Heart of Chornobyl is the long-awaited sequel to the immersive first-person shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, which takes place in a fictional version of the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
The Stalker series is known for its brutally difficult gameplay, immersive environments, realistic gunplay, supernatural elements, and iconic voice acting, which has spawned many memes over the years.
So, how difficult is this new installment? Does it do justice to the previous games in the series? Is it connected in any way to the past games? Find out the answer to these questions and more in our full review for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl
Developer: GSC Game World
Publisher: GSC Game World, SEGA, 4divinity
Platforms: Xbox Series X/S and Microsoft Windows (Reviewed)
Release Date: November 20, 2024
Players: 1
Price: $59.99
Stalker 2‘s plot serves as a loose sequel to the first game in the franchise, called Shadow of Chernobyl, featuring a new protagonist and a mostly standalone plot, although it is not detached from its predecessors as it brings back important lore characters and references previous titles often.
The game does its best to explain the overall plot for newcomers, giving the player different dialogue options that can either acknowledge these past characters as if you already heard of them or let you inquire on who they are and why they are important.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a situation where skimming the game’s wiki will catch you up to speed, as Stalker‘s plot involves a lot of different pre-established characters and factions. It is not a hard requirement to have played Shadow of Chernobyl, but I would personally advise doing so. It hasn’t aged too badly, and it is still a very charming and immersive experience.
Stalker 2 attempts to be a point of entry for newcomers into the series, featuring the most polished gameplay the franchise has had so far, although it still suffers from poor difficulty balancing. The easy difficulty, called Rookie, can be disregarded since it is far from the intended experience, while the hard difficulty, Veteran, turns enemies into bullet sponges, making the game tedious.
The medium difficulty, Stalker, feels like the sweet spot as far as combat goes but also has way too much loot, to the point where you’ll be comfortably restocking from your stash without any issues before leaving the game’s first area.
Stalker 2 would greatly benefit from letting players tweak their own difficulty settings, allowing for greater customization like enemy damage, loot availability, and vendor prices, although it seems like GSC knows their fanbase and expects them to mod these features into the game, something that has most likely already happened.
Even if the game is welcoming towards newcomers, it still throws in a couple of curveballs that are meant to teach players unfamiliar with the series that life in the zone is unforgiving. Monsters that are usually introduced a little later in the previous games, like the bloodsucker and poltergeist, are now much more prevalent and get thrown at the player as early as the tutorial.
Venturing outside of the safe zones is still a dangerous endeavor, and players will be constantly punished for being either greedy or unprepared. Carrying too much weight will give you major penalties like reduced stamina regeneration and a slower walking/running speed, but traveling without enough supplies is also a death sentence.
It’s near impossible to move through some anomalies while carrying a lot of weight, and outrunning bandit groups stops being an option when your stamina starts to take a hit, so the game definitely makes you think carefully about your trips and constantly tests you with random encounters to see if you’ve been good about traveling light.
Loot is generally easy to find in Stalker, as the game does a good job with its level design to guide you towards hidden stashes. Just keeping an eye out is more than enough to keep your bags and storage full, but there are also stalker PDAs that will show you the location of hidden caches once you collect them.
Stalker 2‘s environments are extremely detailed, featuring some of the best-looking locations that I would never want to visit in a video game. There are some truly gorgeous sights to be seen in their own run-down and abandoned way.
Every once in a while you even visit a nice place, like the poppy fields, whose mere sight feels sinister due to how out of place it is inside the zone. The world looks decayed and run-down, but exploring it still feels very exciting because of the otherworldly locations that Stalker 2 throws at the player sometimes.
Unfortunately, Stalker 2 pays for its highly detailed environments with its performance. The game was released in a rough state on PC, featuring a lot of lighting issues, as well as very inconsistent frame rates. The week one patch did solve most of the lighting problems, but performance is still a mixed bag.
