GSC Game World
The release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 logically created a huge buzz around the world, without exaggeration. Of course, the project, long-awaited by millions of players, was most popular in Ukraine. However, this classic review will focus on the game itself. ITC.ua has already had material about the technical state of the game. I will also touch on this issue and share my own experience, as well as tell you how to play «S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl» not only on PC but also on the Xbox Series S console.
Content
It’s been 15 years since the previous game, but S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl takes place shortly after the story of the first trilogy. We play as a stalker named Scythian, whose house on the Big Earth was destroyed by an unusual artifact. Searching for the causes of this event, and with the help of a scientist familiar to everyone, the protagonist makes his way into the Zone to recharge the artifact. However, many events force the Scythian to change his plans and plunge into the local world.
The story and plot of «S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl» have definitely become more player-friendly. And although we get much more information chewed out than in the old games, it’s still not enough for modern AAA projects. Mostly it happens through dialogs with NPCs, additional questions, and found PDAs with recordings or audio files. But we’re not playing with toys here, so you can count on half an hour of something like an introduction and familiarization with the Zone. But then you are welcome to figure it out for yourself. It’s good that we’re not starting in the middle of the field, but we’re making progress.
The game’s scriptwriters hardly deviated from the rigid framework of the previous installments, as we have familiar realism, simple but often interesting tasks, the most direct dialogues, riddles, mysteries, conspiracies, and confrontations.
However, the developers were lying when they said that «S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl» is designed for new players. Because they will have the hardest time here. The fact is that the game hardly explains the events from the previous parts, but they constantly pop up in the plot, they are mentioned, as well as characters, places, etc. Yes, of course, you can ask NPCs additional questions and expand the game’s universe for yourself by finding out events from the past. But no one directly chews on previous events, which is very strange for a modern AAA game, especially with such baggage.
The main plot has never been a strong point of the series and, unfortunately, nothing has been done about it here. Yes, it’s interesting to go through it, but the story develops unevenly and in certain jerks, and sometimes there are more interesting things to do in the Zone.
However, the guy’s Scythian is a good one. The player will not be able to play the role of a stalker for him, at least not in the storyline because this is not an RPG. Of course, it’s up to the gamer to decide whether to help a stalker stuck in the middle of an anomaly field or pass by, to destroy the bandits or help her, etc.. But in the global story, we’re mostly playing a certain story template created by the developers with several endings. The plot partially breaks the Scythian for itself, but the hero still tries to fight the Zone and its habits, tries to do the right thing, but the cruel reality usually wins.
The zone is still unfriendly to the player, as are its population and key characters. Only a small proportion of the locals will treat the stalker hero with understanding and friendship. The majority will want to rob, bribe, or force them to work for them. Or the player will use deception and tricks to deal with the enemy group and then try to kill them. Or just kill and be done with it. And these are just people. And there are also many different mutants, old and new, but always dangerous. And where can you go without various anomalies with artifacts hidden in them.
And while there is no need to look for mutants or people who are constantly trying to kill the player because they always find the gamer themselves, even in very unusual places, searching for artifacts, especially valuable ones, requires time, and often nerves. Not everyone likes this activity, but it’s good that in the story, and through certain side quests, as well as through their curiosity, the player can get a good set of artifacts without going into a deadly anomaly.
As you may have guessed, the main part of the gameplay of «S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl» is exploring the Zone. We have 15 locations that make up 30 square kilometers of the Zone. It is quite difficult to move between some parts, while others are simply conditionally divided by names. However, you will always have to move here on your own. There are guides, but only in some locations, and their services will not be cheap at first.
«Vacuuming» Zone — is probably one of the favorite activities of any virtual stalker. And this game is very suitable for this. Because the developers have scattered a lot of entourage and atmospheric places, just familiar, painfully familiar and new locations that will take your breath away on a large but relatively compact map for an open world. Here you will find service stations, plants, factories, villages, secret laboratories, gas stations, garages, junkyards, and more. And everything is abandoned, neglected, rusted, and mutilated by time and the Zone itself. In other words, everything is just right to create the right mood.
In all of these places, gangs of criminals or stalkers, military units, mutants, and anomalies are waiting for the player. And of course, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of caches with bribes scattered around the map that you want to explore and find out what’s in them.
Often you have to climb on some roof, pipes, or literally into a mutant’s lair to get to them, and before that, you have to figure out how to do it. But often in such places there are mediocre «treasures» hidden in the form of a bottle of vodka «Kozak», bread, sausage, and some ammunition. And sometimes it happens that you accidentally come across a backpack in the corner, and there’s a whole treasure — a weapon, or several improvements for it, a lot of ammo, and even an artifact. This is the zone.
