The wind picks up as you walk down a muddy path. You pray it’s not an emission because you’re too far from shelter to have any hope of surviving one of these nuclear storms. You put a piece of bread in your mouth and satisfy your hunger long enough to reach your goal. On the way you can hear shots in the distance. As you get closer to investigate, you encounter some bandits and the Wards (the supposed keepers of the peace in the zone) engaged in a shootout. Both sides consider you an enemy, so you are forced to finish off those who remain. Later, some mutants come to collect the bones. Chubby, ugly things with claws that can tear you to pieces. They try to escape secretly, but are discovered. With only a few rounds in your shotgun, you hope it will be enough, only to hear a terrifying crack as one of them jumps towards you. Your weapon is jammed and you are about to become another victim of the zone.
Welcome to STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl. GSC Game World’s dystopian open-world shooter is finally here. Multiple delays and even an actual war have threatened the release of this game, but none of these external factors could stop it, and now that it’s here, we’re more than ready to delve into the irradiated and deadly world of the Zone.
The Zone is both the game world in which STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl takes place and, in some ways, the main character of the game. GSC Game World has put a tremendous amount of man-hours into creating this expansive world, and the time invested has been worth it. The Zone is one of the most impressive gaming environments I’ve seen in recent years, and it exudes a uniqueness that will soon put an end to comparisons to Metro, Fallout and other post-apocalyptic shooters once you spend the first few hours go through. It’s a dark and dangerous place where you can meet your end at the hands of a bandit just as easily as you can accidentally step on an anomaly – a point in the world where you’re sucked into a small black hole or accidentally attacked Fires can emerge from the ground – and yet, as the game’s characters describe, the zone has a certain charm. An indescribable need to move on, to accept the anarchy and the freedom it offers and to cling to it like a parasite, taking the zone by any means necessary.
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It goes without saying that the zone is also a very beautiful place at times. Even though I wasn’t able to experience the full enjoyment of this game at maximum settings (which we’ll talk about later), STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is still a beautiful game. There isn’t a very varied environment in the Zone, and weather is usually the key factor in changing the look of your surroundings, especially when an emission can turn the sky into a completely different color, but it’s still a visually fascinating place. Swamps, dense forests, abandoned farms – all show GSC Game World’s commitment to making the Zone not some fantastic idea of a nuclear wasteland, but a real place that feels so grounded you can’t help it. than to completely immerse yourself in it. The facial animations are also very, very powerful even on the lowest settings and help bring the characters to life, even if the voice acting isn’t always there. I played with the English dub, so it may be a mistake on my part, but there were still some standout performances, like Faust and Scar.
You play as Skif, a newly promoted stalker who finds himself permanently in the Zone after his house on the mainland burns down and a job with an anomaly scanner goes wrong. The game’s story unfolds from there, essentially serving as an excuse for you to travel to various locations in the zone, encountering and getting to know the various factions before moving on to the next location. It’s a bit formulaic, and since the map is so large, each new zone area requires its own base camp where you can rest and trade with merchants, which is further reinforced. However, the story missions themselves are varied enough, with great cutscenes and set pieces that keep you from feeling like you’re just pointing at X and doing Y to return home and give Z to your latest benefactor. The characters you meet along the way are complicated and layered, and each one feels like they’ve been molded by the Zone into something different. I wish I could say the same about our protagonist, Skif, but he tends to seem a little one-dimensional. One could argue that Skif is more of a blank slate, so the player’s decisions seem to be made more by themselves and less by what the character they are playing might do, but in other games your narrative changes through your decisions, the protagonist rarely appears bland. Think of Lee in The Walking Dead, Commander Shepard, they feel like people who have their own motivation to continue the game’s story, whereas Skif, after tracking down the person he’s looking for at the start of the game, looks like that , as if he were one. He spiraled from one place to another, and it seemed to me that he was little more than a ghost in the story, barely noticeable, even though his perspective was my point of view.
STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl’s greatest strength lies in its exploration of the zone. In this game you don’t level up, there is no grinding, so your equipment is really important. So it’s a seemingly worthwhile endeavor to head out in any direction, whether in pursuit of a mission objective or just to see what’s out there. In the Zone, survival is the overarching goal, so anything you can do to give yourself a better chance of surviving another day will be worth it. The random encounters are also a lot of fun and don’t last too long. Nothing is more annoying in an open-world game than coming across a side quest just as you’re about to complete your main objective, and then learning that you have to back out on the first task. Instead, helping needy people in the zone will be a quick and painless exercise that can net you good connections and a bit of loot for your problems.
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I’ve already mentioned that STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl’s main objectives run the risk of becoming repetitive, but the game avoids this best through its gameplay loop and shooting mode. Whether you’re fighting an organized group of people, a gang of monsters, or a single invisible mutant, STALKER 2’s shooting gameplay is fun. As long as you keep your weapons in good condition, you won’t have to deal with the frustrations of jammed bullets and can then wreak havoc on your enemies. One small criticism of the combat is that the AI seems to consist entirely of experienced snipers. STALKER 2 is a realistic and addictive game, and yet one thing that gets you out of this situation is that you are more than 100 meters away from the random bandit number 2 and he is still hitting you with stray bullets and perfect aim. It feels like an added element of unnecessary difficulty rather than being representative of the enemies that could actually land these shots. It is particularly annoying when bullets cause bleeding, which can only be prevented with a valuable bandage.
Going back to my previous point, I wasn’t able to use the game to its full potential in terms of graphics and performance, which I think is due to the lack of optimization. I no longer have the best PC, but other demanding games this year run well on high settings, while STALKER 2 still had significant frame drops on the lowest settings. Many visual glitches were also found, such as enemies appearing and disappearing, NPCs being buried in the ground while being spoken to, and people randomly urinating while standing (pictures of which below). It’s hard to say that STALKER 2 perhaps needed more time in the oven, but if you don’t have a killer PC, you might want to wait for some patches and improvements to be released.
Bugs and performance issues aside, STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is an excellent game. Despite all the obstacles, GSC Game World has met and exceeded expectations with this dystopian shooter. An addictive game world, satisfying and challenging gunfights, combined with a ton of characters that bring the zone to life make for an experience I won’t soon forget. Like the game’s NPCs, the zone has captivated me despite its liveliness, and I’m not sure when I’ll leave.
