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

The game was tailored for the first few hours to give it the illusion it's good. After the initial positive impression, it goes downhill fast. Main quest and side quests are a fetch fest, everything is far, and the character can only run 125m at a time with objectives 2-3 km away. Combine the short stamina with the low weight tolerance, you'll see yourself pressing W for several minutes until you get back to a base to sell your loot. Speaking of loot, most stashes and loot from killed enemies are absolutely trash, and are not worth your time. Regardless of the faction or enemies, most of them drop: broken guns, small amount of ammo, some drink, some food, maybe a bandage or first-aid kit. After the first areas, Lesser Zone and Garbage, the number of interesting side quests becomes almost zero. If there's any, it's just to pad the played time to make money to repair your stuff. Speaking of repair, the costs are outrageously high even for the starter equipment and you need to grind for money because that doesn't come easy. The last mission was an absolutely slog with no game design thought with enemies one shotting you (or close to that). Now, regarding the technical issues, Unreal Engine 5 is known to require high hardware specs. Unfortunately, this doesn't translate to good graphics. The game is heavy, requires DLSS/FSR on a 3090 to run at 1440p at medium-low settings. Compared to Stellar Blade, same engine, the performance and graphics are atrocious. If you are a fan of the STALKER series, do yourself a favor and go play the classics or STALKER Anomaly. This game definitely is not worth your money or time, not even on a sale.

All it needed is a couple months of QA work, to fix the memory leak and game breaking shit. For some reason it had to release this year and this unoptimized, broken mess is the first introduction to the Stalker series for most people. It's a good Stalker sequel, but in the current state even for a fan it can be infuriating.

As a long time fan of STALKER games (including Anomaly), this game just plain sucks. Even after a multitude of patches so far, it's buggy and poorly optimized. Unreal engine was a poor choice by the devs, it's awful to begin with. Even overlooking all that - the game just lacks the soul and that immersive feeling previous STALKER games had. On top of that just a slew of other bad and lazy design decisions and lack of big and small QOL things all over the place. Don't even get me started on the main quest line and the driving motivations of your main character factored in. And lastly, the so very annoying cut scenes with complete take-away of your character agency and just doing out-of-character stuff. Ughh. I honestly can't believe I'd ever say this, having been so eagerly waiting for this game, but it's a total disappointment and a pass for me.

The game feels almost the same as its older iterations. It is actually pretty fun, but it has one major flaw. And no, I'm not talking about optimization or bugs—those issues were present in the older games too. The real problem is that the game lacks the A-Life system. Instead, it has been replaced by a random event generator which, to be honest, is quite bad. Sometimes, it even re-spawns random enemies right in front of me just 30 seconds after I’ve killed them. Apart from that, the game is pretty enjoyable.

Main things for me are poor optimization and AI being a little underwhelming but in time it will improve. Atmosphere, quests and gunplay are all super good. Those claiming this to be like cyberpunk's day 1 release are seriously delusional. Its rough, but still a LOT more stable than CP2077's first day at launch. Also, it seems people forget that GSC developed this game IN THE MIDDLE OF A WAR. Ignore the overly negative idiots. This game has limitless potential.