Stalker 2 is happy to feed you to wild boars or let a zombie soldier gun you down in a grimy basement. Guns are plentiful, but ammo isn’t, and most weapons are in poor repair or outright broken. The item degradation mechanic is also over-tuned. That means your gear can lose several repair points in a single firefight. Repairing gear is prohibitively expensive, too, creating unnecessary frustration in its drive toward realism.
The gunplay itself feels great. Unless you bring peashooters against the game’s tankiest enemies, the Time to Kill ratio stays low. On the higher difficulties, it only takes a bullet or two to book a ferry ride down the River Styx. Thankfully, mods like scopes and silencers can be swapped on the fly, letting you tailor your kit mid-gunfight. That versatility is necessary since weight limits will obliterate your stamina if you try to pack-mule too many AKs to Slag Heap for sale. You have options but also limits, creating fabulous tension.
Want to follow your compass from one quest marker to the next like a Ubisoft tour? You can do that. Prefer to disable your HUD and let gossip guide you through the Zone? That’s an option, too. There are plentiful POIs, random mutants, bandit attacks, wandering Stalkers, and deadly Emission storms to keep you busy. Trudging around half-blind and bloodied up, always angling for some clean water and the promise of a bigger score? That’s Stalker 2 at its finest, all dolled up for the apocalyptic prom. For open-world looting, weapon modding, and gritty gunfights, few compare.
It’s unfortunate that broken AI, problematic spawn logic, scuffed pathfinding, and other glitches muddy the experience. Something small bugged out or broke in pretty much every encounter, but it’s telling that I never stopped having fun. No, there aren’t enough random encounters for the world to feel fully alive. Yes, enemies love shouting “I’m hiding here,” ratting themselves out so you can swing by with your Kharod or Dnipro. Yes, you can stump most mutants just by jumping on a car’s hood. I still love it.
Graphics & Audio: Earworms and Invasive Species
The anomaly looks like a snow globe, except it’s 10 meters across, made of water, and appears to be breathing. It hovers above the stinking swamp, bending the trees and reeds with every exhalation. You’re looking past the orb, however, to the pair of stalkers marching through the swamp. The reticule of your M701 Super trains itself on the back of one man’s tactical vest. Their deaths could spoil the truce that protects you from Prypiat to Zaton. Yet those deaths would mean two bodies worth of loot. As your trigger finger weighs the choice, the globe of water takes a breath.
Stalker 2‘s color palette is more Hrot than Apex Legends, a one-two punch of rust and dirt. This isn’t the rotting wasteland of Fallout. The Exclusion Zone is thriving but the way an invasive species thrives. Everything here is strangling or being strangled. From the scarlet flora of Red Forest to the nuclear hell of Cooling Towers, Heart of Chornobyl is exceptionally itself. If only its NPCs didn’t spoil the immersion with stiff animations and broken pathfinding. The optimization is also awful, with dropped frames and stuttering being the norm. Even in a place so full of bogs, my PC shouldn’t be this bogged down.
The dialogue and voice acting are average, but the SFX is exceptional. Explosive anomalies flashbang you and leave your head ringing. Your VS Vintar snips like steel shears as it puts a round in some poor bandit’s ear canal half a block away. Wild dogs make a sad little yelp when they die, a queasy noise that gets queasier when you hear it from a whole pack of mutts, dying in an awful chorus. Although visual glitches, stuttering, and the absence of the A-life system often rob the world of immersion, there’s bloodshot, bleary-eyed magic here.
Conclusion: Anomaly Postponed
I experienced plentiful bugs and multiple crashes during my time with the game. Given five years of mods, Heart of Chornobyl could rival Anomaly and GAMMA as the definitive Stalker experience. Today, however, it can’t stop jamming long enough to get a clean shot. Despite my laundry list of caveats, I recommend Stalker 2. The devs have already fixed many issues post-launch, and few open-world survival shooters achieve anything close to this. Disable the HUD. Find some ammo. Start walking. Those Artifacts won’t find themselves. You can journey into the Exclusion Zone on PC and
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl (PC Reviewed)
An alluring and uncompromising open-world survival shooter held back by poor optimization and an absence of AI interactions.
Pros
- Gritty and satisfying survival
- Excellent shooting and gun modding
- Beautiful graphics (when they aren't bugged)
Cons
- Poor optimization
- Plentiful bugs
- Weak main plot
