STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl Review

To say STALKER 2 has been a long time coming would be an understatement. The game was originally announced in 2010, at the time aiming for a 2012 release date. For those with a keen attunement with calendars, you’ll notice that was twelve years ago. The path to getting the long-awaited sequel out the door has been an arduous one that’s involved developer GSC Game World dissolving in 2011. That’s before contending with the Russian invasion of Ukraine where the developer is based in 2022.

How the game’s even here at all is a remarkable story of art manifested despite terror, and one that’s worth acknowledging - however, it’s only part of what makes this release unique. STALKER games long have a reputation of being obtusely, but richly designed games. Their appeal is in how hard they are, and how tasks that would be automated for you in other games take you time, effort, and resources. It is the epitome of the “Eurojank” moniker.

STALKER 2 is entering a space in 2024 where open-world games are often enormous but sanded down. Where fast travel is abundant, weapons are consistent and enemies have a smoother difficulty curve. Would a new game be able to maintain its identity?

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It’s been a long wait for STALKER 2.

That’s to say a lot is going on around this launch. A lot of history, a lot of context, and a brand-new era. And what GSC Game World has delivered is one of the most complex games to assess in a long time - but it is above all, fiercely singular.

Taking Stalk

For the uninitiated, the series isn’t like a lot out there - hence why it’s kept its loyal, albeit starved audience. STALKER 2 is a single-player immersive sim survival game, where you’re dumped into the irradiated landscape of The Zone and forced to find your path to survive. You have to loot resources like food, healing, and booze - which as we all know, can cure your radiation sickness.

Many will have interacted with systems like this in survival games of the past - but unlike most of the popular titles in the genre, this is not a multiplayer experience. There is a critical path story for you to explore, and you’re encouraged to go out, find side missions, affect the world around you, and otherwise survive in this exceptionally hostile environment. If you’ve played Day-Z, PUBG and especially Escape from Tarkov, which is explicitly influenced by the STALKER franchise, you’ll recognize the systems at play here. You get kills, loot bodies, and find stashes for weapons and resources all while trying not to starve to death. If you mix in some Fallout 3-ish vibes and characters, you’ll start to get close to the feel of STALKER 2.

You find yourself in the shoes of Skif, a guy whose house blew up due to an anomaly, which are elemental phenomenon capable of a lot of destruction, that somehow went off outside of The Zone. There are more lore reasons to get you on your way, but largely that’s it. You’re a guy with nothing to lose, entering The Zone and surviving. It doesn’t take long before you’re embroiled in faction rivalries, towns in need of help, and a plot with world-spanning consequences.

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The main story is full of choices and consequences but you might get lost unless you’re familiar with the lore of the world.

If you’re familiar with the lore and history of the game, the story through the critical path may work for you. There are choices to be had, betrayals and returns. However, if you don’t know anything about this world, it’s going to be easy to get lost. The game picks up and throws away thoughts and ideas quickly, and it can be hard to keep up with what it’s doing without the required reading. Even if you understand it all, STALKER 2 almost always seems to want to jump to the next thing to keep you moving. As a way through this world, it’s a decent enough guide. However, if you’re coming for a rich story to lose yourself in, you may be disappointed. That critical path also doesn’t feel like the main point though. Instead, it all comes down to one thing - surviving this besotted land.

Getting in The Zone

The Zone is the grimy, mud-covered star at the heart of STALKER 2. It’s an unwelcoming, harsh, putrid creation - but that’s also what makes it uniquely beautiful. If long walks in the mud, away from civilization are for you, then you’ll be happy as a pig in… well, mud. For being mostly based on swampy, forested areas, GSC Game World gets a lot out of its location, with different areas feeling relatively distinct in subtle but important ways.

The Zone exists as an exclusion area around the Chornobyl disaster, but, in this alternate history, one that was also extended by a second incident at Chornobyl in 2006. Now it’s a landscape full of genetically modified creatures, other humans with extremely itchy trigger fingers, and the aforementioned Anomalies. The latter provide ever-present danger, and it’s extremely easy to stumble into these practically invisible elemental landmines on your travels. However, if you push yourself into the most Anomaly-dense situations, you can also be rewarded by finding powerful artifacts that can help you augment your resistances. That, or you can pawn them off for a reasonable price at the nearest shelter.

