Blood, Sweat, and Screen tears.
Stalker 2, in several ways, shouldn’t exist. GSC Game World had originally announced the game back in 2010, only for the company to be dissolved after extreme financial difficulties. Eventually, a successor to Stalker would end up on Kickstarter, led by one of GSC Game World’s previous lead developers, only for it to have all the appearances of a scam. GSC Game World would then reform back in 2014 to start work on Cossacks 3, allowing them to limp on as dreams of Stalker 2 would eventually come to fruition.
Some years later, Microsoft would strike a deal to fund development in exchange for the title to be exclusive to its console and also to appear on its thriving subscription service, Game Pass. And while COVID-19 would shake up the studio’s process, it is the Ukraine/Russian war that would have the biggest impact, resulting in the loss of life of some of its development staff, and the need for the studio to move its offices out of the country.
To say that Stalker 2 has seen some delays is only one side of the Hryvnias coin. This is a game that despite everything thrown at it, has shipped. While its state is the other side of the same coin, the team has issued out a staggering amount of fixes to address countless issues that filled up many of the words already written about it in countless reviews that talk of a massively broken game. While Stalker 2 is still in somewhat of a rough shape, it’s also a game that can clash with what you want from it, a game that demands you experience it on its own terms, and a game that not everyone will see eye to eye on; a game that I have grown to mostly like, but certainty not love.
Stalker 2 has you take on the role of Skif, a man who has set foot in the Zone, a radiated hellscape, for revenge. While that is a fine enough motivator for anyone, it’s somewhat half-baked as he is only seeking answers as to why a strange artifact appeared in his home and burnt it down. This isn’t a revenge story about losing a loved one or anything so dire, it’s merely to find answers as to why his home was set ablaze by some mysterious Macguffin. Armed with the artifact in hand, Skif then enters into the Zone for answers, only to be left for dead and his artifact gone.
While the story eventually forms into something more engaging than its premise, traversing it is another matter altogether. With radiated water sources that are not traversable, and bases entirely fortified to cliffs too high to mantle up, there is a lot of forced navigation that causes a lot of maze-like pathing to cause excursions into its wilderness that can feel like it takes forever to reach your destination, only to have to turn around and return to the quest-giver to report the quest complete. While there are obstacles to overcome, locations to explore, secrets to uncover, it doesn't always entertain when many of your treks are uneventful. While the ambience is often second to none, I've put on many YouTube videos or podcasts to at least keep me entertained during these lengthy walks.
The Zone itself is home to several factions, all wanting something of the Zone for themselves. You have SIRCAA, who are a group of scientists looking to exploit the strange phenomenon of the Zone, while the Ecologists are a group of scientists looking to preserve the Zone as it is. Then you have the Mercenaries, Duty, the IPSF, as well as the various flavors of the Stalkers themselves, from loners to those who embrace the life of a Stalker different from others. Then you have the anarchists, called Freedom, who look to explore the Zone without limitations, to the Ward, a military force that looks to enforce those very limitations.
Then you have the Monolithians, a group of brainwashed cultists who were seemingly dissolved some time ago, resulting in some of their members forming the Noontide, a group free of the cult’s brainwashing. Then you have Spark, who are made up of previous members of Clear Sky, who were formed out of wanting to reverse the group's failings and take revenge on SIRCAA and the Ward. While I’ll remain quiet on specifics, this faction war between Spark and the Ward becomes a point of contention as you, a malleable individual set to make real change in the Zone, will be a key player in how this war shakes out. With alternative paths and missions, not to mention 4 unique endings, your choices carry real weight and provide a great deal of replayability. That is if you find the game enjoyable enough to even replay.
Stalker 2 is a game built around survival, but it’s also grounded to a point where certain choices about its design may deter players, even under the game’s easiest setting. It’s remarkably easy to be over-encumbered, an act that has been my constant companion for the last 50+ hours, despite my best efforts. This causes your stamina and movement to suffer, something that becomes all too frustrating after a while. You’ll need to eat regularly, bandage any bleeding, and prick yourself with countless medical needles to replenish your vitality. And should you start to experience some mild radiation, you can carry items to handle that as well. Thankfully, healing items and food are always nearby, sometimes far too often. Seriously tho, how old is the bread and meat you find just laying about??
Engaging in these systems is only part of surviving the Zone. You’ll clash with various factions, all based on your relationship with them and even see them fighting each other, even if they can almost appear out of nowhere to do so. Bandits will shoot first and ask questions later, and the mutated abominations that lurk throughout the Zone will hunger for your blood at every turn. These range from creatures that can cloak as they pounce on you, to those that barely have any of their humanity left. Whether by man or by beast, you’ll take on these matters alone, expending ammo by the bucket load and depleting your healing resources, all while your armor and weapons take a beating, amounting to costly repairs that will often be out of financial reach.
