Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl review

Our VerdictJust like in the old days, performance issues and bugs don’t stop Stalker’s mad, wonderful heart from shining through.

Our Verdict

Just like in the old days, performance issues and bugs don’t stop Stalker’s mad, wonderful heart from shining through.

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Need to know

Expect to pay$60/£50

DeveloperGSC Game World

PublisherGSC Game World

Reviewed onRTX 4080, Ryzen 7 3700X, 32GB DDR4 RAM

Steam DeckUnsupported

LinkOfficial site

Check Amazon

Well, never trust a trailer. It might be shinier and it might have gamepad support, but Stalker 2 is still Stalker down to its bones, that unique and unreplicable mixture of FPS, survival horror, and immersive sim. Whether X-Ray or UE5, the game’s ambition still strains against the seams of its engine. It’s still filled with systems—factions, artifacts, anomalies, a world filled with people going about their business and the staccatothuk-thukof Eastern Bloc weaponry—that at times push the whole thing to breaking point and beyond it.

(Image credit: GSC Game World)

The player wields a pistol and artifact detector while looking at a strange stone pyre over a blood-red pond.

Putting Stalker to the testPCG hardware guru Nick Evanson has been hard at work putting Stalker 2 through an exhausting battery of performance tests across all sorts of hardware configurations, including handheld PCs. You can find his fullStalker 2 performance analysis here.

Putting Stalker to the test

PCG hardware guru Nick Evanson has been hard at work putting Stalker 2 through an exhausting battery of performance tests across all sorts of hardware configurations, including handheld PCs. You can find his fullStalker 2 performance analysis here.

It’s excellent, and undoubtedly my personal game of the year, but here comes the caveat. I meant what I said: Stalker 2 is Stalker to the bone, and that means the bad stuff too. There were errors, crashes, progress-halting bugs and at-times hilarious glitches in animation and AI, plus minor stuttering that I just came to accept as the price of admission, even at 1440p on my 3700X, RTX 4080, and 32GB RAM-equipped machine. And though a meaty day-one patch has helped a lot, the game still feels rickety: a bit stuttery, with AI that still sometimes fails to distinguish between friend and foe, and so on.

Lord knows I can’t fault the devs—that the game exists at all despite its home country being invaded partway through development is a miracle—but it does mean the whole thing feels like it hasn’t quite set just yet. Do I love Stalker 2? Yes. Does Stalker 2 make itself easy to love? No. Or at least, not without the patches that GSC promises are in the pipeline.

Fire and forget

(Image credit: GSC Game World)

Faction leader Scar stares ominously into the camera, face illuminated by orange fire.

Down one apartment and rather annoyed about the whole thing, Skif ventures into the Zone to figure out just what the hell an artifact thinks it’s doing spawning in his flat, and soon finds himself entangled in a multi-layered plot pileup of factional warfare, personal vendettas, competing ideological visions, and sporadic gangland violence, with plenty of choices for you to make about who to side with along the way.

(Image credit: GSC Game World)

An unlucky stalker is pinned to wall by multiple spikes of rebar.

Stalker has always, quietly, had one of the stranger and more philosophical stories in the videogame narrative pantheon, and boy does Stalker 2 make good on that legacy. It doesn’t so much haveaplot as it has a series of small ones in sequence that all eventually add up, each taking you to some new part of the astonishingly massive Zone map, which encompasses, so far as I can tell, every location featured in previous games and then some, and which looks more beautiful than ever with all the whizzbang bells and whistles of 2024. Never before have videogames let us descend into cursed basements with lighting so atmospheric or so eerie.

Never before have videogames let us descend into cursed basements with lighting so atmospheric or so eerie

Exploration feels never-ending, as do the 2-kilometre sprints every time the game sets down a new quest marker that seems almost spitefully far away (fast travel requires you to speak to paid guides in population hubs, and they only go tootherhubs). Ah well, you’ll probably pick up some neat artifacts on the trip.

