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

Background

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl (HoC) is the highly anticipated sequel to the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. trilogy. As a massive S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fan, the prospect of a new game in the franchise was a novel feeling after years of only new mods and mod updates to get excited for. But the high levels of anticipation were tempered a good deal by a lot of doubts about whether or not this official sequel would be any good. When it was released back in November, I was overall, fairly excited and pleased by what I saw and heard. I didn't have a PC that could run it, so I just sat back and took in what everyone else was saying about it, knowing I'd have to wait awhile.

The general consensus seemed to be that the team at GSC Game World pulled it off. They created a worthy sequel after all these years while being under quite strained real-world circumstances. There were issues no doubt, bugs were prevalent, and the hardware requirements were extreme, but the primary complaint was the broken/missing A-Life system. We'll get into it more later, but the moral of the story here was that HoC was seen as a success with some asterisks.

Holiday break rolled around and in the process of selling off something on my wife's Facebook account I discovered the wild west that is Marketplace's PC hardware market. I had priced out a PC upgrade over the summer and just couldn't stomach dropping two grand for a modest upgrade. But now with used Marketplace parts I was able to put together a very similar PC while selling my old parts for a net cost of ~$200! Suddenly HoC was on the table, and I couldn't resist picking it up.

First Impressions

Alright, so for the "review" I'll be upfront and say that I haven't finished the game and don't plan to anytime soon. I've played about 50 hours and been through roughly half of the areas the game has to offer and I'm just a little soured on the overall experience. I believe HoC has a high chance of becoming a great game both through GSC's support and the modding community. So, this isn't me writing the game off, just putting it to the side for some time. I still have a lot of thoughts on HoC though, so here's my impressions based on how the game is in versions 1.1 and 1.2. The policy being, that I can review a game I didn't finish if the game itself isn't finished as well.

About 15 of those 50 hours were spent in the Lesser Zone, the starting area of the game. Two contrasting reasons kept me there, the first one being what I thought was a broken quest. Early on in the main story you're sent to a military base called 'The Sphere'. Upon arriving you're often quickly spotted by a lookout in the watch tower at the front gate, but to my surprise after taking him out, he was alone. I climbed up the tower to get a view and spot more military, but the entire base was empty... strange. I climbed back down the ladder and just as I hopped off, out of the corner of my eye I saw five military soldiers at the gate. Some might call this an ambush; most would call it total bullshit. Those dudes spawned in ten meters away from me when my back was turned on the ladder. Whatever, I fled further into the base taking cover between some barracks. I picked off the initial group, but then the soldiers just kept coming. Getting backed into a corner by seemingly an infinite flood of soldiers; I decided to make a push back towards the gate to escape. However, in the process I was taking so much heat from what seemed like nowhere. With no one in sight and three of my sides backed by brick walls, bullets were still flying from all angles and then I started hearing the soldier's voices over my left and right shoulders... they were in the walls. What can I say, the barrels sticking out of the brickwork were a dead giveaway.

That's when I quit out of the game and gave it a break for a couple of days. The whole sequence pissed me off not just because of the bugged soldiers but because the spawned in soldiers give off a vibe so counter to the experiences found in the originals. There were so many instances in those games where you'd be able to scope out a location before executing a plan. You could observe the mercs at the waste processing plant from outside the walls before infiltrating through a sewer pipe for example. This encounter at The Sphere felt so haphazard and bugged that it made me doubt the game's design as a whole.

When I came back after a few days I decided to focus on smaller side quests for the time being, thinking that my game was bugged and hoping the devs would be able to fix it soon. And to my joy, the Lesser Zone has quite a few fun and interesting quests. You get to know the people around the main town of Zalissya and then venture out to the corners of the area, investigating various points of interest. I thought it was a nice tutorial area that was both expansive and also a nutshell for what the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. experience is.

So, after an update to version 1.2 and 10ish hours running around exploring the Lesser Zone, I thought to myself that I should give the Sphere mission another shot to see if it was fixed. But guess what, the jokes on me because the mission marker actually leads you to an underground pipe with a door at the end of it and that's how you're actually supposed to proceed in the story! Geez, you were never supposed to go into the military base at ground level in the first place. But that's what the game gets for having a buggy reputation. In a normal game I may have been more likely to assume that I was doing something wrong and not blame it on the game. Also, the infinite spawning soldiers still suck any way you put it.

That first impression, while not exactly repeated in my playtime, encapsulates my conflicted feelings on the current state of HoC. There's a lot of good stuff here but also a lot that frustrates the hell out of me. For this review I'll be bullet-pointing the highlights, the lowlights, and the little things in between. I hope to get to revisit this game down the road and say they fixed a lot of this, but only time will tell.

