“S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl” review – ghosts of the past

As paradoxical as it may sound, the main advantage and, at the same time, disadvantage of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is that it is “the same S.T.A.L.K.E.R.”. No miracle happened: the game has both visual bugs and errors in the tasks, which sometimes makes it impossible to complete them. It’s important to note here that I got access to the game a week ago, and most likely most of the particularly critical bugs will be fixed in the first day’s update. So I’m not going to focus on this, even though I thought several times that I had broken the game to the point where it would be impossible to go any further. But what I will focus on is the basic game principles, which have hardly changed since the previous part.

Day in the Zone

Every stalker knows that weapons won’t repair themselves, and you need to live on something, so we decided to go on a small expedition: from Malachite through the Red Forest, and then to the Yaniv station, which is not far away. My goal is artifacts. I run through the familiar spots and decide to check out the equipment cemetery nearby, and then a small building across the road catches my attention. I decide to check it out, because it’s on the way anyway, and it won’t hurt to replenish my supplies. In addition to the usual bandages and vodka, I find the entrance to an underground mine. I go down, and from the darkness I hear the squeaking of stew. A grenade quickly solves the problem. There’s a stalker’s corpse in the corner. I take off his PDA… ah, it’s clear: his partner turned into a zombie, but he couldn’t shoot him. It’s tragic, but the Zone is like that, it doesn’t forgive.

I move on, and here comes my partner. I quickly put him out of his misery and climb up on the other side of the mine. Immediately, the snorks attack. They are not so scary when they are alone, but a lone snork is a rare occurrence. I deal with them, and the cemetery of equipment is within reach. Immediately I hear a piercing roar: bloodsuckers! I’m lucky that a barbed wire fence separates me from them. I start shooting at the sound and the ghostly silhouette, kill one, and a stalker patrol joins me and helps me finish off the other.

The cemetery of equipment is greeted by the crackling of a Geiger counter. The metal covered with radioactive dust retains traces of the disaster for a long time, so it’s not safe to go to such places without protection. I move towards the helicopters and immediately take out the detector. Firstly, I see the anomalies, and secondly, maybe I’ll get lucky and find an artifact. Almost immediately, I find the Flytrap, which is good.

Then the road goes past the Yantar plant. It’s a huge building, I can imagine what it looked like before the disaster. But I don’t have time to look at it, I have to be on the lookout. In the factory yard, I quickly make my way between the “fryers,” grab another artifact, the Flashlight, and run for the exit.

I keep heading north, but out of the corner of my eye I notice a bunker near the plant. Well, they say that curiosity is the way to the future, so I decide to look inside. I approach and immediately feel a psi influence: the controller! I quickly start looking for it, but I don’t need to – it gives away its location. The controller is a very dangerous mutant, especially when surrounded by those he controls. However, this time I was lucky, and we found ourselves face to face with him.

After a short fight, I finally enter the bunker, where I am greeted by a dozen zombies. “Here comes the controller’s entourage,” I think to myself, methodically making shots at the heads of the former stalkers. I take the ammunition from the corpses and move on.

Finally, the Red Forest! To my right is a bandit camp that had to be cleared out a few days ago. I move on along the railroad tracks, the Geiger counter crackling happily. Suddenly I hear a deafening roar, like a roaring wind. “Vortex!” And what a size it is! Holding the detector in my hands, I cautiously approach it to check for the artifact, and we’ll decide how to get it out later. This time it’s empty.

I find the dead body of Kiri Atricalo. I take his supplies and weapons from him – he won’t need them anymore. The detector alerts me to another artifact in a nearby railroad car. The only thing that is a bit alarming is the sound coming from it. My curiosity and thirst for profit get the better of me again, and jumping over the puddle of toxic waste, I quickly grab the artifact and jump back out just as quickly. I don’t know where that sound came from, but I didn’t notice anything else but a cloud of toxic fumes.

Here comes the Yaniv station. I’m selling everything I collected on the way. Forty thousand! Not bad for such a race. How much did you say the repair would cost? A hundred thousand?! Thank you, I’ll have a look.

Welcome back, stalker!

The zone in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 greets the player with an updated appearance and an epic storyline. The contrast with the previous games is striking. While in The Call of Pripyat you literally appeared in the middle of the field without any instructions, the sequel leads you by the hand for the first hour, establishing intrigue and identifying future enemies and allies.

The first settlement welcomes the player with bread, a glass, and a story. Stalkers and locals hand out tasks and give advice.

