Stalker 2 Is Somewhat Decent, When I Actually Get to Play It

During the opening moments of Stalker 2, which sees the protagonist Skif set up a device that triggers inexplicable anomalies in order to gather data and promptly gets ambushed and robbed of all he’s worth, I quickly learned I wasn’t going to be running this game on high settings. The framerate frequently dropped below 20 in outdoor spaces as I headshotted marauders and dealt with a slightly terrifying mutant that frequently went invisible.

Dropping down to 1080p but leaving the settings on high seemed to alleviate this issue, though I wasn’t pleased with playing a game in 1080p in 2024. Skif, with nothing but a handful of bolts to his name, woke up surrounded by anomalies that warped the air around him. I had to throw those bolts into those warbling anomalies to dispel them and run through, and then I set off to find the major settlement of the first zone.

Stalker 2 is absolutely massive with a dozen large, spread-out zones filled to the brim with mutants and different factions vying for power. From what I could tell, most of the game is spent scavenging for ammo and weapons (that eventually break down) to battle these threats, and the shooting that makes up most of the game feels pulled from an old-school shooter like Counter Strike. Against human enemies, headshots are one-hit kills, and the bulbous, grotesque mutants function more or less as aggressive bullet sponges.

Discoverable artifacts change things up a little bit but again, because of technical difficulties, I never learned how much, though I did run into a mutant enemy that ripped my SMG out of my hand with spooky magic before levitating it into the air to fire back at me. That was neat. I wanted to see far more of that.

I couldn’t, however, because the game kept freezing up whenever I entered a heavily populated area like a settlement. This would require me to force quit the game, boot it back up, wait for the shaders to reload for a minute or two, and then I was good to go for another 30 – 60 minutes before it hitched up and froze once again.

A massive pre-release patch that hit around 30GB brought the total install size to a ridiculous 150GB and did not help at all. In fact, it seemed like my performance suffered more, though that could just be because I was further into the game.

Thereafter, it felt like I spent more time in menus fiddling with the settings rather than actually playing; in the end, I ended up dropping all the settings down to low for some semblance of stability. But alas, Stalker 2 still didn’t want me to play it, as even then I encountered frequent freezes, sudden hitching and framerate drops, and even strange visual bugs during cinematic moments like the headphones my companion was wearing floating off beside his head rather than on his ears.

This was a shame because I was genuinely interested in the Stalker 2 world as it has a bit of a Fallout: New Vegas in Russia feel to it. The shooting, while rudimentary, had enough charm from the tension caused by scant resources to make it intriguing enough, and while Skif’s quest to recover his stolen research equipment didn’t intrigue me much, the general world and how people live in this irradiated wasteland did.

In the end, I expect Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl‘s early days will function basically as a beta test, and that in a year or two, it might become a title that people speak well of. The developers have promised some day 0 patches, but at the same time, I have little faith these will alleviate the mountain or two of technical problems people are going to go up against.

Again, the other reviewers I spoke with didn’t have quite the difficulty I did, but I do believe many early adopters will. So, take it from someone who didn’t have to pay $59.99 – wait a while before picking Stalker 2 up, lest you suffer my fate.

Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl releases on November 20, 2024, on Xbox and PC.