Highlights

The iconic atmosphere is 90% intact

What is S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s iconic atmosphere? Well, I have a whole article/video series on this, check it out here:

A Love Letter to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s Iconic Atmosphere

Plus, my beginners guide to the series!

Sevastromo StationSevastromo

It's fair to say I really appreciate the art/world/sound design of the original trilogy so it's a huge relief to say that this sequel still has that intangible quality. A few aspects detract from it, some were fixable in the options menu others need fixing by GSC. Turning off the combat music, disabling most HUD elements, modding out the corny death screen, and using Ukrainian voice acting all helped this version of the Zone feel more like the one I remembered.

We'll get into the graphics, the good and the bad, but what GSC has done in updating the Zone is downright incredible. The best part about the game for me was essentially being on one big nostalgia trip as I went from one iconic location to the next, meeting old friends along the way. Traversing the open world is reminiscent of the originals too. Mutants, artifacts, emissions, old machinery, decaying buildings, vacated factories, it's all there to stumble across and explore. I did feel the open world soundscape to be a little lacking, it just doesn't have quite the same forlorn/hostile vibe to it. Also, I kinda miss stalkers looking like this:

Graphics are absolutely superb (at times)

This is the best looking game I've ever played... sometimes. The sometimes I'll leave for my critiques section, but as a rule of thumb, the outdoor areas and completely indoor areas look fantastic. Very detailed and atmospheric in the right ways. Pictures speak louder than words so checkout my selection of screenshots below:

Weather is super immersive

I never knew I needed better weather in my games until a gust of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 wind blew across my face. Seriously, the wind that comes with storms in this game is so damn good. The way foliage bends and the whooshing sound effects that accompany it really make you feel like you're in the Zone. Lightning strikes will smack the ground as a flurry of sparks careen into the environment creating one of the most effective jump-scare generators in video game history. The rain is as moody and dreary as ever. I love how your footsteps become a squelchy mess as rain drops drip around the end of your AK's dust cover.

Gun mechanics are detailed and with snappy animations

A bunch of little things lead to guns in video games feeling 'real' and not just a stiff, digital nerf gun. HoC does a bunch of these little things. The animations for reloads, switching firing modes, unjamming the weapon, equipping an attachment, and simply firing a round are all snappy and slick. Nothing is too tedious, locking you into lengthy animations. The way guns interact with the world also has a nice attention to detail. My favorite thing about it is the tight object collision boxes that seem to be implemented on every environmental object. If you can see a target, you can aim your weapon and hit it. Examples are being able to fire in the gap between a door and its door jam or lacing a bullet between the piping of a tractor's engine block. A limitation being that if the weapon can't fit in the particular spot, the barrel will be raised as it collides with the environment. It's a nice touch and makes using handguns in tight spaces a legitimate tactic.

Oh yeah, cutscenes are top notch

This is coming from someone who's been known to straight uninstall games that push it too far with cutscenes. I like how the originals did it, a brief intro and outro cutscene and that's about it. In HoC, cutscenes are laced throughout the mainline story. I have issues with the pacing of the story beats but the quality of the cutscenes themselves are top notch. Great CGI, great acting and motion capture of the acting, overall, I thought they were really fun.

Significant Flaws

Outdoor lighting inside

So, I raved about the graphics, praising the immense attention to detail and atmosphere conveyed. But graphics are also the primary reason for taking a break from HoC right in the middle of my playthrough. The problem is specific, and I really hope the developers can address it soon. The major issue I have is with indoor lighting when it's from an outside source. Check out the screenshots below.

If you were unacquainted S.T.A.L.K.E.R. you might assume it was set in the Sahara Desert. The sun is absolutely blinding when looking out a door or window! But then you step outside and it's just your average dreary Ukrainian day... The lighting is not only blinding but also has the incredible feature of being both blurry and high contrast at the same time! Some interiors are just far too dark as well. And that right there is the big problem, I know there's a beautiful game here, it's just this awful lighting gets in the way sometimes and makes me feel like I'm missing out. If you're not convinced by my complaints check out this quick video I made of just simply walking in and out of the bar in Zalissya:

Yeah... it's that bad. Apparently, the game is trying to simulate a natural thing our eyes do where our pupils dilate and constrict based on the brightness of our environment. All I can say it they've failed in horrible fashion. No graphics option I touch changes this and I'm running at over 100 fps on high settings, so I have room to tweak things. I'm at a loss with this, so I will patiently wait for it to be fixed.

To hold me over, I decided to play The Last of Us for the first time. And the only reason I bring this up is because of the instant irony I was smacked with by the main menu screen. Holy shit! A good-looking window, I forgot those existed! I realize this is an out of game engine thing, but it turns out The Last of Us has damn good lighting in game too, so the irony holds true regardless.