The Zone itself will also attempt to kill you on its own. There are gusts of wind that can bite back, electrical surges that are soaked into the very ground at your feet, to warps in reality that can pull in and tear off your skin. There are heavily radiated areas that will also consume you, bodies of water that cause you to walk the shore to find a bridge for what feels like forever, all causing your Geiger counter to illustrate how dangerous the area truly is. These anomalies can also bestow artifacts upon you, relics that can boost certain stats, but also cause radiation poisoning as a meager trade-off, all depending on their gift. Thankfully, you’ll have a tracker to use to benefit from these environmental surges and the gear that can see them equipped. While the relics are an interesting find, I found them far too frustrating to locate and very rarely worth the effort. I spent five whole days trying to find the “weird water” item that boosts your carry weight, only to give up as it never spawned.
Another environmental encounter are the Emissions. These are moments when the sky turns red and you experience strong lightning storms and you need to seek shelter, if you can find it that is, and then wait for them to end. If you are stuck outside during this red-skied threat, you’ll need to spam your healing items as fast as you can before you can take cover. However, while hiding inside is sometimes simple, there are small houses in wide open fields I’ve found that didn’t allow for such safety, despite you being indoors with not much difference in design to locations that have worked prior. Hell, I’ve stood outside a cellar and was safe, but inside an actual house, nope, still died. I would find locked or inaccessible buildings that were flagged on the map as “seek shelter” icons, only to find them unable to enter. While the idea is sound, these always felt like a boring waste of time as I sat there ready to play and would have to wait out the two or three minutes until they ended. Often, I would set the controller down, go grab a drink, and hope it passed during that break.
Your gear is crucial to fighting back against most of what the Zone can offer. You can equip three guns; two rifles and a pistol, and up to five artifacts, should you improve your gear at a technician to free up those slots. You’ll have four quick slots for healing items, using the D-pad as you tap or hold for the various items you’ll need in a hurry. Your gear will have durability as well, requiring the need to see it repaired. You’ll have a suit as well as a helmet/mask, some of which are a prebuilt combo, all of which can be upgraded to apply better protection against thermal, electrical, chemical, radiation, psi, and how good it is at stopping bullets. That, and you can make it weigh less, which is always the option I went for.
While I don’t have an issue with weapon or armor durability, the economy feels largely broken due to the repair costs and what you are generally earning to make up for it. While you can sell gear, your weight limit really doesn’t benefit or allow you to haul back too much to sell. While you can stuff it all on a corpse and haul them back into town on your shoulder, the missions you’ll tackle don’t pay well enough to really see that gear last you. It’s also a shame that your chest, which is located in each major camp, cannot be accessed to sell items from it, forcing you to constantly revisit it as you dump gear to attempt to make a buck. I had to endure a whole no-turning-back chapter with completely broken gear as my weapons would jam constantly, and bullets would soak up my health bar like a sponge; it wasn’t fun. Had they provided a shop and a technician in the location that kicked off that mission, I would have had zero issues with what awaited me. While I could have walked back to a major town, it would have taken longer than the mission ended up being.
While I could have picked up new guns or gear to combat this issue, I would have then had to endure a harsher weight issue to retain my upgraded guns and armor as I didn’t want to leave them behind. That, and you cannot use a gun instantly off the ground, you have to pick it up, open your bag, equip it to a random slot, or slowly select it from the sluggish menu controls, and then equip it and close your bag. Trying to do that in a firefight is next to impossible. And yet, being face to face with your attacker and your shotgun jams after the second round and you feel like the game simply wants to bury you.
I’ll also point out that looting is needlessly annoying due to the cursor instantly popping back to the stationary point after taking the item instead of staying where it is. This means if you want the 4th and 5th item, you have to slowly move the cursor over, take the 4th item, then repeat the same movement of the cursor from the first item all the way back to the 5th. In nearly every other game, you would take the 4th item and then move the cursor over one spot to take the 5th. Why Stalker 2 does this is unknown, but holy hell is it frustrating when you need to loot a body quickly during a firefight. I ended up taking everything at once just to stay alive during some scenarios and then dropping stuff after the skirmish.
I do enjoy the fact that Stalker 2 is trying to ground itself with the loop of ensuring you're equipped for the mission, completing the mission, and then repairing your equipment, and then repeating that loop again. However, the payouts, even despite the patch to improve them, can be downright pathetic. Since enemies don’t drop money, you have to rely on selling items, equipment, or artifacts, or taking on various side quests that have you legging it all over the Zone for less than what a gun can sell for. 800 for a simple fetch quest doesn’t make much sense when you’re likely to endure five times that in repairs and resupplying for the next. If enemies dropped “coupons” or if they were found as you explored, then I would have a reason to engage in combat and exploration more often. As I am always encumbered, exploration has lost its charm as I can’t afford to pick anything up. As for money, there is a very easy money glitch that can get you 100K in less than a minute, provided you plug a mouse into your Xbox. While it has been patched to lessen the amounts, it still works as of this writing.
