Another game I was very excited for, but ended up very glad to have skipped.

Header image: The Duga OTH radar array, also known as the Russian Woodpecker, in STALKER 2 (Screenshot: GSC Game World)

I’m a huge fan of the original STALKER games. I’ve played these games a lot back in the day and they’ve not only influenced my gaming preferences, but also were instrumental in kindling my love for post-apocalyptic stories. So when I heard that, after 15 years, there was finally a new STALKER game coming out, I was as excited as any fan would be. Luckily, I held off and did not buy the game immediately. That turned out to be the right decision — which, after the Veilguard debacle, is now becoming something of a pattern.

Misplaced Nationalism

STALKER 2 is a mess. I must admit, I started to have a bad feeling about this game when the developer changed its subtitle from “Heart of Chernobyl” to “Heart of Chornobyl” in an obvious display of nationalism. The finished game — if you can call it that; more on this later — has many more nationalistic tendencies, with the Russian language completely eliminated from the game and loads of little patriotic gestures and symbols throughout. While this might be understandable from a Ukrainian developer in wartime, it completely goes against what the original games were. You see, in the original STALKER games, almost everyone spoke Russian. Not only made this sense given the background of the game — it being set in the mouldering ex-Soviet ruins of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone — it is also what made the franchise popular. Its success in the Russian-speaking market not only spawned whole genres of games inspired by it, it also caused its popularity in the Western world.

There were Ukrainian characters speaking Ukrainian in the original games, but it was rather subtle and the developers back then knew they depended on the Russian market to make the game a success. They don’t depend, or even want, these customers any more and so they have pivoted their game’s setting. But this is causing the whole game world to feel weird and somehow unreal. You have to remember that STALKER is very much based on a famous Russian novel. It is full of Russian architecture, gear and — most importantly for a first person shooter game — Russian guns. It seems weird to want to pretend that Russia doesn’t exist in your game when your player, at most times, has a quarter of their screen taken up by the butt end of an AKS-74U, a VSS or an SVD. There are Western guns in the game, like the German G36 but, lets be honest, nobody plays these games to shoot NATO weapons. Why didn’t they just make the villains of the story some cartoonish Russian bad guys, like in those old-school Cold War movies. You could have put all your disdain for the Russian culture into the game without causing this weird cognitive dissonance. It would have worked much better that way…

Even though immersion is probably the most important part of games like this for me, I could have probably ignored these glaring problems brought on by needlessly injecting politics for the sake of pure spite into the game. Because, let’s be clear, these changes don’t drive or change the story, they’re just there because the developers wanted to make a political point.

A-Life Turned into No-Life

Again, I could have overlooked that, if the rest of the game was great. Sadly, it isn’t. It’s a buggy mess that is missing a lot of things that made the old games great and that you’d want to play a STALKER game for. I mean, the game looks great. You have to give it that. The atmosphere is amazing. Even if it is horribly unoptimised and you need absolute state-of-the-art hardware for it to be playable. But if you have that, it looks awesome. Even if it is way too dark throughout with an infuriatingly feeble flash light, no night-vision equipment and a day/night cycle that seems to be about 75% night. It is an incredibly looking game. They nailed the atmosphere of The Zone.

The problems come in when you actually play the game. There are bugs everywhere. Some of them break main missions in the latter half of the game that hard brick save files and make it impossible to finish the game. Neither the combat, nor the game’s economy are balanced at all and some enemies are simply bullet sponges that you’ll have to pump literally hundreds of rounds into at higher difficulties. And you can’t even loot those corpses, so you get no reward for having wasted all of that ammunition. The voice acting, at least the English version, is comically bad throughout the whole game. NPCs repeat the same line over and over again. There are animation glitches, and people floating above the ground and such, everywhere.

