S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl Review

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is an open-world first-person shooter RPG, a wide-ranging genre mashup liberally sprinkled with horror and science fantasy as well. It promises immersion few other games can achieve but requires extreme amounts of player patience and investment. I’ve been very romantic about this series since Oblivion Lost was doing the rounds in early 2000s PC gaming magazines. It eventually morphed into 2007’s Shadow of Chornobyl and its two follow-ups, the protagonists and locations of which feature heavily here. This sequel to GSC Game World’s original trilogy manages to cram the entire geography of all three original titles into a seamless space with a whopping 40-hour-plus critical path questline. As new and old audiences acclimate to roleplaying a hard-pressed scavenger in a toxic waste zone, it might be surprising to know that there is little fun or joy within Heart of Chornobyl. It’s a cruel, gruelling experience, both intentionally and unintentionally. Yet when its plates are properly spinning, it hints at one day becoming a journey like few others in modern video games.

Here’s the skinny. Player character Skiv is drawn to the Zone, a Ukrainian region where a fictional second Chornobyl nuclear disaster has occurred. Now shrouded in myth and paranormal phenomena, the Zone has lured Skiv by spawning an “artifact” in his living room, destroying his house. Artifacts, granting special powers, are commonly known to have never before appeared outside the Zone, adding intrigue to Skiv’s excursion. This misfortune sees him trudge every corner of the hazardous locale and into the presence of all the series’ important characters. This game spends little time coherently recapping past events, so I highly recommend checking out some YouTube primers. I cannot imagine what uninitiated players will take away from this grand story that is deeply in conversation with the original three games and lore, but it does help that Skiv is inquisitive and never in the know. Thankfully, every line of dialogue is fully voiced, the conversation systems have been smartly modernised to ensure flow, and the English acting has been levelled up. It won’t win awards, but it is consistently entertaining, with the worst deliveries of its all-male cast channelling the straining hamminess of Tommy Wiseau in The Room. 

The slav squats are territorial this time

All the stalker wisdom from previous games is assumed knowledge here, and I felt very welcomed back right from the moment Skiv was dropped at the Zone’s towering concrete border. When a bloodsucker was thrown at me 15 minutes later, I instinctively knew to leg it. I was wary of the temptation of loot and knew to scrutinise every single acquisition (ammo included). And most importantly, to never trust a soul in the Zone. I was so ready to play the bandit scavenger role once again.

As personally grateful as I am for GSC Game World to have delivered on this long-awaited follow-up despite fighting a war back home, I am saddened by the first draft state of it all. Once you look past the attractive Unreal 5 surface and spend enough time navigating S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s various systems, you begin to realise that every single one of them is noticeably borked to some degree. Before the first week of bug fixes, I had issues with everything from the main menus to the sound, graphics, gunplay, voice acting, quests, and rewards. If you can imagine an unintended video game anomaly (a bug, or glitch), S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. could replicate it on release. Even after these fixes, the atmosphere and immersion of this game remain dependent on various systems that still don’t quite manage to reliably function correctly in tandem.

In the odd moments where the visuals are stable, this isolated slice of contemporary eco-fantasy tourism is breathtaking in its vast scale and detail.

The worst of these is the enemy AI. At the time of publication, enemy stalkers will see you in pitch-black darkness and through surfaces on any axis. This is so bad it renders the new stealth mechanics inert. Enemy stalkers will spawn directly in front of you during critical path firefights, killing the tension of the otherwise interesting combat. During exploration, they will announce their entry into the game world right behind you as you interact with an important object, not even pretending to have stumbled upon you dynamically. Friendlies will randomly, irrevocably turn on you without warning, as their mates, your pals, idly look on. In dynamic open-world RPGs, AI hijinks are considered an expected part of the experience. But with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, I finished the game with the bitter feeling that this AI doesn’t hold a light to the 2007 original, nor is it ever compelling outside of tightly scripted main missions. I’m not suggesting Heart of Chornobyl has buggy or malfunctioning AI, rather it became apparent to me that it is basic and unengaging on a fundamental level.

Poorly tuned low-lighting means firefights in darkness are blind firing crapshoots for the player

Mutants fare worse. All have one specific attack pattern that usually ceases to function once the player climbs on top of something. Anything higher than knee level is a bullet sponge, though this is notably less of an issue at the time of writing. Rather, the mutants are a big part of the game’s scare factor that suffers rapidly diminishing returns. Sadly, there are very few new additions to the monster roster, none worthy of note. The most fearsome to return such as the devastating bloodsuckers and mind-bending controllers are flung at the player too often and in uninteresting ways, soon proving predictable and effortlessly easy to exploit. 

But the Zone is such a large world, visually rich despite its dilapidated backdrops. As you explore, you will meet new and established factions of stalkers and be made to feel as if you affect these people. This illusion extends to the shifting power dynamics, with critical locations changing ownership over time and others refusing you welcome access. Players will get lost among the sublime rewilding around Chornobyl, seeing all the familiar old locations further giving way to the vibrant or burnt foliage of the physics-defying zone. In the odd moments where the visuals are stable, this isolated slice of contemporary eco-fantasy tourism is breathtaking in its vast scale and detail. Weather systems continue to inspire awe, with frightening lightning striking ahead of your immediate path once or twice. Even the high-stakes gunplay where every bullet counts is improved by the new weapons’ ballistics, sound design, and satisfying headshot crunch.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 throws out some sublime, vivid biomes

And for every one of those praise points that iterates on what folks have loved about this series, there will inevitably be some unintended compromise, persistent issue, or misjudged balancing decision that causes unnecessary friction. Undoubtedly there is further work to be done by the developers, who have made a game of epic scope, but where the reward of immersion and exploration is being undone by player troubleshooting. For a title this complex, bug fixes won’t address the abundant technical issues here anytime soon. With the current state of the game, for both your mental health and the integrity of the art, I advise playing on the lowest difficulty. I found the standard difficulty meant I often could not tell if my over 100 deaths were due to the sky-high challenge, an unfathomable anomaly of the Zone, or yet another unfathomable anomaly of the Zone’s code. 

Final Thoughts

A general lack of polish and quality assurance has become a somewhat endearing shortcoming of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. experience. We joked about it and expected it for the sequel, especially given the endurance of a developer currently facing tragedy at home. GSC Game World’s extraordinary ambition in delivering this long-awaited follow-up is buoyed by some frankly impressive world-building and narrative developments that fully commit. The extraordinary scale of this world, the generally satisfying gunplay, and the ambitious story are always contending with the player’s growing anticipation that their experience is about to break down at any moment. The magic circle that is so crucial to the successful immersiveness of this series is, currently, fractured by the extent to which the many promising aspects of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 simply don’t reliably function together.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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