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

I've been having a really good time playing Stalker 2. It's weird and wonderful seeing so many familiar and beloved locations from the previous games, but now not separated by loading screens. Gameplay is exatly what I would expect given the previous titles. Story is good too, as is the voice acting, and the visuals are beautiful. There are some bugs, but so far nothing that has impacted my enjoyment anywhere near enough to consider stopping playing. The single time I've had a true game-breaking bug, I was able to load a save from five minutes before and lose almost no progress, and it didn't happen again. It is a good idea to save frequently and keep a bunch of rotating saves. The other time I thought there was a game-breaking bug, I thought to update my video card drivers, and that fixed it. I look forward to more patches though, there are some things like the shaders not cacheing (even when following their official work-around), and enemies spawning too close or respawning too frequently, that definitely need tweaking. Overall I am very pleased and happy to support a smaller studio, especially one based in Ukraine. It puts games like Starfield to shame.

I'm averaging at 100 FPS in towns with my rig @1080p EPIC (DLAA): i7 12700k OC'ed @4.8GHz, 64GB DDR4, RTX 4070 Ti OC, last gen NVMe drive, Win 11. Honestly better than I expected. Gunplay, ennemies and UI could be better. Immersion is really good, that is the defining feature of the game.

This game is much more of a worthy sequel to the original trilogy than I had anticipated. However there are two glaring problems with STALKER 2. 1. The performance. It's horrific. Stuttering, CPU bottlenecks, and memory leaks that completely destroy framerate, especially in towns. 2. There is no A-Life. The devs claim that it is in the game but not working, but I am skeptical. I suspect it will never be in the game or will be a sad shadow of its former self. Other than that, the game is very immersive and carries the spirit of STALKER. Unfortunately I have put the game down until the devs fix this mess.

Honestly I love the game. Given enough time for performance / bug fixes and in conjunction with content from the modding community this will easily sit in my top 10 games of all time. However, there is a derpy amount of blood-suckers in this game and I don't like. I feel that it detracts from the atmosphere set in the original games.

First of all, Thank you for the Dev team for bringing it to Gog store. I can't stress this enough as It is important for me personally ( moving my library as much as possible from Steam to Gog ). The game is buggy at times ( perhaps even more so than modern game releases! ) but despite that it is fun. It reminds me of Metro series albeit there is less focus on story here and more so on exploration and immersion. One thing I had wished the game had is "special powers" for our main character. I don't think it's a stretch considering all the anomalies and mutated creatures roaming around. It doesn't have to be some crazy powers... but let's say mutagen that allows players to see in the dark without using a flashlight ( playing stealthily, making enemy A.I double guess ). Gameplay is fun but personally don't like the "durability" in weapons... I just don't like this feature in ANY game. It doesn't add anything for my experience except frustration. The Dev team is patching up the game and holy smokes those patches are 100 GB+... which is ridicilous to say the least. For me personally this game will age like a wine ( more updates, mod support and perhaps DLC's... ) but if you think that it's better to wait then... it's YOUR CHOICE. Don't have to play the game at release dates!