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(1 of 2) Anomalies throw up some pretty special effects in The Zone

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Anomalies throw up some pretty special effects in The Zone (left), You get a real sense of just how fraught the struggles are as you explore further into The Zone (right)

The Zone is also enormous but matched by a rich density. It would not be hard to lose tens if not hundreds of hours exploring everything it has to offer.

Performance Woes

One area STALKER 2 undeniably stumbles is its performance and optimization. During earlier parts of the review process, there were times when the game was nearly unplayable. Thankfully, patches have come thick and fast, and the game has improved drastically. There are still changes coming I can’t appraise, so it’s hard to say how that performance will land once out to the public - but it likely still has a long way to go.

At the very least, from testing and comparisons, running the game off an SSD seems practically essential. That same SSD will also need to have a free 160 GBs. You’ll also need a lot of RAM, preferably 32GBs, and if you want to run it on high at even 1080p, you are looking at 4070 or equivalent. It’s one of the most demanding and temperamental games out there, and that’s when it’s behaving.

At times, it may not be entirely clear where all of that power is going either. While there’s certainly some beauty in the game, this is hardly a graphical powerhouse. Facial animations are flat, closer details aren’t overly impressive, and there’s nothing that jumps out about the presentation that ever really has that wow factor. Performance can swing wildly depending on the kind of area you’re in and what it has in it. There’s also a lot of Bethesda-esque jank throughout, with people ascending into the sky or halfway through floors, objects floating in mid-air, or, in one instance, a dead body failing to settle and eventually wheeling out of a window. I’ve also encountered a ton of audio bugs, from guns not making sounds or voices from characters sounding like they are in the room with you when they are meant to come from your radio. There’s also the voice performances which can charitably be called inconsistent.

Even with an extensive day-one patch, expect to need a powerful machine and even then, be a little underwhelmed by the technical side of the performance.

(Note: Gamer Guides reviewed the game on PC and can’t speak to how the game plays on Xbox. Be very wary, especially if you only have an Xbox Series S.)

The Right Kind of Pain

Performance is only one side of the story here. Even if the game is patched to run wonderfully and its bugs squashed, STALKER 2, like the rest of the franchise, is not a game for everyone. It’s a game that expects you to work for your enjoyment.

A good example is how you will be traversing through The Zone. Fast Travel is in the game, but it’s only usable through guides found at key shelters. Shelters are not abundant, and not every shelter is going to have what you need at it. So, in order to travel somewhere, you need to walk, maybe a kilometer to a shelter, then once you get there, find the guide and pay him 1500 coupons. While not bank-breaking, overusing it would add up quickly. It’s only something you want to do for big trips.

For the vast majority of travel, you’re going to be on your feet - and the game often asks you to cover some pretty lengthy distances. Several times I went out into The Zone, I needed to travel to somewhere one and a half kilometers away and then come back. That can translate to a 30-minute roundtrip where nothing might happen - and that’s the best-case scenario.

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Planning excursions is crucial to survival due to encumbrance so looting everything is not an option.

Before you even get to the point of going on a trip to a mission, you’re going to need to consider what you need. Encumbrance is an essential consideration. If you’re someone who loves to pick everything up and loathes when their movement is hindered when they have too much on them, STALKER 2 will drive you up the wall. Instead, what you’ll likely need to do is go to your stash at a Shelter, where you deposit all your resources and carefully plan what you’re going to need for your journey. How many bullets, what radiation prevention, and food do you need, can you afford the luxury of energy drinks, do you need special psi-blocking drugs?

STALKER 2 forces you not to hoard, and pack light If you make the wrong calculation and don’t have enough radiation meds, or you didn’t bring a shotgun and you’re ravaged by a pack of wild hogs, you’re done for.

Your equipment will also deteriorate frequently and often. So while you may think you have enough money to start upgrading your weapons to be more powerful, by the time you fix up all your guns and armor after a big fight, that small fortune you thought you had for those upgrades may have dwindled on you merely upkeeping your current status quo.

