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

...that loses a star for releasing with game breaking bugs for many. I didn't play on release day, instead waiting for several patches to get pushed, my experience has seen some choppy performance but all in all, good. The environments are stunning, daunting, terrifying in places, hilarious in others. The characters you meet are crazy! They have dumbed down a couple of mechanics, but it is still a very enjoyable game. The first few times out at night, not knowing what to expect, was something I'm not going to forget. The world is an absolute joy to explore, I can't wait to fire it up again. The feeling of wading through thick overgrown nature only to see a large industrial complex emerge out of nowhere is wonderful. Likewise, the terror of being in the middle of nowhere and an emission warning is sounded. Love it! Some negatives: As mentioned, many people have experienced terrible performance at launch. For my personal taste, I did install a few mods to alter things slightly. The armour and weapons wear down far too quickly, and it is super expensive to have them repaired. In the first few hours, I found myself grinding just so I could have a functioning gas mask and weapon for the next run, to that end, I installed a mod that decreases the wear by a factor of two meaning I can get three+ full and long excursions out of them before needing a repair. It is easy to shoot your mates in the face. The only indicator that an NPC is friendly or hostile is the reticle, which turns green for friendly. However, if you like a minimal UI, you will get zero feedback on their intentions. This game is quite challenging on hard so I find myself quick saving when I see a group, then waiting for their response, if they are hostile then it's already too late - you need to get tactical when outnumbered.

I really like it! I got everything I wanted from the game Stalker 2. Works quite well even on a laptop i5-12500H RTX3060. I think a couple more patches and the game will be perfect.

Stalker 2 is an RPG without experience points, like an open world System Shock that punishes you for refusing to think and rewards you for figuring out what you are doing wrong. The way you level up is by learning. You start off collecting anything you can sell, but you don't have much inventory and can't run far while loaded down. Then you find a few artifacts and realize they are more valuable, plus they respawn after emissions, so you stop looting guns and start hunting for artifacts. Suddenly inventory isn't a problem anymore. Eventually you figure out that artifacts don't spawn until you are 100m away so you start farming for good ones, balancing weak rad protection with weak endurance buffs to keep the artifacts from cooking you, and by the middle of the game you've found armor that shields you from artifacts, so you stack 3 thunderberries, a weird water, and a liquid rock for max endurance, max weight, and max rad protection. But that's just one build. You want to respec for combat you need to swap your gear. Rifles for people, shotguns for monsters. Hypercube and Compass for bleeding and physical resistance. It's not perfect. A-Life isn't working and the spawns are annoying, especially when you just cleared an area and they pop in out of the ether. Even more so when a failed spawn puts their broken guns in your equipment slot and you pull out your fully loaded saiga to find out its been swapped for an empty cracker with a bloodsucker breathing down your neck. It's a poor first impression, but patches have been dropping like crazy though, so hopefully they get it all sorted. The story is serviceable. I'm not familiar with the previous games so I might not pick up on everything, but it was interesting enough it kept me going and didn't make me feel lost about what was going on. To be honest, these days it's just refreshing that it isn't woketrash. The gameplay is spot on though, so as a package it is definitely worth the price of admission, warts and all.

I Love This Game

Runs like garbage and just horrifically terrible story telling/immersion/interest so far; cheap jump scare tactics might be enoug for kids, but I expect more for this much money. This is not worthy of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. name at all.