Part of the reason why this review is coming so late is because I personally had to reinstall the game three different times, since every new update would cause the game to re-download itself in its entirety (150+ gigabytes) and not apply the patch properly.
The game is generally better now than it was on launch but still has its fair share of bugs. One of the more annoying ones causes your gun to look jammed even when it isn’t, which is incredibly disruptive during combat.
Artifacts play a somewhat larger role in the story this time, with the main character, Skif, being betrayed after trying to recharge an artifact that left the zone without being disintegrated. This betrayal is what kicks off the entire plot, leading him to explore the zone in search of what is rightfully his.
Artifacts are much more prominent in Stalker 2; in fact, the game features the most artifacts in the series, most of them coming from previous titles. As usual, they are acquired both through quests and exploration, as well as by poking into large anomalies with the help of a detector.
Artifact hunting is a fun part of the game, especially once you acquire the better detectors, which have a much larger search radius. It’s still a tough balancing act to decide whether you’ll be killed by the Zone’s dangers or the radiation produced by the artifacts, but a lot of them are worth equipping, even if you’ll be constantly drunk trying to keep the radiation at bay.
Most of the game deals with a push and pull between the Ward, a militarized faction that wants to take control of the zone, and the splintered Stalker factions, who want to preserve it in an almost religious manner.
It’s interesting to see the different relationships that each Stalker has with the zone, since some see it like a beautiful natural phenomenon, while others see it as a way to profit while enforcing a survival of the fittest scenario.
These different outlooks on what is essentially a desolate, irradiated wasteland make the zone feel like its own character in a way. The exclusion zone is definitely alive in some capacity, being described as ever-changing by multiple people, so it’s interesting to try and separate what is truth from fiction when taking in these different accounts.
Despite being more freeform in its approach than most AAA games, Stalker 2′s story content can be surprisingly cinematic, featuring sparse but exciting scripted sequences, which usually present the player with different story choices.
One interesting thing is that the game lets you be a total scumbag, which is even rewarded most of the time. Other stalkers and bandits will also try to do the same to you, sending you on fake missions that turn out to be traps or trying to kill you as soon as you stop being useful.
It is a little disappointing that as long as you complete the main story missions, most hubs will like you, so even if you backstab people a lot, it doesn’t seem to have a negative impact on how you are seen by the major factions or hubs, although this could be tied to story choices rather than what you do during side missions.
As far as its dub goes, the English voice acting is good, although it doesn’t necessarily fall in line with previous entries in the series. The decision to have most characters not sound European hurts the game a lot, as it doesn’t make sense for people in Chernobyl to have an American or British accent.
It’s safe to say that most Stalker fans were clearly expecting an English dub performed by European actors, or at the very least an English cast attempting to emulate that, but instead we got a very generic English dub, which would have been fine in any other game, just not in Stalker.
This issue is remedied by the Ukrainian voice acting, which replaces the Russian one due to current geopolitical events. Personally, I can’t tell Russian and Ukrainian dialogue apart, so to me the difference isn’t felt, but it does come with the side effect of losing background dialogue due to unreliable subs.
Despite its performance issues, Stalker 2 still absolutely cheekis my breeki, providing a brutal experience through an incredibly dense open world that never ceases to kick you while you are down.
It’s disappointing that GSC Game World continues developing on engines that hurt their projects, as the previous games in the series are also known for their fair share of jank and issues, but it is undeniable that Stalker 2 is a looker of a game, and perhaps those visuals could not be achieved without Unreal 5, as much as it pains me to say.
Heart of Chornobyl continues the long-lived Stalker tradition of releasing great immersive sims with loads of performance issues, which are still enjoyed by the fans due to their charming atmospheres and immersive gameplay. Stalker 2 is far from a perfect title, but it delivers in terms of content and story to those who want to see more of the zone. If you liked the game also make sure to check out these combat and action inspired online casino slots.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl was reviewed on Microsoft Windows using a game code provided by GSC Game World. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is available on Xbox Series X/S and Microsoft Windows (through Steam).
