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

Currently unplayable. Sure, it might say 60 FPS, but it feels more like 20. For a first-person game, performance optimization isn’t just important—it’s non-negotiable. Otherwise, aiming feels less like precision and more like pain management!

It's fun and immersive, I am having a ton of fun. But there's fixes that need to happen to optimization, glitches, AI, some quality of life on keybinds and other "minor" things. If you think you'd enjoy this game, you will have a blast, just know that it's not the perfect smoot experience all the way. But the game feels good to me.

you will still enjoy this game, its very atmospheric and so far I have been sucked into the world. I have played the game for around 8-12 hours now. still in the lesser zone so i have not ventured so far. Does the game have it issues yes it does. Its lacking some functions and features from the old games, like pages in the PDA, binocolurs and so on. luckily for me im sitting with quite an high system (RX7900xtx and an I7 12700k with 32GB) so im lucky enough to not experience the performance issues some people are talking about. Sadly A-life is not really comparable to the older games (as of now GSC says it does not work as intented) but the world does not feel alive in the same way as the old games, as i said in the beginning the atmosphere is there and sucks you in, but you will notice that everything is just a bubble happening around you and not the entire map. hopefully we will get a system more compare able to the old one in the future. So far I have been having a good time in the game, and hope to see it improvements in the time to come. one good thing is that this game still have a great community and alot of fans so already mods for it is flooding in and that is without an official modding tool. it is a good game and as alot of games it has it problems espacially in the beginning. So if you are not in a hurry to play it. wait a few months to let it cook in the oven a bit more. if you are a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fan the world will have alot to offer.

I have over 100 hours clocked in this game and I'd love to love it. But the sad reality is that it is currently so broken I cannot in good concience recommend anyone to buy it. I've played since 1.0 and so far the game was at it's best at 1.0.2 even though the A-life was missing and enemies spawned behind you. At least the game was stable and didn't crash as much as it does now with 1.1.3. Currently my game seems to become unplayable because it soft locks every few minutes forcing me to to either restart the computer or log out and back in. Besides the obvious bugs the most annoying thing about this game are its mutant enemies. They are bullet sponges that run and hide immediately when you're out of their physical reach and spring back to you the second you come down to their level. This happens with the lowliest rodents to biggest baddies. Human enemies can shoot you from unrealistic distances with broken shotguns without even seeing you, sometimes through whole tanks or other thick metal barriers. They also love to spam grenades with pinpoint accuracy. Some quests are currently bugged so that all the choice you as a player have is seemingly missing. Kill a character and the quest giver scalds you for siding with them for example. Quest items sometimes are left to your inventory after the quest is completed, I'm currenlty carrying over 3 kg of useless quest items I can't get rid of. Enemies can get stuck in walls and just stand there so you can kill them, I guess it balances out the bullet spongines and their instinct to hide from you. Sometimes this means that grenades fly right through them AND the wall they're stuck to. So you end up wasting grenades for bugs and ammo for bullet spongy enemies. It's really not as fun as it may sound. Graphically the game is nice, but not great. The vegetation still has a lot of popping issues and lumen implementation distorts lighting in distant objects making them flicker either in dark or light areas.

TL;DR As somebody who preordered the Ultimate Edition, I'm actually very pleased with my purchase so far. I knew my current hardware was on the low end and that I'd struggle to get a solid performance out of it, but it's doing better than I feared. I'll do my best to avoid spoiling things, but here's some pro's about the game - Fully open-world Zone map, reportedly eight times the size of CoP - Towns feel populated and busy, moreso than prior games - The atmosphere and environment is impeccable and very close to the teasers/trailers that had previously been shared -Edition bonuses are not given to you directly, and must instead be found through a series of stashes dotting the Zone - The game retains its eccentric naming schemes for characters and many have unusual dialects or mannerisms, which I personally love, they feel more organic to me in this way Nearly all of my complaints are related to performance. I'll list what I know/understand about the current build. - The game's shader compilation is configured for dev-mode, where it takes a long time calculating shaders on first boot and rechecks every shader in the game on subsequent boots. There is a way to configure it to use more optimized/efficient shader compiling, but several people (myself included) run into OOM (Out of Memory) errors. This will likely be resolved by next patch. - The game's lighting and reflections uses software Lumen, which is a raytracing technology. This itself is fine, but the issue is the game currently ONLY uses software Lumen. If you own a GPU with RT hardware, its not currently being used to power Lumen. This will also likely be resolved by next patch. - Most of the graphical options don't provide a substantial performance difference. The best to lower for performance are Fog, Foliage Quality, and Environmental Draw Distance at the moment. I'm hopeful they'll adjust the settings or offer more toggles to claw back some FPS.