Review In Progress | S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl - A Long Winding Road

After as many hours as it took me to complete the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, I’m finally hooked on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl. It’s a seriously big game, and one that holds a lot of cards close to its chest, sometimes for the better, and often for the worse. Now that I’m in the real meat of the game I’m hopeful that I’ll have a fantastic 80 hours or so, I just wish I didn’t need to get through what felt like a nearly 15-hour tutorial to get there.

Where Shadow of Chernobyl gave you full access to the open world from the word go, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2  has an introduction sequence that you have to get through before The Zone really opens up. New players to the series might struggle to understand everything though. The game does a pretty bad job of actually explaining the rules of the world: what the stakes are for our main character Skif, and why he is significant. Besides that the introduction is fine but a bit by the numbers: a tutorial, a tease of some later-game weapons and enemies, a few very curated views to show off how pretty S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s Zone is and it’s over. I think it was a mistake to restrict players’ freedom at the beginning though. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. isn’t about enemies, or weapons or any of that stuff, it’s about The Zone, and the path you find through it. 

Technically, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is definitely guilty of a few bugs. Definitely nothing game-breaking, but when the game leans so hard into a systems-driven seamless open world bugs like magically respawning enemies or dubious AI can be a big hit to the immersion GSC Gameworld is striving for.. One of my pet peeves is that despite the AI’s supposed intelligent AI that will guess where you are often enemies will try and shoot you through solid walls, which doesn’t really impact me materially but it does remind me for a moment that I am fighting the game, not a group of bandits or mercenaries or what have you. Performance can be a bit sluggish too, especially in areas with dense NPC populations. On PC, lots of more graphically demanding games are able to estimate how strenuous a certain setting is going to be on your GPU, which can be really handy for tweaking your settings perfectly, but S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is a far cry from highly optimised titles like Red Dead Redemption 2, and I really feel the absence of a system like that here.

And speaking of settings, there are a lot of gameplay tweaks that can make your experience more challenging or immersive and I won’t tell you how you should set those because it’s personal (I’ve been playing with combat music set to off and honestly it really made the game more enjoyable for me). I would recommend trying the native Ukrainian voiceover though, it seems more consistent than the mixture of Ukrainian, British, American and Irish accents found in the English dub and is nice and authentic to boot.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl takes a more modern AAA open-world game approach to narrative, kind of Bethesda-esque. So far, the story has spent a lot of time shepherding Skif around the Zone to introduce him to the major factions. I think partially for this reason it felt like the game hadn’t really begun even when I was five or so hours in. The thing is, loads of open-world games have factions with varying moral qualities, each with their own quest chain - in Heart of Chornobyl you have to get through all the stuff to reach the narrative beats that are unique to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. 

That didn’t stop me from spending hours just wandering around admiring the scenery of Chornobyl, listening to the rain, and marvelling at how well-modelled and animated the guns are. Seriously, the attention to detail in the way the guns reload, swap ammo, and even how they jam is so tactile I’m usually not even upset when it gets me killed. In fact, all of the first-person animations are beautifully hefty and give Skif a real feeling of presence in The Zone.  

I’m at the point now where I can say that if you enjoyed S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl you should definitely find the time to play the sequel. It might take a while to get you as much as the first did, but it will get you. The Zone is the same as she ever was, you just need to find her.