S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl

The wind picks up as you trudge down a muddy path. You pray it's not an emission, as you're simply too far away from shelter to have a hope of survival in one of these nuclear storms. Shoving a hunk of bread into your gob, you stave off hunger just enough to reach your objective. On the way, you hear the distant pops of gunfire. Moving closer to investigate, you find bandits and the Ward - the supposed peacekeepers of the Zone - in a firefight. Both sides see you as the enemy, and so you're forced to finish off who's left. Afterwards, some mutants come to pick the bones. Squat, horrible things with claws that can rip you to shreds. You try and escape stealthily, but they sniff you out. With only a few shells left in your shotgun, you hope they'll be enough, only to hear a dreaded click as one leaps towards you. Your gun has jammed, and you're about to become another victim of the Zone.

Welcome to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl. GSC Game World's open-world, dystopian shooter is finally here. Multiple delays and even a war have threatened the release of this game, but none of those external factors could stop it, and now that it's here, we're more than ready to step into the irradiated, deadly world of the Zone.

The Zone is both the game world in which S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl takes place, and it is the game's main character in a way as well. GSC Game World has put a huge amount of man hours in hand-crafting this expansive world, and the time has clearly paid off. The Zone is one of the most-impressive game environments I've seen in recent years, and it exudes a uniqueness that will put the comparisons with Metro, Fallout and other post-apocalyptic shooters to rest as soon as you spend those first few hours walking around the Zone. It's a bleak, dangerous place, where you can meet your end at the hands of a bandit just as easily as you can accidentally step into an Anomaly - a point in the world where you might be sucked up into a mini black hole or randomly set on fire from the floor - and yet just as the characters in the game describe, there is an allure to the Zone. An indescribable need to keep going, to accept the lawlessness, and the freedom it provides, and attach yourself to it like a parasite, taking the Zone for all its worth.

It doesn't hurt that the Zone is a very beautiful place at times as well. While I wasn't able to experience the full joy of this game at maxed-out settings (which is something we'll touch on later), S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is still a gorgeous game. The Zone doesn't have much of a varied environment, and usually the weather is the key factor in changing the appearance of your surroundings, especially when an emission can turn the sky a different colour entirely, but it is still a captivating place visually. Swamps, thick forests, abandoned farms, they all show GSC Game World's commitment to making the Zone, not some fantastical idea of a nuclear wasteland, but a real place that feels so grounded that you can't help but immerse yourself entirely within it. Facial animations are also very, very strong, even at lower settings, and they help the characters come to life, even if the voice acting isn't always there. I played with English dubbing, so that might be a flaw of my own making, but there were still some stand-out performances, like those of Faust and Scar.

You play as Skif, a newly made Stalker who finds himself in the Zone permanently after his house on the Mainland burned down, and a job involving an Anomaly scanner goes awry. The game's story leads on from there, and essentially acts as an excuse for you to travel to different places within the Zone, meeting the various factions and getting to know them before moving onto the next location. It is a tad formulaic, and because the map is so large each new area of the Zone needs its own base camp, where you can rest and trade with vendors, that is only further enforced. The story missions themselves are varied enough, though, with great cutscenes and set pieces to keep you from getting the feeling that you are just going to point X and doing Y in order to return home and give Z to your latest benefactor. The characters that you meet along the way are intricate, layered, and feel like they've each been moulded into something different by the Zone. I wish I could say the same of our protagonist, Skif, but he does tend to feel a bit one dimensional. You could argue Skif is more of a blank slate, so that the player's decisions feel more like they're of their own making, and less of what the character they're playing as could do, but in other games where your narrative is changed by your decision making, the protagonist rarely feels bland. Think of Lee in The Walking Dead, Commander Shepard, they feel like people, who have their own motivations to continue the game's story, whereas after Skif tracks down the person he's looking for in the beginning of the game, it feels like he's just spiralling from place to place, and I found him to be little more than a ghost in the story, barely noticeable even though I have his perspective as my POV.

Where S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is at its best is in exploring the Zone. You don't level up in this game, there is effectively no grind, and so your equipment really matters. Therefore, setting off in any direction, whether in the search of a quest objective, or simply just trying to see what's out there, is a task that feels as though it's worth doing. In the Zone, survival is the overall goal, and so anything that can be done to reach a better chance of surviving another day is going to be well worth your time. The random encounters are also a lot of fun, and they don't take too long, either. Nothing infuriates more in an open-world game than running into a side quest just as you're about to reach your main objective, and then being told the former needs you to double back on yourself. Instead, you'll find lending a helping hand to the people in need around the Zone a quick, painless exercise that can lead to good relations and a bit of loot for your troubles.

I touched before on the main objectives of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl risking on becoming repetitive, but one of the ways the game avoids this best is with its gameplay loop and gunplay. Whether you're fighting an organised group of humans, or a gaggle of monsters, or a single invisible mutant, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2's gunplay is fun. So long as you keep your guns well-maintained, you won't deal with the frustrations of jammed bullets, and then you're free to rain hell upon your enemies. One small gripe with the combat is that the AI seems to be made up entirely of expert snipers. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is a realistic, immersive game, and yet something that pulls you right out of that is being 100+ metres away from random bandit number 2, and yet he's still catching you with stray bullets with perfect aim. It feels like an added element of needless difficulty, rather than being representative of which enemies might actually be able to hit those shots. Especially annoying when bullets cause bleeding, which is only preventable by using a precious bandage.

Jumping back to another previous point, I wasn't able to experience the full potential of the game in terms of visuals and performance thanks to what I can only describe as lacking optimisation. I don't have the best PC anymore, but other demanding games of this year run fine at High settings, whereas S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 still had serious frame drops on the lowest of the low. Visual bugs were found a lot as well, including enemies popping in and out of existence, NPCs being buried in the ground while speaking to them, and people randomly peeing while standing up (images of that find below). It's hard to say that perhaps S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 needed even more time in the oven, but if you've not got a beastly PC, perhaps wait until some improvements come out.

Bugs and performance issues aside, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is an excellent game. Despite all the hurdles, GSC Game World has matched and exceeded expectations with this dystopian shooter. An addictive game world, satisfying and challenging gunplay, combined with plenty of characters that bring the Zone to life makes the whole package an experience I won't soon be forgetting. Like the NPCs in the game, the Zone has dragged me in, despite its deadliness, and I'm not sure when I'll be leaving.