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

I knew the game was going to release in an incredibly broken and buggy form, so i didnt pick it up in their November release window. Only after i saw the 1.3 Patch 5 months later did i pick it up. Even so the game is in such a odd state that i can't reccomend it to many people. Starting off with the positives. The first 10 hours of the game really nails STALKER. It brings you into the world and sets you up on a narriative adventure inside the Zone. It's obvious that this is where the Devs put 80% of their time and effort. I want to say the first 3 or 4 zones have plenty of stuff to do, side quests and interesting things to explore, but the later zones feel so empty and devoid of things to do. Its like they had the main story set out and started building out around it only to run out of time and need to ship the game shortly before Christmas in order to make rent. The Voice Acting is all over the place, i highly suggest you run the game with Ukranian VO and English subtitles, I think they have gone and hired the same VO studio that Warhorse did with Kingdom Come Deliverance. You get Scottish, Irish, American and Australian VA's with a slight Eastern European accent trying to convince me they have lived and worked in Pripryat all their lives. Now we get onto the bugs and what is causing me to put the game away for maybe another 6 months. I spend 60 hours running the game, get to quest 10 and im hard locked. The quest dialogue won't activate, im told to force progression through a console command and then force spawn an anomoly to reset character AI. This does not work, and i am now faced with 60 hours save file which i cannot progress, or start again. I want to come back to this game and love it, but in its current state i cannot justify this level of jank.

Unfinished. Unpolished. GSC CEO Ievgen Grygorovych said "Everyone at the company was too exhausted to finish the game. We couldn't run another marathon." So instead you decided to ship an unfinished product? You didn't have to work your employees to death in the first place. If the scope of your game was too big, it should've been dailed back. If you believed in your vision, you would've given you game more (non-crunch) time. There's no excuse for this. Don't ship unfinished products then expect the player to be "cool" with it. It is especially painful because given one more year, this game could've been truly great, and you wouldn't have had to deal with player backlash.

I'm a longtime nerd for the Stalker series and I waited so many years for this game and I was so happy to see it on GOG from day one! I started playing and on my system didn't had any mayor performance issues besides some big frame-drops (R7 9800X3D, 32 Gb ram. 4080 Super). I really enjoyed the first parts of the game (Absolutely love the "brutal and dangerous" feel I get from this game), but not long enough I saw some issues: Economy balance, repetitive loot, monster are bullet sponges, enemy spawning behind me, the UI and most of all: lack of Alife 2.0. So I decided stop playing. I don't want to refund the game because I want to support the devs (I can't imagine what they have gone through during development) so I'll wait, want to play the best version possible. I hope GSC dont give up on the game (for what I've seen so far, they are actively patching many things) I'm an old nerd who doesn't have much time to play, so when Alife is fully fixed... I'll be back to the zone!

First of all I had technical difficulties with this game. With Frame Generation on, it drops to about 5FPS when you play longer than 20 minutes and get near NPCs. Not fixed despite mulitple patches. All those patches did for me was make the game crash sometimes during the shader compiling screen, which is extra fun when the Task Manager can't be brought in front to close the game. But what really grinds my gear are the hitscanning enemies. This is such bs! The player has to fire semi, because bursts and full auto are too inaccurate and you even have to watch for the bullet drop and have to shoot the enemies 5 to 6 times with Assault Rifle bullets. I just had to shoot an enemy 3(!) times in the side of his head with a .45 USP. All while the enemy just blasts away at 200 meters or more and you just get hit. and if you take cover, well they start throwing grenades that always land next to you. In the beginning this was not that noticeable but I am close to the finale now and here it just is really annoying. nothing but enemies left and right and everyone is just blasting away your health bar despite having one of the best suits in the game and you shoot them in the face and the throat and they don't even care. This is such an artifical difficulty nonsense. Make the enemy hard to kill and the player easy and done is "Our super challenging game". They also have fun instant deaths if you enter areas where you're not supposed to be. Totally cheap and weak and my guess is the devs don't have the skills to make it a balanced game. Just like they don't have the skills to fix the technical problems.

Gameplay is everything I wanted, optimization needs work but it’s playable