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

After all these attempts, I don't feel like downloading more than 100GB for every patch. This sucks. I won't be buying anything more from this studio.

It is like GSC have done only a transfer of an old game to a new engine XRay engine to UE5 and need to be say lot of things are not like a real STALKER game (but for the new player generation, Stealth indicator, map points) But the game is still STALKER but needs some polishing and performance optimization what with UE5 a pain in the butt hahaha is :)

If you are one of those people that played the old S.T.A.L.K.E.R. trilogy at the day those games released, you'll fill like you gone back in time... Everything i experienced with those games is back! The amazing graphics for that time, the ambient atmosphere of larking danger in every corner, the realistic approach in everything gameplay related... the open world sandbox that keeps on delivering something interesting even after multiple hours of exploration... and the bugs... And everything in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is multiplied by 2 or more... So if you're one of those people like me and you loved the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. trilogy for what it was buy this right now. You will be supporting this amazing team of developers that accomplished this extraordinary feat beyond odds and i believe they are capable of fixing the game and deliver us on the promise of the best S.T.A.L.K.E.R. experience ever. They have achieve that before. They will again... In conclusion... As with No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk i supported those games and they ended up being great games that lived up to their promises and now are on my favorite games that i replay constantly... I strongly believe that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 deserves to get on that list even with all the problems that it has. But it's your money and if you don't have a strong connention with the game and if you only played the old games once or not at all, maybe you should sit this one out... I will finish my Steam copy (got it 40% off on an ROG preorder deal) now and replay when the game is fixed probably buying it on GOG too so i can keep it forever... Good luck Stalkers.

As to be expected, STALKER 2 is rough at launch. But, it's also a lot of fun. And as to be expected, sadly, bots are out in force across the internet leaving negative reviews for money. I didn't think governments of the world could be so petty, but here we are. Truthfully, if you want to wait until better optimization happens? Fair enough, good idea. But, it's no where near as bad as Shadow of Chernobyl was at launch. Yeah, I got that at release back in the day, I'm a STALKER OG. In all, this is what you want from a STALKER game. This is the logical improvement on those old games.

A lot of what I have played so far, I have really loved. Great gunplay, great atmosphere, there's so much to love here. I tried to get into STALKER ~ 15 years ago, and for as much as I wanted to like it, it never quite clicked. I don't know if it's me being 15 years older now, or STALKER 2 being more "modern", but whatever it is, this game is clicking. I want to play more of this game. I wish I could play more of this game. But I keep running into game breaking bugs. Not crashes, not silly glitches, not things of that nature, but full, "missions are incompletable" bugs. Missions will be rendered fully broken, I'll reload my save, and the same thing happens every time without fail. There've been 3 patches thus far at the time of writing, and I've tested every one, same problem on them all without fail. I even submitted a report to the devs. I described my PC specs, the mission that was breaking, how it was breaking, and I included my save files and analytics data files in the submission. They replied to me, asking what my gamertag was (I'm on PC), asking me when my save files dissapeared/became corrupted (they didn't), and requesting that I submit another report with save files attached (again, my original submission did include both save files and analytics data files). Originally, I was going to hold off on writing a review. But between the game being broken to a degree that I have to check with each patch if I'll actually be able to play the game now, and the copy & paste response from the devs that indicated they didn't even read my bug report, it's all left a bad taste in my mouth. I'm trying my best to be kind to the game. I'm willing to let a lot more slide from a developer making a game on the frontline of the Ukranian/Russian war than I would be from your standard AAA dev. I can forgive crashes, performance issues, etc. But I've reached a point where I cannot progress, and all I can do is wait for another patch, and hope it actually fixes the problem