A-Life and AI issues

So, these two related issues take a close second as to why I'm pausing my playthrough. The A-Life is straight up bad, broken, not fun, not immersive, and definitely does not feel like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. I really do not like modding a first playthrough, but a mod of the A-Life system was the only thing that got me as far I did. The base game implementation can be simply explained as every 15 minutes spawn a group of stalkers and mutants ten meters away from the players and then let them proceed in duking it out, at least that's what it feels like. You'll be minding your own business, traveling along the road, when intense gun fire and loud mutant moans will sprout up out of nowhere right next to you. It's bewildering, there were no mutant sounds a moment ago, you never saw a group of loners pass by, the fight just spawned into existence at a moment's notice. With this you lose out on the intrigue that is created by hearing something off in the distance. In previous games, you'd try to decipher where the sound was coming from and who was involved and then decide if you even wanted to get involved. That's all lost in HoC, you never hear things off in the distance...

I should've started by describing what this A-Life system even is supposed to be... So, A-Life was a system in prior entries that attempted to control the AI in the environment both near and far away from the player character. The goal was to create a lived-in, dynamic environment with NPCs being a significant part of that. AI would have objectives they'd pursue that would push them into an inherent conflict with mutants or opposing factions. The result was an unpredictable zone that would change over time. My favorite aspect of A-Life is that dynamism it provides. Sometimes you'll just see a group of stalkers walking off on the horizon, other times bandits will have set up camp in a new location surprising you, sometimes there will be a clash off in the distance that you need to pull out your binoculars to observe.

On the more individual level for AI, I find the combat AI a little frustrating. My biggest frustration is that enemies once they've spotted you seem to never lose track of you again. You can sprint away and hide, try to fake them out by hiding in a different spot when they're not looking, switch cover in a sneaky fashion, but none it matters, they always make a beeline straight to your location. It's odd to watch in action as they do this slow zombie walk, while aiming down sights, and firing at you, while leaving cover. I don't like the feel of it, enemies should feel and act more intelligent than this. Issues compound when a cool feature like bullet penetration becomes a huge red flag telling you that the enemy knows your exact location behind a wooden board despite them never seeing you move there. That's frustrating to say the least.

Resource balance is out of control

Who knew the Zone was so rich and plentiful? So, here's the situation, I'm at a hub with my stash, traders, etc. and I get a quest or two to go out to the fringes of the map. To prep, I'd review my inventory making sure I have the equipment and consumables I need for the outing. In this example if we look at my medical supplies I have: seven medkits, five bandages, and three antirads. I set out, complete my quests, loot some stuff, investigate an additional area, search for an artifact, get in a shootout with bandits, normal stalker shit, and then return to base. I go to my stash to review my inventory and what do I have? 19 medkits, 21 bandages, eight antirads... What happened? Did I just raid a hospital? Nope, nine out of ten times this is how I'd return from my outings. And while I am a veteran stalker at this point, this is my first playthrough on the hardest difficulty. This is why I say the resource balancing is broken. It feels very antithetical to the post-apocalyptic setting to be dropping copious amounts of food, beverage, and medical supplies on the ground in the middle of nowhere because your inventory's stuffed to the gills.

I feel like this should be an easy fix. The loot in the world just needs cut way back. I think in particular the crates should be cut back drastically. In the Zone you'll find crates with either medical supplies, ammunition, or food. On top of this you can find all of these things on dead bodies, in stashes, or just sitting out on a table or shelf. The crates I think overdo it. They were in the originals, but way less in number and rarely had anything inside. Moral of the story here is that I don't need something in every room in every location, sometimes less is more.

The Elden Ring problem

This one is more of a personal problem I have with larger games; it really feels like these types of games are not meant to be played by a person with my kind of schedule. The Elden Ring problem was: too much of a good thing. To expand on that, more isn't always a good thing; it's the pacing of gameplay and story content that matters. In HoC, you'll get two to five minutes of character/story-based content and the next 10 hours of gameplay is exploring a swamp and then at the end you get another sprinkling of story stuff. For someone who plays a couple hours on the weekend and then if I'm lucky maybe a half an hour on a random weekday night, 10 hours is two full works weeks and a dozen kid bedtime routines ago. So, when Col. Korshunov starts berating me for something or other, all I can think is...

"Who the fuck is that guy?!?" Seriously though how am I supposed to remember anything. There's no encyclopedia, no personal diary, the quest log is very bare bones on information. Sorry, unless you give me the in-game tools to keep up with the story and its characters I'm going to have to say your game is bloated and poorly paced. I don't think this should be that crazy of an opinion for a 100+ hour long game.

