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

I have had fun with what I played so far. Immersion in this game is pretty good and the environments look nice. I have only crashed once during my playtime which is around 14 hours at the moment of review. The gameplay is about what I remember from playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R SOC with some extra mechanics added in. With all that said, the reason I am only giving it 3 stars is because of the other issues the game has given me. 1. The game has to cache shaders every launch. Now on most games this isn't a problem as it goes through fairly quickly. However on this particular game it takes about 10 to 15 mins to get to the main menu on each launch of the game. 2. When loading a save, the game will usually have a long loading screen followed by it telling you to press any key to continue. During my playtime if you press any key as soon as it allows you to you will have to stand still for a minute or two longer just to let everything load in around you. 3. Every time I get close to or enter a settlement the game will freeze for around a minute before finally letting me move again. 4. Most of the time when loading a save you will not be able to access your inventory, PDA, weapons, or pause the game until the game is completley loaded in around you (enemies can and will still attack you). 5. There is some pretty bad pop in at certain areas of the game. Structures in the distance can be seen popping in and out of existance as you get closer, clearly trying to load in higher quality models but it doesn't hide it well. There are other issues I have had but those are the biggest ones. Again, I have enjoyed what I have played so far but some of these issues are starting to get very annoying over time. Hopefully they can get these issues fixed soon.

The game runs like crap no matter what your hardware is, and using a grame generation program like dlss just causes a noticible amount of input lag for your mouse and isn't a real solution. I will say so far I haven't had any crashes yet though I probably am jinxing myself by saying that. The game is buggy, not quite a bethesda release buggy but still not great, but bugs are fixable with time. The ingame economy right now is insane, early on you get 300-1000 credits for selling a weapon because you sell everything for 10% of its value and in order to repair armor at 80% it costs 10-20k credits, missions give 600-1000 credits. (I altered the economy with some mods to make it less harsh, but that is only a bandaid solution.) The English voice acting is just awful, not because they are bad, they are but I don't care about that, but because of the wide range of accents of voice actors. Hard to believe I'm in the chernobyl zone when 1/3rd of the people have an english accent and 1/3rd are american. Another issue is the game lost a lot of the charm the old games had. This game has too many "cinematic slop" cutscenes during narrative parts of the game. Not a fan of that. All in all if they can fix the performance issues, balance the economy better, and fix the bugs I give it a 3.5/5. It's a fun game but definitely not a 9/10 like some people claim it is.

I love Stalker. I love Stalker 2...but it just does not work sometimes. Performance issues aren't AS bad as people say, I am running it on a rig just above minimum requirements and it runs at a generally solid 30fps outside of areas with loads of NPCs but there are a few quests that straight up do not work and I'm only about a third of the way through the game from what a friend tells me... There are also alot of visual glitches and A life doesn't work. I get why they had to release it now but they need to do some critical patches and fast. Really hope they push said patches to the GOG version too as I know some developers neglect GOG. There are also alot of missing things from previous games such as binoculars, night vision, mutant looting and from what I can tell alot of the guns (particularly pistols) are just not there. Seems kind of half baked. I would gladly change my review to four or possibly five stars if these things get adressed.

I have gotten into half of the main story and feel bored already, there are almost no side quests, but the thing that turns me off most is how life in Zone feels dead in the old engine we had like actual characters that walk and do their thing in here it feels so virtual and so not real, those 3 random bandits that spawn all the time is most annoying and dumb thing, encounters have to be real, not random. that old engine felt so good compared to the new one. *the side quest is another big thing we have a massive zone that we always dream of but what to do in it nothing happening in the zone there need for more proper side activity from bigger to smaller. *the weapon system is a downgrade from old stalkers, in the early game they shotguns feel useless against mutants the new one feels so ineffective snipers are completely useless they never gonna snipe anyone from far away because they don't even exist in-game from that far. in old engines, they might be invisible if u run a game on Potatoe but they still existed. then there is a progression problem in old stalkers u felt good when u got some end game weapon now it feels pointless only way to deal dmg to anyone is headshot and pistols scripted to be op about that *mutant too healthy mutants take 0 damage it is better to add 5 bloodsuckers instead of 1 with a health of 5 fighting them is literally heal change mag unload mag heal change mag........... *The health system is bad medkits should heal over time and the player must be tanker instead of perma healing *interaction with characters feels dumbed down too much *there is a need for fast travel options map is a massive I really hope the game is unfinished and at least some of the stuff will be fixed then I might change my review

This game is a bitter disappointment. It feels like a game made by Ubisoft. The game world is huge but completely dead, as there are no real dynamic events like in the original games. NPCs and enemies just spawn out of nowhere. The survival elements are a joke, the only thing your character occasionally has is hunger and food is literally lying around everywhere, even Fallout 76 or Fallout 4 go further than Stalker (What a shame). The A-Life 2.0 feature is a lie. The equipment breaks far too quickly and repairs cost far too much, it would be nice if you could find repair kits in the game world instead of burning up all your credits on repairs. Crashes, bugs and poor performance are also back, just like we are used to these days. If you play with the controller, you can't even walk straight because the developers forgot to include a dead zone for the sticks (so you're constantly walking diagonally to the left or right). But the absolute worst are all the non-human enemies (the mutants), they were made so tanky that it technically ruins the game's gameplay. They walk straight towards the player and ignore any gunfire and if they're close enough to the player, you'll be knocked over and bleed, and it goes on like that the whole time. Some will now think, of course it was like that before, but the games have evolved since 2007, but not this one. The only way to deal with these enemies is to avoid them completely, because fighting them means frustration, a lot of wasted ammunition and damaged equipment and nothing else. In other words, 50% of all enemies (the humans) are there to fight and the other 50% of all enemies are there to run away from (great concept). I wasn't expecting the features of a Stalker Anomaly/Gamma, but I wasn't expecting this watered down version of a "modern" Stalker.