STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl

I'm about 3 hours or so in, only a few main missions in and primarily picking up stashes and exploring at the moment so I can't speak to the story. It's janky, performs worse than it should for the horsepower and while it looks good it's not stellar. It is for all of those things 100% everything I love about Stalker, bugs included as they're just kind've a given. The gunplay is good and brutal at the start, even on medium/normal difficulty you will die relatively frequently which is a refreshing change from most games these days. The atmosphere is where it shines again if you like the Stalker universe it hasn't diverged at all, no goofy vanilla pixar blx here - it's nicely tuned wasteland misery with enough action, horror and interesting puzzles to make you lose yourself in it.

I'd agree with some of the better reviews I've seen in that if you are a Stalker fan and know what to expect with the jank get it now, if not wait for a few patches.

And that's exactly what this is, the "eastern European open world shooter masterpiece" we've been waiting for. It's STALKER, with all the good and the bad, and I'm happy it is this way.

I haven't played it, and won't anytime soon for time/financial reasons (unless game pass makes it a cloud game) but I did watch a playthrough of it last night by Hollow, who isn't a great gamer, and it looked very good I thought. The graphics seemed nice, there were no outrageously bad bugs and it did have the feel of a Stalker game. That we even got a new game after so many years in the wilderness is quite an accomplishment.

The English accents were much more off-putting and immersion breaking (one early quest has clearly Irish and Scots Stalkers) than anything gameplay related, but Call of Pripyat also had that issue and I believe now you can also playing with Ukr dub and english subs?

The A-life does look like it needs lots of work though, as the spawn system seems messy and broken. I think if they can get that fixed the game will be doing very well.

I will say though that I'm not a fan of relying on modders to fix things and to get a "real Stalker experience" like some say. If you pay for the game you should be getting a properly functioning game. It's great that the series has a vibrant modding community but really having SoC and Clear Sky requiring mods to be a decent gameplay experience shouldn't have been accepted back then and it shouldn't be acceptable now for Stalker 2.

Having a great time with it so far. Like the atmosphere a lot. Traditional AA seems to be borked on PC though and it seems to need DLAA/DLSS to sort the shimmering. HDR isn’t too badly implemented either. The thing eats RAM too. Had to root out a spare set of slower 16GB sticks I had and fire them in to sort out the hitching. Playing with the Ukranian voiceover is an absolute must. The ENG voice acting is trash and a bit jarring.

https://www.videogamer.com/news/stalker-2-devs-announce-a-life-2-0-patch-to-fix-poor-ai-spawning-issues/

Good to see it formally acknowledged and a patch in the works. A-Life 2.0 was the big marketing push for this release so the fact it’s completely broken probably makes the entire game now a wait-to-play. I’m still enjoying the atmosphere and the overall presentation but after burning another couple hours at it this morning, the blatantly scripted nature of the spawns - and the ‘pop-in’ spawns that are egregiously reproducible - have started to drag.

Can it play STALKER?

Make sure you enable Nvidia Reflex

Me dying for the nth time here:

-angry noises

My wife: is this the game you've been wating for 15 years?!

Me: YES!!!!!!!

Unless I'm doing something wrong the loot economics needs some more balancing, I'm spending pretty much all I get on loot to repair my weapons and armor, and the deals I get for loot are just too low. Also, broken weapons can't be sold, and the repair cost is too high, too often you get a cool broken weapon that's actually worthless. I don't remember so much hustle to get money in the original trilogy - I got the buried in coins monolith ending before getting to the true ending.

As for performance on PC it's not so great for me, it's definitely CPU bottlenecked. 10850K + 3080Ti and it's difficult to get a consistent 60fps@1440p in busy areas especially in the hubs.