I should clarify that when I say this game is bloated, I mean bloated in size. For the amount of story and side quests that exists, the Zone is just too big. It's too bad because the actual areas of the Zone are damn beautiful and I wanted to get to know them better. It always felt like I was being whisked away by the story, but an underlying reason was because there wasn't much else to do. This is where my Call of Pripyat bias is coming out. I'd rather have three areas of the Zone that were densely designed with intertwining questlines and evolving character/faction relationships. But what we got was essentially the whole Zone where you can meet a bunch of new and old characters in a string of pretty high-quality mainline quests. It's impressive in its own right and maybe all this comes down to is that I'd prefer a 25 hour S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game as opposed to one three times that. It's just like FromSoftware's games; I like the gameplay loop for 60 hours not 120 hours...

Good news is that there's a lot of ways GSC can remedy the issue. Here's a couple of my suggestions:

More side quests: I would love a full-fledged return of the detailed, intertwining quest design of Call of Pripyat. The Sultan-Beard-Kalyna quest line sort of dabbled with this type of thing, but it was too shallow in my opinion and only one of a few.

Faction warfare: Clear Sky had a broken but fun system that saw factions warring against each other for territory. Something like this seems difficult to do, but they almost accomplished it before. This is probably the most far-fetched idea but damn it would change things up in the Zone.

Fix A-Life: This is the most likely thing to happen because it seems like there's been a clear expectation set by the community (based on what they were sold on) and rightfully so. I just hope the system is robust and fun and happens sometime this decade.

Better/more information: I already touched on this one too, but please give me more information in the PDA. A bestiary, an encyclopedia of characters, a more detailed quest log, a personal journal, something! I know loading screens are a thing of the past, but I remember The Witcher 3 had these little voice-acted, narrative vignettes on the loading screen. At the time, I think I was a bit annoyed with how persistent they were, but they were effective at reminding me of where I was at in the narrative. I don't think that's the answer, but I also need some attempt from the developers to keep me engaged with this long game.

Nitpicks

Moving while in inventory

In HoC you'll be constantly covering a lot of ground traveling to and from various locations all over the zone. It would be really nice if we could walk while our inventory is open. This is something the originals allowed and I'm not sure why it was taken away. It was really nice to have this option as you can keep moving while managing your inventory, dropping unneeded loot or switching out an artifact for instance.

Various PDA annoyances

I'll admit that I've been spoiled by the Gunslinger/Anomaly 3D PDA. I think the 3D PDA is really immersive but it's also functionally convenient as it can be lowered and used while moving around. I love this because you can have a location on your PDA map, lower it, and that orient yourself to it in the real world. That's really nice for someone who usually plays without a minimap or HUD compass. For some reason they also removed the encyclopedia, achievements, and statistics tabs. The latter two are fairly gamey so I get it, but I would've loved an encyclopedia for this huge game. Oh, and you can't move while looking at your PDA either.

Voice acting

I'm an English speaker and I miss the Ukrainian plus eastern European broken English voice acting that was used in the originals. In HoC there's either full Ukrainian where I must use subtitles or there's English which unfortunately seems to be entirely voice acted by people from the UK. I've tried both options and determined I'd rather struggle to read subtitles than experience the immersion breaking English voice acting. For some reason subtitles in video games are tough for me despite them being a requirement for any movie I'm watching. Something about reading subtitles in games feels like patting the top of your head while rubbing your belly at the same time. Nevertheless, the broken English voice acting of the originals was only sparsely used, primarily for important story characters and quest givers, but maybe there's a good reason they skipped on the broken English this time.

Screen effects

There are a couple screen effects that I promptly modded out. First there's a stealth screen effect. Notably stealth doesn't even work well, so why do we need this ugly vignetting that happens when you crouch. I know I'm crouching... I just pressed the button; I don't need my screen to go dark. Second there's the radiation screen effect. This one just seems redundant. We already have the radiation icon and meter in the corner plus we have the Geiger counter sound effect, we don't' need the screen to turn all fuzzy like I've all of a sudden flipped to the wrong channel on my old television. It wouldn't be so bad if the effect didn't start when you had barely any rads and saved it for when your radiation meter was fully pegged, but this isn't the case.

Press and hold hotkeys

Why are there only two hotkeys for four quick slots? It's for players who use consoles, that's pretty obvious. But why is this locked down for PC players? In the keybind configuration, PC players cannot split out hotkeys for all four quick slots. Seems like that should've been an obvious thing not to do.

Verdict

NR

Right now, unless you like early access games, I do not recommend S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl. I'm glad I tried it, but I should've waited at least another year. I'll be back when they implement some major fixes to the lighting and A-Life systems.