However, just as quickly, the game literally and figuratively goes off the rails, throwing new characters and events at you, sending you from one end of the map to the other. To be honest, I tried to run through the main story campaign before writing the review, but the game doesn’t work at this pace at all.

Time and again I asked myself the question: “How did we end up at this point in history?” Here you are talking to a representative of one of the factions, and a few minutes later you are already conducting a sabotage for the other. And between these events, there is not a single line that would somehow explain what is happening on the screen. It feels like the plot of The Heart of Chornobyl is a series of fan stories, the only link between which is Skif, the game’s protagonist.

And that’s not to mention the fact that the game constantly throws the player around the map, which is especially acute in the second half of the game. Keep in mind that the Zone in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is huge, and you get to march for several kilometers across fields with nothing on them or across terrain you’ve already explored before.

The culmination of this running around was when I had to talk to a character I had talked to on the radio many times before, only to have him send me back the way I came.

Of course, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. wouldn’t be S.T.A.L.K.E.R. if the plot was the main focus, and the Zone looks too attractive not to explore. But there are nuances here as well. Some locations are tied to the progression of the main plot, and before you can get somewhere, you need to complete tasks that can and will drive you back and forth through familiar places. The lack of balance between the plot and the exploration of the world is the first problem with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, which is exacerbated by the so-called “S.T.A.L.K.E.R. formula”.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. formula

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games have never fit into a clear genre framework. They are not traditional horror games, and the survival elements in them are too simplified to be called representatives of the respective genre. Nor can they be called first-person shooters or open-world role-playing games.

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. formula is a unique combination of elements from different genres, and at certain moments of the game, one of them comes to the fore. When the player descends into another dark bunker, the game takes on a horror atmosphere, and in tasks where you need to shoot dozens of enemies, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. turns into a classic first-person shooter.

That is, a player plays not one but several games at the same time. Problems arise only when peripheral mechanics drag the main genre down at some point.

The first-person shooter is hampered by constant inventory management and the need to search every enemy. This is especially acute in the main storyline, where the game does not shy away from throwing dozens of enemies at the player, who must first be killed, then searched for their bodies, and then preferably eat something else. It’s somewhat reminiscent of the Witcher, who calmly ate loaves of bread to restore his health during battles with enemies. Digging through your backpack doesn’t pause the game, by the way.

Exploring the open world, although very exciting, is limited by stamina and the distance between points on the map. In The Call of Pripyat, this was not so much of a problem, because you could always quickly return to the nearest camp for repairs and resupply. In The Heart of Chornobyl, not only are the settlements quite far from each other, but the game constantly throws up a pig in the form of the inaccessibility of a certain one due to the vicissitudes of the plot. And the further you go, the more acutely these distances are felt.

And there will always be a need to return to the merchant and technician, because, as before, the size of the inventory is limited, and weapons and armor fail faster than the player can earn credits.

This is not to mention the fact that you don’t have any guidelines at all on where to go next and which places are worth exploring in the first place. Of course, you can always visually estimate where the anomaly or some interesting place is on the map. However, why not add a few lines like “Did you hear how Syava Borzy went to the farm near the Jupiter plant and died in an anomaly?” to the idiots who rub shoulders with the bar in every stalker settlement, so that the character marks this place on the map as interesting? There’s no need to go to extremes like dozens of points of interest, as in the latest iterations of Assassin’s Creed, but S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 doesn’t focus the player’s attention in any way. You either know interesting places or spend hours searching for them.

And the horror is not as scary as it used to be. What player would be afraid of a bloodsucker that they’ve killed dozens, if not hundreds of times before? By the way, at some point I stopped paying attention to mutants altogether, except when a fight with them is impossible to avoid. There is no reward for killing a mutant, and ammunition here costs a fortune to every merchant.

And by the way, who taught blind dogs to open doors?

“Looking for shelter”

As before, the Zone lives its own life, trying to pretend that the player in it is just another stalker who will die in the first anomaly. Gangs fight for bribes, patrols encounter bandits and mutants, anomalies pulse, burn, and spin into a vortex.

However, over time, the illusion cracks.

The first thing I noticed was that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 literally creates enemies out of thin air. I stopped counting the number of times when characters appeared behind me in the middle of an open field and a firefight started.

Once I cleared a tunnel of bandits. After making sure that all the enemies were dead and that I had collected all the provisions and ammunition, I headed for the exit only to be shot in the back a few seconds later. And yes, I checked – these were new enemies, not resurgent zombies or another anomaly of the Zone.

