Review: Stalker 2’s best ideas are undercut by a stale plot and constant performance problems

No discussion of Stalker 2 is possible without the real-world situation facing the development of the game. Before this review begins we’d recommend reading our recent feature on our trip to the now Prague-based studio, as well as the studio’s own documentary about the making of the game.

That being said, this review will heavily reference a litany of technical problems that we faced while reviewing the game. While we are not hand-waving them away due to the circumstances, we feel it’s important at the beginning to acknowledge the unique nature that Stalker 2 finds itself in at launch.

Stalker 2 is oppressive. From an opening that barely tells you what to do and expects you to die before you ever see a checkpoint, to the taunting game over screen that tells you just how many times you’ve succumbed to the zone.

Every enemy encounter could spell death, every new location could be teeming with anomalies. It’s a game world that effectively communicates that it doesn’t want you there better than most in recent memory.

Stalker 2 is a hardcore shooter born in an era where they’ve largely disappeared. A new player approaching Stalker may expect, from the outset, a modern FPS RPG like Fallout or Far Cry, but quickly they’ll have reality coldly slapped into them.

Stalker 2 is all about survival. You arrive in the Exclusion Zone, tasked with finding out more about anomalies, which are otherworldly occurrences that have appeared throughout the world.

These can be things like electric fields that shock anyone that enters them, or whirling vortexes of wind that will throw the player across the map with ease. This is set against a background of political strife in the Zone, where limited resources, food, and weaponry make interactions with the people of the Zone pivotal to how your story plays out.

Stalker 2’s greatest assets are its location and characters. While the overall narrative isn’t massively compelling, the smaller character stories are, and paint a story of survival that isn’t laden with cliches. There are a lot of side quests in the game and we felt compelled to take on as many of them as we could in an effort to meet more of the strange inhabitants of the zone.

What we ended up doing on those quests could have been slightly more interesting, but whenever an icon popped up denoting we had someone to talk to, we were excited. We’d highly recommend the game’s Ukrainian dub, as the English one can undercut the tone with some dodgy performances.

Gunplay in Stalker is hit-and-miss, and that’s not just down to the strange enemy AI. The human enemies have a habit of getting stuck on geometry or running back and forth inside rooms, making the challenge not one of not getting shot – instead the difficulty is hitting the enemies while they zip around.

This is one of the numerous technical issues with Stalker 2. When working, the survival horror elements are effective as hulking beasts appear at you from out of nowhere. There aren’t a huge number of these enemies, but when they’re used sparingly they’re a cheat code to get you jumping out of your seat.

The quiet moments are just as enjoyable as the tense ones. There’s a lot of serenity to be found in Stalker 2, if you can ignore the whiff of radiation sickness that’s around every corner. Some of our best times in the game were traipsing through fields and looking through the derelict buildings to see what we could find.

This is also where the game can be very pretty. The time-of-day lighting work is exceptional, and when the game is running at full power, at sunset, as the light is breaking through the trees, it’s an arresting visual. For many, this exploration and Chornobyl walking sim will go a long way.

Sadly, Stalker 2 is, by far, the most unstable game we have reviewed in a long time. As stated at the beginning of this review, there are likely reasons for this beyond the usual review-build jank, but it’s impossible to ignore that for several sessions during our week with the game, it became genuinely unplayable.

A repeated bug saw the screen cut to black roughly every 90 seconds. We had to reinstall 150 GB of the game several times, and that’s not including the 160 GB patch that dropped less than 48 hours before the embargo. Lighting elements are broken in some scenarios, there’s a host of audio bugs and we also faced an issue where not one single input would work on the game, including keyboard and mouse or controller, until we forced our computer to turn off.

Realistically, many of these issues will be fixed, but it’s impossible for us to know which of them will, and when, and thus it’s colored our time with the game. While games in this genre do have a history of coming out somewhat undercooked to later be saved by a built-in modding community, this doesn’t feel like that. The Stalker 2 we have played for a week felt like it wasn’t ready for public release.

There’s a compelling game at the heart of Stalker 2. Whether that’ll be excavated by modders, or by extensive patchwork, is yet to be seen. The ominous, creepy loneliness of wandering around is really enjoyable, and there are a lot of individual parts here that players will get their teeth stuck into, but currently, it doesn’t work as a whole package.

That’s without the rampant technical problems that made this review week one that’s probably not representative of what the game will be in time, but for now, it’s not something we can realistically recommend players spend money on. It is a miracle this game exists, and in years to come it could be a great game, but the one that’s coming out at launch isn’t despite green shoots of a promising future.