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.
Just ignore its existence, and do something better with your money and time. Play the classics instead. And if you are already a stalker fan, im sorry man, this aint good....
This game is a perfect recreation of all the ideal qualities that drew people to the original stalker trilogy, and so much more. Strikes an excellent chord between the additional realism the franchise has always had in moderation, and the goofy gameyness that brings so much fun when combined with the realism, a component that derivative shooters like Escape from Tarkov do not bring to the table. I really enjoyed how the English voice actors just chew up their lines and make for a bunch of action movie-esqe camp from time to time.
It runs rough on pretty much any computer, and its janky as hell from time to time, but it sure as hell is a gem.