At the same time, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 does not generate characters unless you have a corresponding task. While exploring the map and collecting bribes, I came across another factory, in which, among the usual surroundings, there was a room with an imitation throne on the wall. There was no one in the factory, not even mutants. “Someone must have left the area recently,” I thought, and went about my business. Only to return here an hour later with an assignment and discover that the plant was the base of a local gang, and their leader was sitting on the aforementioned throne.

Of course, every game generates enemies and characters where the player is. However, time and time again I had the feeling that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was just throwing them at my head, which only spoiled the atmosphere and immersion in the wonderful world of the Zone.

“Hey, man, you want to hear a joke?”

От якби Зона була б необжитим місцем без сталкерів, то це, безсумнівно, був би рай на землі.

The locations, both familiar and new, look amazing. The developers claim that everything you see in the game is made by hand, and it is true. Even an ordinary trash can in the middle of the field looks like the most perfect trash can in games. Yes, some game objects are repeated, but you don’t notice any outright cloning.

It’s fun to explore the familiar locations from the previous games and see how they’ve changed over the past fifteen years. Fans of the series will definitely be delighted.

The only thing that was a bit of a letdown was the indoor lighting: even in sunny weather, there is not enough diffused light, so it often seems too dark inside. I don’t recommend turning off the flashlight.

However, this is more than compensated for by being outside. I don’t know if the screenshots convey the atmosphere, but the visuals combined with the sounds, especially in bad weather, will definitely impress you. The new anomalies will also be eye-catching, but we’ll do without spoilers here.

Accordingly, the best thing about the game is adventures like the one at the beginning of this review, when you invent your own entertainment and explore the Zone. Yes, most of the time you come across some junk, but it’s not uncommon for the game to reward you for your wit and effort, and most of all for your patience. And if you didn’t have to be distracted by talking to local alcoholics and running around the map in search of ghosts of the past, it would be a perfect artifact hunting simulator. Or for mutants. Whatever you prefer.

And what did you get?

The review turned out to be too emotional, perhaps because the game was developed by a Ukrainian studio, and I really wanted them to succeed. Every project manager knows that the first ninety percent of a project takes ninety percent of the time to complete, and the last ten percent takes the same amount of time. And this is very evident in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: we didn’t look after something, we didn’t test it, we just didn’t have enough time to do it better. My criticism is just a desire for the game to be successful and admired. Yes, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 will undoubtedly get its audience, and updates and modifications by fans will fix the biggest issues.

But even without regard to the technical part. Fifteen years have passed since the release of The Call of Pripyat, but for GSC Game World, they seem to have never existed. Once again, we have a game that sometimes drags itself down and requires the player to play only as the developers intended. And while this is not a bad thing, and I’m sure there are thousands of people who expected this, I also think that some flexibility would have been nice.

The final score you see is for the average modern player unfamiliar with the series. Fans of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. who wanted to get almost the same game with new graphics can easily add 2 more points, I think they will be satisfied.

We look forward to updates and user modifications.

Instead of an epilogue

I’ll leave my configuration here just in case: Intel i5 14600K, 32Gb RAM, GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super, Samsung 980 PRO 1 TB SSD. I played in 1440p. All graphics settings are maximized, I just changed the scaling method and enabled DLSS automatic frame generation.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 keeps its 120 frames per second, there are occasional freezes and once it started to freeze after I adjusted the sound settings, but restarting the game fixed it.

There were three crashes during the whole time, but this is normal for the beta version of the game that journalists received.

As for the question “Will S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 run on my PC?” I can recommend checking out other games on Unreal Engine, the result will be more or less similar.

I decided not to write about the weapons, because they are there and they shoot. In fact, the shooting is very well done, and you can feel every shot, but you could also understand this from the videos before the game’s release. The only thing is that I was not able to test all types of weapons, because you can’t take many units with you, and it is financially expensive to change weapons often. There are not enough credits if you don’t dust the entire map.

Oh, and I really miss the mini-map. You have to constantly take out your PDA to check if you’re moving in the right direction. It’s very inconvenient. And the mini-map showed the number of enemies at once, which might have been useful.

And I would like to emphasize once again that some of the problems I encountered, especially those related to tasks, may have already been or will be fixed. We have sent a request to GSC regarding some issues in the game, but I don’t think we will get a response in the near future.