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.
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.
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.
---despite the open world, the game discourages us from exploring
-in places game doesnt want us yet to explore we will find immortal sniper that will kill as with one shot
-even if we can get to locataion in 9 out of 10 cases place will be empty or NPCs there will have nothing interesting to tell us unless we are there because story told us to be there
---combat is bad:
-NPCs will spam with grenades
-the accuracy is insane, they can spot us super easily
-each time we get shot no matter what armor we are wearing our character will shake his head
-enemies are bullet sponges, in human emenemy case most of them die with one headshot (depending on armor)
-bleeding, no matter what armor we are wearing, we will bleed almost every second shot we got shot
---skif and his motivation are simply bad: entire game he is whining about his destroyed apartment almost as if his entire family had died, to some people he is friendly to other aggressive with out reasons
---random fps drops in "towns", only way to fix it is to reset game
---plants cast strange "shadow" that disables reflections in water if we will look "through" them...
I dont know how to describe that, wish I could attach screenshot
+++graphics look good
+++many weapons to choose from
