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

Almost 4 weeks since release, still can't save my game in an entire area of the map while doing the main quest as it will brick the saves(means also you can't die or lose all progress you made since the last working save) and we just have radio silence on patches now. When it works the game is great, athmospheric and the guns feel good, too. But the techincal issues are frustrating. If they don't fix some random side quest, sure, but the main quest should work at this point without big hiccups.

The game is riddled with performance issues and bugs. The latest update has made the game unplayable as I can't even get past the compiling shaders part. It is a shame because the gameplay, environment and even the story is great.

I had a great time with this game. I was very skeptical that the devs could get a new stalker game "right", but they definitely did. I can tell you this cause I have hundreds of hours across all previous games and their mods. There are certainly things to complain about without considering the afore mentioned techincal difficulties, but lets just say you wont be disatisfied with the game itself as it keept me hooked throughout the 100 hours it took to beat. The problems that stand out the most are indeed the techincal ones. The specs are really high, graphics settings dont seem to matter to much both in visuals or performance and it feels like optimization has been thown out the window in favor of just having DLSS and FSR. But I would argue the biggest problem is the input lag, which so far seems impossible to fix. This makes it really hard to aim, which is obviously important in a tactical first person shooter. While during the majority of the game its manageble, during some sections it makes the game incredibly frustrating and borderline uplayable. The difficulty during these sections then come entirely not from the gameplay itself, but from the bad performance. Will this or even can this be fixed by the developers? I don't know, but I do know that I still like this game for what it is right now, and if you are eager to try it I don't think you will be dissapointed!

What's good in S2 in terms of gameplay it inherited from its predecessors, what's bad equally so. The game has pretty nasty issues in regards to giving player feedback, informed choices, and a series of really annoying and almost outdated progress barriers in the form of insta-kill script walls. It is a game rife for modding, balance patches, and content patches. That said it also has an incredibly engaging story if you find it engaging to reflect on the ambiguity of it. It reminds me of Cyberpunk 2077 and Fallout: New Vegas. It's going to be hit or miss and I didn't really care for it until the ending where everything became retroactively far more fascinating, but having finished the game I now am very happy with it. The game also panders hard to nostalgia, which at times can get annoying, but it is always done with subtlety and skill. Perhaps because I am nostalgic for STALKER I am biased, but I never felt like the game was expecting me to clap at a thing I recognised, instead dotting its world and references consistently, and never in a way that would be distracting to someone whose first experience is this game. It is tasteful, and I found it very fun to catch up with the more subtle ones. If this is the last STALKER game then this a worthy send-off for its characters, and I am happy to have seen them like this. But the way this game ends it leaves it plenty open for more STALKER adventures in the future, and this please me. I don't know if this is a great game, but its definitely better than good, and I got a good 150 hours out of it where I was never bored. That said it needs some love in the form of technical patches, and some post-release content would be nice. - Better feedback for when a location is inaccessible - Balance pass on economy on Veteran - Improve mobility options and uncap weight - Scar's VA and mocap actors deserve canned meat - Come to Him - We thank you, oh Monolith, for revealing the cunning plans of your enemies to us. May your light-

Sadly this one is just as disappointing as I expected from the heavily scripted "real gameplay footage" videos presented before the release. It appears that the main priority when finishing the development was to cater to XBOX standards of controls, accessibility, information - things that are just as important, but not at the price of not making sure that the core gameplay is anoyhow fun. At every point of interest, enemies spawn right in front, sometimes right behind you, in infinite waves, with mutants automatically aggro-ing you and always knowing your exact position. Fun it is not.