As some reviewers have already said, the game is struggling with performance problems in its current state.
It makes no difference whether the graphics settings are set to high or low. In addition, there is the long waiting time at every game start until the shaders have been compiled.
The game is definitely not unplayable, but it is not as much fun with the performance problems.
I can't say too much about the story because I've only played about 45 minutes so far. I'll probably pause the game for now and wait for a few patches.
So far I have enjoy what I have played, it reminds me a lot of 2007 stalker and that means also roughness. The only problems which have had an impact of my enjoyment has been searching why my FPS was dropping to single digits and that was NPC faces which I drop to low-medium in settings, which push it up to 28-30FPS. There also was a problem with toggle-hold choice of sprint etc which was fixed by loading an older save. Plus the AI problems said by other people.
I run everything on high with some on epic fog, grass etc, and I have an old CPU I-6700k with 32GB and RTX3700, I get 30FPS in camps with 50-60FPS on a 2k monitor outside, temp is 63 on the system in total.
If you’re a fan of stalker and were around back in 2007 you will enjoy this game even with the problems which the devs are already said they are fixing. If you’re more sensitive to bugs or have worse specs then me or need optimisation out of the box. I would say hold off for a few weeks/months put it on your wish list; keep an eye on it, because it has all the fundamentals for a great game. Plus the mod community are one of the best for future play through, I Hope this helps someone out there.
NOTE: See review update at bottom, after the indicated line
The game has the atmosphere of the original Stalker games, including the bugs by the looks of it. I would love to be able to play decently it for once.
The most annoying bug is not being able to compile/unpack shaders, which means that for every 5 minutes of play you spend 25+ minutes restarting the game and hoping you get further than the startup screens. Once into the game, if you manage to actually start, then it is a waiting to see if the game will crash after walking 5 meters, 50 meters, or if you're very lucky, you just might get halfway to your destination before the game crashes due to not being able to unpack shaders (?!?!?). And that is with patch 1.4.2
If you do manage to get in to a fire fight, expect to have to play through that fight atleast 15+ times. Because you can't save without enemies nearby, and the game crashing every 2-3 kills due to shader issues, a 2-5 minute fire fight may take 3 days to actually get to a state where you can save.
If the developers actually manage to fix that issue, then the game may just start to become worth the €€€ I spent.
---- UPDATE ----
Updating/changing my review. Once I got frustrated with all the updates seemingly making my game experience worse, I started looking at other possible causes. One possible cause that I found was a bug in intel CPU's which could damage the CPU itself (caught that in time with a FW fix), unfortunately this fix didn't help. The other possible issue was with the Intel Turbo Boost Technology being activated in the BIOS. Turning this off, has resulted in just 2 crashes in the past 3 months! Which is an enormous step forward from crashing every 5-10 minutes (sometimes on startup).
Not all bugs have been fixed, a really big issue is dead NPCs disappearing under the ground. Especially when it is a key NPC whom you need to open a door/stash. For example in the Concrete Forest, where you need to jump down the tower and retrieve the key from a dead NPC at the bottom. This NPC is underground, as the icon (v1.15+) shows, but no way to interact with as it's too far away.
Hoping to see these fixed in upcoming patches, as well as looking forward to the upcoming DLCs, considering I bought the Ultimate Version.
If there is a good game experience to be had here, it has been destroyed by awful optimization. Having to wait for 5 minutes every time you start the game to compile shaders should be a crime. Every time you load a save it takes over a minute and you still enter the world with only 25% of the assets being loaded. Coming into an area with multiple NPCs makes the game lag out for 30+ seconds.
I'm running on a Ryzen 7 5800X and a 7800 XT. While not being top tier, they're better than "average" and I can't see my hardware being to blame for this bad of an experience.
To add to all of this, the enemy AI in the game amounts to aimbots that can pop in on a moments notice. Even when in cover they will spot you 100+ yards away instantly and take you down in a couple head shots. The invisible mutants will attack you before you have a chance to react and by the time you can heal yourself, they're knocking you down to start the cycle over again. If you do get some shots off it won't matter because it's going to take 6+ point blank shotgun blasts to (maybe) take them out. Then you get to wait for over a minute while a save loads and think about how you'll just get wiped again and repeat the process.
Not sure I could really recommend the game in its current state.
It took a while, about 9 months after launch, now July 2025, for a lot of major patches to come in and also mods as well, but I feel now you can really get a great and customized experience with this game that feels like a worth sequel to the original stalker games
The performance is quite bad, hopefully Unreal Engine 5.6 update eventually fixes this, unless you have a beefy CPU, the game runs much better on my 9800 X3D now at least since it can just brute force through the game, but I think middle range CPU will do better with UE5.6 updates which is apparently a big performance boost
The game itself is impressive imo, it really utilizes UE5 in a great way, the detail is impressive, character models and shading look excellent at ultra/epic settings and so on, it feels very immersive when interacting with the world and characters due to the incredible detail, and they did pretty well with some of the narrative scenes and facial animations to make it look convincing, even if slightly in the uncanny valley territory,
There are other random issues like enemy ragdolls flying all over the place after dying which is immersion breaking
Controller support is pretty good, but there are some issues with overlapping controls, jump and "focus" aim are the same button, so aim focused basically can't be used
Not all older mods work well with the updated game, like weightless mods, which I really like to use, most mods work pretty great though
You need another application to get proper widescreen FOV adjustment which is a nuisance, especially FOV adjustment on the gun model, flawless widescreen is needed for that, that really shouldn't be necessary in such a new game
But anyway, trailing off here, after that 9 months I feel the game with the A-life updates and game simulation updates and so on is a lot improved and finally feels like a proper sequel to the original Stalker games, it feels a lot more polished now even though not perfect
