S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl

1 year and 5 months of waiting before writing this review. I’ll start with something simple so people who want to buy this game don’t fall into the same trap I did. The starting area is great — the game begins really strong. But the longer you play, the more obvious it becomes that the whole thing is held together with duct tape and the mindset of “we’ll fix it later.” It felt like the first ~20 hours were genuinely polished, but after that the game kept getting worse and worse. Not in terms of story — I couldn’t even bring myself to finish it — but technically. More and more quests started breaking, bugging out, or becoming impossible to complete. What’s the biggest problem with the game? Simply put: boredom. The gameplay loop looks like this: you get a mission 1.4 km away (0.86 miles for the freedom people), and you run there. Sounds normal, right? Except it’s literally just running. Nothing happens on the way. Sprint + energy drink to instantly restore stamina, over and over again. The A-Life system that was heavily advertised simply doesn’t work, and nothing meaningful has been done about it. Almost every update so far has just been fixing basic issues that never should have made it into the final release in the first place, with an occasional new weapon thrown in to keep players happy. More than a year later, the key system that defined every previous STALKER game basically still doesn’t exist. Best example: I was exploring a huge construction site with a large building complex — completely empty. No enemies, no allies, nobody at all. So I went to continue the main quest, and suddenly it turned out the exact same place was home to a massive bandit base. Yes, the place where literally nobody existed 20 minutes earlier xD I went back, and sure enough, they were there — but only because the main quest script finally allowed them to spawn. That’s not how STALKER is supposed to work. The world and the map look beautiful, but they’re just empty. Nothing actually happens in this world. I honestly feel like we were misled about this from the very beginning. Not only were all mentions of A-Life quietly removed once people realized it effectively wasn’t in the game, but the bullet drop is ridiculously short and unrealistic to the point of being sad. Enemies spawn inside a roughly 100-meter bubble around the player, and you can clearly see it in how weapons behave — most guns are only really effective within that range, and even then not particularly well. So what’s the point of sniper rifles? Answer: basically none xD And honestly, considering how absurdly bullet-spongey enemies are, using single-shot weapons feels like a waste of time anyway. Around launch (and for a long time after, because I gave the game several chances), I played on the highest available difficulty setting — and it was simply unfair. By “unfair,” I mean the lazy kind of difficulty design: enemies had absurd amounts of health, requiring multiple magazines to kill, while you as the player died in just a few shots. No smarter AI, no behavioral changes — they’re as dumb as enemies from games made in the early 2000s, maybe even worse. Another issue is making a game on an engine you either don’t understand, don’t know how to use properly, or that simply isn’t good enough (cross out whichever option you prefer). Since launch, the developers still haven’t managed to fix the lighting system, which behaves completely randomly. From outside a building you can barely see anything inside, then you walk in and suddenly it’s bright as daylight xD It works the other way around too — from inside buildings you often can’t see outside properly even during clear weather, but the moment you step outside everything becomes perfectly visible. Then there’s the performance. At launch I had one of the strongest PC configurations possible, and of course the game still stuttered and suffered heavy FPS drops at 1440p. I tried again a year later on a 3440x1440 ultrawide setup and the exact same problems were still there. What makes it even more ridiculous is that some random text config file from Nexus Mods made by a random user improves performance more effectively than the developers themselves. Meanwhile, Cyberpunk was running at nearly 200 FPS on the same setup. I’ve bought plenty of good and bad games over the years, but I’ve never felt as misled as I did with this one. I regret giving it so many chances and waiting for update after update. If I had known this was how things would turn out, I would’ve refunded it within Steam’s 2-hour refund window. If you really want to try the game, trust me and wait for a sale — something like 50–70% off. It is absolutely not worth full price.

The game looks alright, however, it doesn't run well, even on a 5070ti. Ultimately I found the gameplay to be tedious and repetitive, with little to no reason to explore, you go out of your way to a stash just to find the same bread, sausage, energy drink and 9x19 ammo you found in the last 5 stashes. Enemies are bullet sponges, but considering how often you find first aid kits, you'll have 30 in your inventory in no time and losing health won't be an issue. Beyond that, enjoy walking 2km back and forth across an empty world dealing with the same repetitive encounters with bandits over and over. Before long you'll learn there no reason to do anything other than run from main mission to main mission without diverting.