I enjoyed the tales-within-a-tale structure, for the most part, but it does have the discombobulating effect of making you feel multiple times like you are approaching the final showdown, the great denouement, the climax of climaxes, only for the game to turn around and pretty much say ‘and now, the rest of the story. Please turn your cassette to side B’. Its pacing gets fatiguing, particularly as you get into the true endgame but things still continue to go on. And on. And on.

(Image credit: GSC Game World)

A gravitational anomaly: concrete floats through the air over a ruined, spherical building.

The world at war

But you don’t really come to a Stalker game for its story. You come for its stories: the bizarre anecdotes that the game’s systems and “A-Life” AI can’t help but spit out, and Stalker 2 has those in spades. This is a bonafide clockwork world, and its NPCs—who to this day retain their utterly charming procgen names like “Gena Badass,” “Vanya Ampoule,” “Max Sleepy,” and so on—are just as much subject and victim to its whims as you are.

(Image credit: GSC Game World)

A stalker in a gas mask tells the player that bandits tortured him.

A conundrum. I stood, brow furrowed, rain pattering on my hardened military exoskeleton, pondering how best to resolve the situation. I could open fire, I could sneak through, I could search for some other means of ingress.

(Image credit: GSC Game World)

An emission viewed through a warehouse window, bathing the interior in red light.

But it’s also here, in the knotty systemic stuff like the faction system, that some of the worst bugs reared their head for me. Although I went to great lengths—including multiple extended bouts of mass murder—to communicate my dislike for the Ward, the game never quite processed that I had completely severed ties with them.

One of their main quests, loose and orphaned, appeared in my log and sat there abandoned right up to the ending. This confused things multiple times when I had an objective along the lines of ‘kill all these Ward guys.’ The enemies wouldn’t attack, and when I had finished the slightly disconcerting task of euthanising my foes like cows, the quest log wouldn’t update, leaving me stranded. To be fair, GSC’s day-one patch mostly fixed this. The quest was updated, but the Ward still refused to treat me like an enemy. Better, but not quite a clean bill of health.

(Image credit: GSC Game World)

Sunset over a huge poppy field.

The rough with the smooth

But as a Stalker die-hard even the bugs feel a bit like an old friend. It’s these idiosyncrasies—the quirky, unforgiving, systems-driven game design and, yes, even the jank, that I worried GSC might be tempted to sacrifice in the leap to whatever ‘AAA’ means.

More fool me. The devs have been resolute in refusing to sand down any of the series' rough edges for a new audience of potentially more casual players. Stalker 2 does not hold your hand and the Zone does not care about you. This is a game where the first mutant you fight is completely invisible, and that won’t hesitate to chuck its strongest enemies at you if you happen to make a wrong turn early on. Even if you escape, you spent precious resources on staying alive and your equipment probably got chewed up in the tussle; they’ll get you next time.

(Image credit: GSC Game World)

Looking out at the Zone through the window of a derelict building, discarded children’s toys litter the sill.

It’s almost uncanny to play something with such unsentimental, old-school design sensibilities that looks as good and feels as modern as Stalker 2 does, and it’s a welcome return for one of PC gaming’s greatest and most eccentric series. Yes, there are bugs aplenty, so maybe give it a little while before you dive in, and yes, the abrasive mechanics might put some people off. But it’s great to be back in the Zone after over a decade away, and to find that it hasn’t sacrificed the things that made it so special all those years ago.

Stalker 2: Price Comparison

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The Verdict83Read our review policyStalker 2Just like in the old days, performance issues and bugs don’t stop Stalker’s mad, wonderful heart from shining through.

The Verdict

83Read our review policyStalker 2Just like in the old days, performance issues and bugs don’t stop Stalker’s mad, wonderful heart from shining through.

83Read our review policy

Stalker 2Just like in the old days, performance issues and bugs don’t stop Stalker’s mad, wonderful heart from shining through.

Stalker 2

Just like in the old days, performance issues and bugs don’t stop Stalker’s mad, wonderful heart from shining through.

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Our Verdict#

Fire and forget#

The world at war#

The rough with the smooth#

Our Verdict

Fire and forget

The world at war

The rough with the smooth