You can take all this good stuff to traders or hide it in your own vault until better times. The latter looks like an ordinary metal chest and appears in every large settlement or at a base near a trader. They are often very colorful and different, but they are far from Sidorovych’s. Traders have certain things and different prices for both selling and buying. For example, sometimes it’s better to go further and give a bribe to another NPC because he will give you more than going to your neighbor. But if you help this merchant and complete his task, the attitude towards you will change for the better, as will the prices.
To prevent the stalker from being tempted and unable to carry all the treasures of the Zone at once, the developers have created an endurance mechanic and limited the amount of weight you can carry. Depending on the chosen clothes and their upgrades, the figure can be different, sometimes more, sometimes less, but there are always restrictions, and the available kilograms are always low.
The more loaded a player is, the slower he can run and the faster the available endurance scale runs out. It will also recover more slowly. Therefore, in order to avoid walking 500 meters on the map for 10 minutes, the weight of the backpack should not go beyond the red zone. Of course, you can drink an energy drink and immediately replenish it, but with an overload, it makes little sense.
That’s why it’s important to always choose your stalker gear carefully and not to take any extra gear and leave it in a cache. Food and bottles of vodka and water weigh a lot, which is logical. Ammunition and weapons also weigh a lot. It’s better to take 2-3 types of weapons and a lot of ammunition with you because you’ll always need it. This is the main weight. And the rest of the weight should be taken up to the green or yellow limit with first aid kits, bandages, and some food. Because the latter is always plentiful everywhere, so often a hungry stalker can eat and drink what he finds from dead bandits, or in a cache in an abandoned house, or just on the table during a mission.
It’s important to understand that stamina affects not only this, but literally all physical actions of the character. It’s used when they swing a knife or jump. That’s why you won’t be able to jump from roof to roof like a madman or twirl a knife like in American action movies – just a few jumps and you need to rest, and the character is breathing heavily. Realism as it is.
An important element of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is the fight with the enemies. This part is as close as possible to the previous games in the series, that is, shooting in the new «Stalker» is difficult at first, and you need to get used to it. Weapons are guided, they are different and behave differently, they jam if they are damaged, and so on. The animation of the weapon retrieval is cool, and each pistol, shotgun, sniper rifle, or assault rifle has its animation. If it’s a short rifle, it’s relatively quick and easy to get it out. And if it’s a long gun, you can see how Scythian takes it off his shoulder, turns it over, and only then picks it up. It’s cool and realistic, but it can be annoying if you have to change weapons during a fight because you’re out of ammo.
Despite all these nuances and peculiarities, shooting in «S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl» is very cool and fun. The shooter mechanic was, of course, an important part of the game, but in the previous installments I, personally, didn’t enjoy it as much as I did here.
Everything shoots in its own way, with a certain recoil or peculiarity, with its sound, etc. Each weapon is painted in detail, it has chips, scratches, defects. It’s wet, it jams when it rains, and the hero pulls out a cartridge and reloads it with a separate animation for each weapon.
The battles in «S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl» are difficult not only because of the conditional realism of the combat system. The enemies themselves also affect this. Although the AI Life 2.0 system was not as innovative as we were told in trailers and interviews, enemies often shoot as well as the player, which means they often hit, so bleeding and low health are constant companions of the stalker.
I liked the effects of grenades. If it doesn’t explode very close, it doesn’t hurt, but it mutes, which has its own animation, and the stalker loses concentration for a while, can’t move, etc.
As for the intelligence of enemies and the aforementioned AI Life 2.0, I expected more, but it turned out to be just fine. Yes, sometimes enemies are stupid and go for the breach, but very often they still come from different directions, hide, ask for cover, shout cool phrases, etc.
The drawback here, in my opinion, is not the intelligence of the enemy during fights, but the artificiality of creating life around the player. You pass a building, there’s no one there, and you move on. And then, literally two seconds later, three bandits who were definitely not there start shooting you in the back. That is, the game just literally «pulled them out of thin air», drew them and set them on the player. There were many such moments.
I’m glad that «S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl» gives the player a choice to start the battle or avoid it. Or minimize it. For example, you can go straight through, killing everything in your path, or enter through a gap found somewhere on the side, quietly kill the guards with a silenced pistol and complete the task. Or you can leave no one behind, practicing pure stealth. However, the latter will be the most difficult because enemies can hear very well, and sometimes it seems that «can feel» you even through the wall. Although, if you think about it, there is no glass on the windows, and the player just walks without hiding, stepping on garbage, making noise, etc. Perhaps this is very realistic.
As for the battles with mutants, they turned out to be no less difficult for me than they used to be, but now I’m no longer afraid of a bloodsucker or a controller. I think it’s because I’ve grown up, and we’ve had a lot to be afraid of in the real world over the years, so the virtual monster doesn’t give me the shivers it used to. But they made mutants cool, and it’s hard to fight them. And sometimes it’s easier to take down a big mutant than a bunch of little guys who just surround you and literally devour you.
