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

Since I hadn't played a Stalker game in a while, I did a full run of vanilla CoP just to warm up the engines. That was a mistake. The devs made a lot of questionable decisions which added to poor writing had me wondering most of the time if I was playing Far Cry "Pripyat". To keep it short I'm only going to talk about gameplay issues and I'm not even going to mention bugs. I'll also ignore some gameplay/story issues, like the million stashes or Stalker Santa leaving tons consumables all over the place or the half hour of unskipable cinematics or the clairvoyant enemies that can shoot through obstacles or the bloodsuckers being bullet sponges for whatever reason or the way they implemented radiation or the lack of binoculars or the lack of night vision or the flashbang anomalies. And don't get me started on the end game. As of version 1.3, what hurts the game the most if the lack of A-Life. They faked it by using a spawn timer in certain places so enemies appear out of thin air within a certain distance so I've had 3 bloodsuckers materialize right in from of me and beat me to death. The second worst issue is the lack of free fast travel. In CoP you can pay a friendly stalker to take you some place, acting as fast travel, but in this one you can only do it via specific NPCs in select locations, turning the whole game into a freaking walking simulator. From my 112 hours I probably spent half just running from point A to point B. There's a lot of stuff I missed in my first playthrough so I want to do another run but right now the game has too many issues so I'll wait a few years and check back to see if they finally implemented A-Life.

I almost never refund games. I think between here and steam I've refunded 2. Now, 3. I put almost 20H in to trying to get this game to work properly. I don't have the fastest comp by any stretch but know how to config game settings and what I should get out of hardware. This game, when it works, has so much potential. Game performance however is a complete mess. From my own personal experience combined with forums the game has big VRAM leak issues that require constant re-starting to (temporarily) fix. Areas drop to single digit FPS, re-start game, above 80. But this sometimes needs to be done multiple times in a 20 min play. Close proximity to NPCs seems to worsen this. Other random stutters and drops occur and sometimes correct, but mostly don't. UE5 has some serious issues, but S2 seems to magnify these big time. It's possible as with Cyberpunk that these issues can be overcome. But I have my doubts about the studios capacity to do this. The game should have been delayed signifigantly longer, shit even start a go-fund-me page to finish it, or the studio should have bowed out and passed it on to another developer to finish. It's sad, I feel sympathy for them. But releasing the game in its current state was just the wrong thing to do. I hope I can come back to this game in a year or two, but for now my decision is to not supprt it with money I worked hard to make. I can't reccomend this game to anyone in its current state and it makes me sad.

I give this 3 Stars even though i think it only deserves 2 atm because i do think it can be fixed, has potential and i probably wont (be able to) edit this review in the future. Exceeded all my expectations at the start. Looks great, good atmosphere, good framerate, clunky but serviceable combat a bit reminicent of metro, which im not too keen on tbh. Quest design and writing seem decent so far, but really too soon to tell for me atm. But after the Tutorial the performance really tanks. Every few minutes i have to quickload to make the framedrops go away for another few minutes. Some areas are completely unplayable though. The game needs some serious optimization work. Graphics customization options are also very barebones. Like cant turn off motion blur just turn to 0%. I dont understand decisions like that. Its just a toggle button.... add it! Also most options seem to do absolutly nothing at all. For me the biggest issue however are all the cutscenes and the way the world interacts with the player (and not the other way around sadly). Its supposed to be an immersive sim. The original Stalker got that down. This seems like a huge step backwards and reminds me a little of that awful Thief reboot, although not nearly as bad. Far from being this living World from past Stalker games everything just spawns in right in front of you based on radius. Why even have sniper scopes? Stealth is not even remotly an option, all NPCs have superman senses. Silencers do increase detection time but only from nearby enemys that have their backs turned. As soon as they turn around they instantly see you no matter how many bushes you hide behind. Grenades are also seemingly useless. Hit a bugged Bloodsucker with 5 of them and got barely a grunt out of it. Fighting mutants all you can do is run around or stand there like an idiot while they hit you. I dont feel like a Stalker that carefully plans his next move, i feel like a CoD Protagonist. Also (some) hardcoded keybindings! WHY!!!???

On top of all the balancing issues, nonexistent A-life, terrible performance, and braindead AI you've already seen in other reviews the main story is just so ridden with hard and soft lock bugs that it is genuinely unplayable in its current state. Once you reach a certain point in the story, entire settlements on the map start to get wiped out due to bugs preventing you from doing the quest to save them, quest vital characters are locked behind doors that are bugged shut, and the game crashes incessantly. Up until about halfway through the story the game is mostly bug-free and it's painfully obvious exactly where in the development they ran out of time/budget to properly test and QA. In its current state it's half of a functioning game sold at full price.

Missing several features that were present in the original games. Performance is utterly awful. Even on low with FSR was getting some serious lag with AMD 6800XT GPU and 5900X CPU. As many have said, the game doesn't really have A-Life, it's more of a poor imitation of A-Life. I do not believe that the developers will be able to make this an enjoyable game even with future updates. I do not think they are capable of it. I'd love to be proven wrong as STALKER is awesome but I'm not going to be holding my breath for anything good.