If all of that sounds horrendous, STALKER 2 is not for you. But if you embrace that struggle, realize that’s what makes it special - that’s when you’ll finally reach the nirvana it offers.

Pick a Struggle

STALKER 2, as the franchise has always been, is about the struggle. It’s about the ugly, the unpolished, and the unintuitive. However, it centers that struggle as the joy of the game. It’s what makes it an excellent survival game. This isn’t like most in the genre that have you start from nothing but before long you become a world-conquering badass. While you will get better weapons and likely have a stable collection of resources in your stash once you’re established - that sense of survival and struggle never goes away.

No matter how good your weapons are, getting jumped by a chimera out of nowhere is going to be an enormous pain at best - or a death sentence at worst. The Zone has ways to humble you and throughout my time, I never truly felt I’d conquered it. Instead, I merely had an understanding. Like getting to know a wild animal - you can begin to understand it, how it works, how it thinks, but you have to also understand it can take you out at any moment.

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The game is incredibly punishing and even as you progress, the difficulty doesn’t really let up as much as you might expect.

When that sense of struggle and the game pushing against you as hard as it can comes together, something special happens. In one illustrative encounter, I’d finished a mission and was running low on resources. Earlier, I’d left a gun I wanted to sell for credits in a stash down a deep hole. I trekked back a kilometer to pick it up. As I went down the hole, got my cargo, and tried to leave the cave I was in, I emerged on the other side in a literal minefield of anomalies. As I stepped out to carefully navigate it, a voice over the radio said “We have an Emission imminent”. These are world events in the form of violent storms where you need to find shelter or you die.

Then to top it off, I heard a wild scream behind me, and one of the game’s tougher enemies, the invisible Bloodsucker came running out of the cave I’d just left. I ran, hitting multiple anomalies as I went, having to use more and more medkits to outrun this monster on my tail. Luckily I found a different cave just in time, lost the Bloodsucker and I finally had respite, battered and bruised by the ordeal while running on critically low resources. As the apocalyptic winds of the emissions howled through the caves, that was the moment I realized, “Man, this game rules.”

It’s An Anomaly

At the end of a review, you’re supposed to put a pithy quote on a game to summarize the experience. An easily digestible sentiment that essentially says if this is something worth your time or not. That’s difficult with STALKER 2. Instead, something like a flowchart is more befitting.

It has undeniable issues. It’s very buggy, its performance is inconsistent, and it’s not the prettiest game ever made. That’s doubly egregious due to the absurd hardware demands the game has. If you don’t have the hardware, or you struggle to persevere through performance issues, you’re at least going to want to wait for a couple of optimization patches.

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In an unforgiving world, there is a really unique and special game, unshackled from a lot of more modern game design tropes.

If you clear those bars, STALKER 2 is still going to remain a struggle. It’s a game about survival, managing resources, being encumbered, your weapons degrading - and walking. A lot of walking. The vast majority of your time will be spent walking from one point to another, with only a limited, inconvenient way to fast travel. It is unbothered by modern design conveniences, and instead, makes everything require effort on your part. This is a hostile experience, and GSC Game World doesn’t pull punches on its players. After a hard day’s work, playing a game that actively wants you to struggle through even the most basic tasks, might not be how you want to spend your downtime - and there’s no shame in that.

However, if you’re the kind of player who is still here wanting exactly that - of which most are already STALKER fans - there’s nothing out there that’s going to satisfy you like STALKER 2. It marches to its own drum, and that’s rare for a game of this scale. This is an enormous experience and one you can get lost in for days, if not weeks. GSC Game World captures the identity of the original games in the series - for good or ill.

This is not a game for everyone. Hell, it might not even be a game for most. But it is something great for those who are willing to put in the required work the game wants from you to meet it on its wavelength. In a AAA landscape where most appeal to as many people as possible, STALKER 2 beats its own drum. It’s ironic that in-game, there are dangerous anomaly fields that are miserable to wade through that can bear rare artifacts that make it all worth it if you persevere. As it turns out, that’s about as perfect a metaphor as you could write to sum up STALKER 2.