You probably already know without me that the biggest problem with «S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl» — optimization. And in my opinion, this is great because it can be fixed, and it will be done. However, I don’t understand how developers could fall into the same trap as they did 15 years ago.
I still remember how my friends’ and acquaintances’ computers were burning up in 2007 when «S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chornobyl» was released, even though the same systems were running Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Mass Effect, or Need For Speed Most Wanted just fine. I remember how my first computer, which I got in 2009, burned up from the same game from two years ago, not to mention «Clear Sky» or «Call of Pripyat».
After 15 years, we have Nvidia DLSS, thank the gods, because without this and similar technologies, even modern gaming monsters would have a hard time. I was playing the game on a 90,000 UAH laptop (Intel Core i-7 12650H, 4070 Laptop GPU, 16 GB DDR5), which sometimes coughed up «S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl».
I played on a Full-HD monitor, on high graphics settings with DLSS enabled for quality, and mostly had 100-120 frames per second. But the key word here is «mostly». Because sometimes the fps dropped to 80-90, and sometimes to 30-40. Hello, Zalissia. But the main problem is constant freezes. It was because of them that the game experience was often unpleasant. You’re running a mission, you have 120 fps, and everything around you is incredibly beautiful. But then something goes wrong, something goes wrong. And you look at the meter, and it says 60-80-120-40-30-80-110 fps.
The fun with a significant drop in frames also begins at bases or in settlements, where my counter often dropped to 25-35 frames per second. Also, the fps drops significantly when a storm starts. It’s a very spectacular phenomenon when the wind blows, lightning strikes, the wind is humming, leaves rustle and fly, debris on the roadside, etc. But at the same time, in the same place, the frame rate in sunny weather and in a storm can be 40-50 fps lower, and there are also freezes.
Despite all this, the game looks great, of course, as far as it goes. Yes, there are some problems with the animation of NPC faces, a little bit of a clumsy hero shadow, etc. But in general, the project looks good, in my opinion. However, not everyone can see it in all its glory yet, not even those with powerful systems.
I also played «S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl» on Xbox Series S. After that, I think the main problem with the new game is that it was released on PC, not consoles. Because it was much more comfortable to play on this small, silent, and cheap console than on an expensive gaming laptop. You don’t have to adjust anything, tweak settings, download optimization mods from Nexus Mod, etc. You just turn it on and play. Yes, it’s 30 frames, but for console players, this is not a problem at all, and the main thing here is C — fps stability. See examples of screenshots from the Xbox Series S below.
No PC for 13-15,000 hryvnias, which is the price of this console, will give you a similar gaming experience. Yes, the graphics are not the best, you can see textures, noise, etc. But if you play on a large 4K TV and lie two meters away from it, the picture is good, there are no lags or freezes, everything is just fine. And if you still want a better picture, there is the Xbox Series X with two options for running the game at 30 and 60 frames. The consoles also support a keyboard, so they are generally ideal for those who want to play «S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl» without nerves right now.
There were no critical bugs or errors during the passage at all. The game never crashed, but a few times dead enemies got stuck in the ground at strange angles. That’s all. I should also note that the game is very dark, especially in the rooms. Because of this, I never turned off the flashlight and I don’t advise you to do so. This is probably due to the fact that the developers wanted to create a certain gloomy atmosphere of the Zone. They definitely managed to do it, but still overdid it a bit.
So we are waiting for patches and watching the developers gradually bring the game to the «candy» state. Would you like it to be done before the release? Of course, yes. But we have what we have. The main thing is that it is not critical, that it is fixed, and the game itself is incredible.
The atmosphere of «S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl» covers almost all the above-mentioned optimization issues. Literally from the first frames, from the first steps in the Zone, the game chills you to the bone, makes your skin crawl and makes you remember the times when everything was better and the grass was greener.
I would also like to note that GSC GameWorld managed to bring the game out of the post-Soviet era. Of course, this aesthetic is present here and has an important visual component. But now we can see that the Zone is not in some conventional post-Soviet country, but in Ukraine.
The developers have filled the new «Stalker» with Ukrainian culture, decorative elements, references to the current war, important little things and interesting details. There’s a burning Russian T-90 tank over there, and we pass by an incredibly beautiful bus stop with images of a kobzar. There is a well-known pack of yellow and blue matches on the table, and most importantly, everyone and everything speaks Ukrainian.
It’s an incredible experience to have a full-fledged Ukrainian language in the game. It literally permeates every detail of the game, whether it’s inventory, a conversation between two bandits, or a radio broadcast. The latter is something incredible because the radio plays wonderful and different Ukrainian music, both familiar and unfamiliar.