But the worst sin the developers committed is advertising their awesome A-Life 2.0 system and then not shipping it in the finished game. You see, A-Life was what made the original STALKER games great. This AI system for NPCs and enemies was decades ahead of its time in 2007. The idea was to give characters in the game fixed schedules and things to do, so it looked like they were living lives of their own in The Zone. Stalkers hunted for artefacts, soldiers patrolled areas, mercenaries went on the same missions that you, the player, could take on. All of it made The Zone feel alive and it caused you to basically live in the place instead of just playing a story-driven video game following through quests until the game ended. People spent thousands of hours immersed in those games. It made you not care that the main story of these games has always been a rather corny copy-and-paste job from the Strugatsky novel and shows like The X-Files.

A-Life 2.0 isn’t in the game, though. NPCs act like you’re playing Oblivion and enemies stupidly spawn in like they do in any old Assassin’s Creed game. None of this is groundbreaking. In fact, STALKER 2’s AI systems are inferior to its 15-year-old prequel. Instead, we get a very involved main story that is very long and has good looking cutscenes, but isn’t written to a higher standard than the older games. It’s a confusing storyline that I, honestly, gave up to understand about halfway through. And that is coming from someone who prizes story in games above all else.

I was also really disappointed when I found out that while you, optionally, can visit Pripyat in the game, the CNPP — the iconic location the subtitle of the game refers to and that most people get drawn to right away — can’t be visited. It isn’t even finished as an in-game location. This game is called “Heart of Chernobyl” and you can’t even visit the heart of Chernobyl!

Excuses, Excuses

In its current state, the game, while looking gorgeous, is barely playable for many players. It has many bugs that range from merely annoying to game-breaking. And yet, the game’s Steam reviews are “Very Positive”. Why is that? Well, if you read a lot of these reviews, you realise that people are mostly reviewing what the game could become after months or years of improvements, and not what the game is right now. While it is true that the previous games have had an incredibly active modding community, and these people are already hard at work fixing some of the issues with STALKER 2, it is simply not fair to your fellow consumers to review a game based on what could be instead of what is. People reading reviews, by and large, want to make a decision to buy a product or not. And they can only seriously do so based on facts about a game. Instead, many STALKER 2 reviews on Steam are filled with wishful thinking.

And the reviews from the commercial gaming press aren’t much better. They aren’t so much focused on what this game could eventually end up looking like and do, by and large, acknowledge its problems, but they are also not letting these issues influence their scores nearly enough. Instead, you read heart-wrenching stories about how developers on this game died in the War in Ukraine and how the whole company had to evacuate to Prague when the renewed invasion kicked off. While this is all very interesting drama and good stories, it has nothing to do with the question if the game in itself is a good one. I haven’t seen any Russian developers, say Escape from Tarkov’s Battlestate Games, getting cut any slack because their employees have to go to the front lines in the war. But then, these guys aren’t putting their national crest on the melee weapons in their game for political reasons either.

In the end, games journalists should be writing for their readers. They should be on the side of consumers and against big corporations. And if you release a full-price game and its as buggy as most Early Access titles, that needs to be reflected in the review score. STALKER 2 currently sits at 73/100 on Metacritic, when really, it should have been more of a 60 to 65 at the state it was in at release. Some outlets got the score about right, but even most of those made excuses on behalf of the developers. It would be one thing if these journalists would just generally bend the knee and accept the marketing propaganda from big studios uncritically, but then, weirdly, they once in a while do attack them over things like workplace sexual harassment. The criticism rarely seems to extend to the actual products, though. These almost always get hyped at release, with obvious problems only being addressed weeks later when most of the copies that will be sold of the game have already been sold and can’t be refunded any more.

Streamer Deadlyslob struggling through a particularly buggy section of STALKER 2. In the end, he quit the game before finishing it because his quest progression was shot all to hell.

Having watched about 25 hours of gameplay of this game on Twitch, I am very happy I skipped this mess. It might be worth revisiting in one or two years at a steep discount. Maybe by then, it’ll fulfil most of its promises and I can ignore all of the disappointing nationalistic bullshit and enjoy a game for what it is. Without it breaking every few hours, because the developers got in way over their heads and launched something too ambitious too early. But if the modders fix this instead of the people at GSC Game World, who are getting paid for doing it, it’ll better be heavily discounted indeed.