As you will try to figure out what guns to keep, upgrade, or discard, or even just what ammo to deplete from the choices that lay on the ground, shooting itself is largely disappointing. While it is certainly intentional, I just didn't find it fun. When you are taking on the standard human forces, you’ll largely succeed, until they start to group up in packs and your damaged guns start jamming. However, the mutants themselves are a different story. The aiming never feels well enough to properly work against the smaller rodents or faster threats, causing a lot of missed shots. I would often just back myself up into a corner and just point down, and start shooting. These encounters were never fun and I often just legged it away until they stopped chasing me; that or wait for them to group up and hope a grenade would finish them off as I stood atop a car’s hood.
While there is a good variety of guns at your disposal, I would often just rely on rifles with a decent mid-range scope, even with the sway being a tad too exaggerated, making it hard to be precise in firefights. There is a hold-breath option, but with how slow some of the aiming is, I found it to not be something I could ever rely on. Shotguns are suitable for some close-range fights, but not so much against the smaller threats that move far too fast. I also feel that some enemies take far too many rounds to go down, even when I tried the game’s easiest setting. While the point is to aim for the head and they’ll drop easily enough, body shots feel like I am hitting them with pellets and barely breaking skin. There are moments when the shooting does feel good with some of the submachine guns, but ultimately, with the combination of guns damaging too fast and leading to a lot of jams, to the weapon sway that feels far too strong, I ended up more frustrated than immersed, despite anything I attempted to do otherwise. Is it a skill issue? Sure, It could be, but browsing Reddit, I am far from a minority voice here in this matter.
While I’ve had many technical issues across my roughly 70 hours, one glitch that I continue to have to this day when it relates to gunplay and my inventory bag is often when I have had the game paused for a few minutes or when I would leave an area, the game would provide me a few extra guns in my inventory slots and even equip them to me randomly. I would go into a gunfight and suddenly I have two long-range sniper rifles equipped with three more in my bag, causing me to move at either a snail's-pace or even to the point where I couldn’t move at all. This happened so often that I stopped counting. While more patches came in to fix a wealth of different bugs, the game was certainly in a state at launch that it never should have been. This was a game that desperately needed one more delay.
Despite my issues with large swaths of this game, the visuals are mostly impressive. I say mostly since many of the non-story NPCs look incredibly disappointing when compared to the characters who actually have lines of dialogue worth hearing. Thankfully, a patch solved some of the oddities around teeth and eyes, but some character models still look extremely dated when compared to what other titles are doing with the same tech. As Stalker 2 uses Unreal Engine 5, it allows for some staggering environments that look incredible. The team has used the engine to some impressive highs here as the Zone is moody, atmospheric, and breathtaking, regardless of the time of day. The photo-realism on display is impressive and is a constant throughout the journey. While the long walks can often zap the fun out of the game, the views are constantly jaw-dropping.
I played the entire game via the English voice-over as I rarely enjoy reading the subtitles when characters are conveying information while I am trying to explore or engage in combat. I prefer to hear game audio in my native language. That said, the Ukrainian performances put the English voice-work to shame. Apart from two or three actors, the voice work in English is pretty generic and often not great. Elsewhere, the ambience and sound design of exploring the Zone, especially when wearing headphones, is staggering and a real treat for the ears.
Stalker 2 sounds like an amazing game on paper with all the immersive elements you need to thrive. However, playing it is another story. There are some sound ideas here, but the gunplay, inventory systems, and countless bugs, just don’t do it any favors. Stalker 2 is a game you need to experience on its terms, so your mileage will certainly vary on how tolerant you are to its rigid structure. Stalker 2 is a game that shouldn't exist due to its complicated development and the team’s passion to see it through. Regardless of the incredible story of what is behind this game’s history, I just couldn't find a compromise between what this game offered and what I wanted from it.
Developer - GSC Game World. Publisher - GSC Game World. Released - November 20th, 2024. Available On - Xbox Series X/S, Windows. Rated - (M) Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco. Platform Reviewed - Xbox Series X. Review Access - Stalker 2 was downloaded and played on Xbox Game Pass.
Jeff is the original founder of Analog Stick Gaming. His favorite games include The Witcher III, the Mass Effect Trilogy, Hi-Fi Rush, Stellar Blade, Hellbade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and the Legend of Heroes series, especially Trails of Cold Steel III & IV.