Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl review – An imperfect return to The Zone

Fifteen years on from the last instalment, Stalker: Call of Pripyat; here we are again.

So, how does Stalker 2 compare? Watch our video review above, or keep on reading, to find out!

Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl is a game I sorely want to love without the burden of baggage. I grew up playing those originals, but they were games I learned to truly appreciate over the years as the modding community helped patch them up. I suspect that may be the case here too.

As a fan of those older games and modding-galore-bug-addled Bethesda romps, I have a very high tolerance for what we in the biz may refer to as ‘jank’, but Stalker 2 is quite different from its predecessors which makes it a harder pill to swallow.

A lot of the original games’ storytelling came from written text or basic cutscenes, but everything about them felt a little rough around the edges. Stalker 2 in contrast is a very cinematic game with some incredible performances, but it doesn’t quite nail the landing when I am having a conversation about the mysteries of the Zone with a Walkman and a floating pair of headphones while the character is standing some metres away.

It’s a real shame, as protagonist Skif, a man who the Zone has reached out and found, is someone I am deeply rooting for and my time with the hands-on preview was a far smoother affair.

In our preview video, I made a point of highlighting just how tumultuous the development of Stalker 2 has been for GSC Game World – I cannot fathom making a game in such circumstances. I can't empathise with the developers enough, but Stalker 2 has unfortunately not come out unscathed.

GSC Game World has taken the recipe and ingredients of those older games, the ones that made them great and updated them where necessary, but like those games did, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl simply needs more time in the oven.

There is a truly great game underneath, and I found myself enjoying it more and more as I went along. It is intrinsically and unmistakably Stalker.

As a long-time fan, it was surprisingly disorientating. The mechanics and gameplay are essentially the same, but the world is now fully open-world and at times, quite beautiful thanks to being powered by Unreal Engine 5 – though this is not without its drawbacks either.

Revisiting locations from the originals is a bizarre experience, as is meeting and interacting with characters you may have come across in them too. This is all done in a way that doesn’t feel cheap or just for the sake of fan service either. They are introduced in a manner that makes sense. Skif is on his way to becoming a legend of the Zone himself, so it makes sense he would brush shoulders with those who came before him too.

Hunting for artefacts is still as much of a joy as it was back in 2007 and the relief of surviving it all and returning to safety is palpable.

Gunfights too are more intense than ever, with AI taking cover, being liberal with grenade tosses and pushing forward to flush you out.

Weapons sound punchy and hefty, and controlling them requires skill. Your guns will wear down too, and there’s nothing quite like a gun jamming to get your heart rate up as a bloodsucker mutant is trying to tear your face off.

The audio design is absolutely superb. The Zone groans and creaks as it protests your very presence. Emissions crash and thunder. Mutants roar. Anomalies sound as otherworldly as they look.

I briefly touched upon it earlier, but Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl is full of wonderful characters I deeply care for and those I loathe (in a good way). The Ukrainian voice acting is superb, but some of the magic is lost in the English dub.

There is a certain fatalism found amongst the inhabitants of the Zone. It’s a hard thing to convey in writing. Ukrainians as a people have endured much over the centuries, be it gruelling life under the Tsars, the Holodomor, Nazi occupation and extermination, the Chornobyl disaster, Soviet rule or the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Untold millions have suffered and died. Many of those who lived through those times are still with us, with the effects of those events still felt to this day.

The fatalism is not so much an acceptance of one's fate, or giving up, but rather the ability to live alongside the horrors without succumbing to them, and it’s what allows the characters of the Zone to feel real. You can hear it in everyone’s voice.

Strider – the former leader of the quasi-religious Monolith faction – puts it best; “Some things are more important than happiness.”

Switching between languages, this has not been articulated as well by the English-speaking actors who do not have the shared culture and lived experience to draw upon. It is why representation in the arts is so important. Some stories are best told by those who lived it. If you are able and subtitles are not a barrier to entry, I highly recommend you opt for the Ukrainian language option.

Compounding what made the world feel real in the original games was a sense of dynamism driven by a system known as A-Life which allowed NPCs – be they humans or mutants – to go about their lives independent of the player.

It is a shame then that in Stalker 2, A-Life 2.0, works against the fantastic worldbuilding and characters as the denizens of the zone appear to enact bizarre suicide rituals where they agree to kill each other in a small circle so that they may offer you up a huge amount of loot.

I came across these macabre scenes so frequently that it almost became comical. It was that, or a bunch of bandits, mutants or soldiers spawning right where you just were and you suddenly have a HUD element telling you you’re being spotted from behind in a way that feels a bit forced or cheap.

Bodies can flail around too, NPCs have been stuck in a T-pose or are halfway into the ground. I only experienced one hard crash in my playthrough, and stability seemed to improve over the review period with a day-zero patch inbound, but time will tell.

In some ways, Stalker 2 at times is the inverse of those original games. Its story, performances and cutscenes are real standouts (when they work), but the moment-to-moment gameplay can be what lets it down.

The aforementioned Unreal Engine 5 allows for some truly impressive vistas. Lumen is used to great effect to help improve the dynamism of the world, making underground facilities and caves feel truly pitch black at times and the day-night cycle feel natural.

But many of these effects are constructed using temporal techniques where information from prior frames is used to inform how the lighting should look, and being software Lumen, there are inherent inaccuracies that produce a final result that is grainy and often blurry.

Running the game on a Razer Blade 17 equipped with an Intel i9-12900H, Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti 16GB and 32GB of RAM, I had to heavily rely on Nvidia’s DLSS upscaler to get acceptable framerates at 4K and this compounded the blurriness as it means Lumen samples from an even lower-base resolution. Foliage too shimmers and blends in with one another, making it harder to see enemies and already difficult to spot anomalies.

On a positive note, upon launch, on PC the game will precompile shaders which goes a long way to eliminating stutters. In my interview with Techincal Producer Yevhenii Kulyk, they spoke about what work they had done to get Unreal Engine 5 to behave in such a big open world. This has largely been a success, but you need a beastly machine to run Stalker 2 and get a clean image.

Ultimately, reviews are exercises in subjectivity with a certain level of objectivity. Here, I am going to lean heavily into the former. Despite all the bugs, A-Life 2.0 being goofy or the performance woes, the Zone drew me in like few other worlds can. I wanted to keep playing. I was so invested in the story, the characters and the fate of the Zone that I kept pressing on.

Early on during my time with the game, I already made quite big decisions – I couldn’t stop thinking about who I would side with, stab in the back, save or forsake in my next playthrough and see what ending my actions take me towards.

The promise of mods too is ever-alluring and if the developers can deliver on this front, Stalker 2 will have a long, long tail.

If you’re unsure, Stalker 2 is on Xbox Game Pass, making trying it out a fairly low-risk investment, but for those who have pre-ordered – depending on how much the day-zero patch fixes – you may feel hard done by.

Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl could be an incredible game given time, if GSC Game World can hammer it into shape. Right now, it is at times a great one with flashes of brilliance, let down by technical mishaps brought about by the most unfortunate of circumstances.

Currently, I don’t know what ending Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl is headed towards. The path to release has been long, arduous and endlessly difficult, but the road stretches out before GSC Game World yet.

Stalker 2 is out now on PC, Xbox Series X/S and Xbox Game Pass. We reviewed on PC.

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