Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl review – 2024’s most compelling survival game experience?-Steve Boxer-Entertainment – Metro

Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl – go with him if you want to live (GSC Game World)

A Ukrainian-made mix of survival horror and first person shooter, whose branching narrative and complex open world is one of the most impressive gaming has ever seen.

The fact that Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl even exists should be classed as a minor miracle. Its Ukrainian developer, GSC Game World – now split between Kyiv and Prague – had to find a way of dealing with the invasion of its homeland while creating the long-awaited follow-up to 2007’s beloved Stalker: Shadow Of Chernobyl (Chernobyl is the Russian spelling, you can imagine why they changed it). The end result is an irresistibly compelling, characterful, and modern-feeling survival shooter that speaks volumes about their skill and tenacity.

Given the enduring popularity of the original game, GSC Game World hasn’t strayed far from its blueprint: Stalker 2 is very much the modern technology sequel that franchise fans have long craved. It even starts in strikingly similar fashion, with your character, Skif, in a truck heading to the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (known by everyone merely as the Zone). Although this time Skif, tasked with using a sophisticated and expensive scanner to gather data about the Zone’s weird scientific anomalies, is given a short tutorial introduction before he is robbed of all his gear and left for dead.

The series’ backstory involves a second disaster at Chornobyl, which creates all sorts of mutants and where the rules of physics seem to break down, creating weird, almost supernatural anomalies. Although it’s not officially related, the concept is heavily inspired by the 1979 Soviet film Stalker, which in turn is an adaptation of the seminal science fiction novel Roadside Picnic. The resulting set-up is grim and foreboding but endlessly fascinating once you learn to become a Stalker yourself.

Stalker 2 is all about survival, particularly in its early stages. It’s a game which, every time you respawn, tells you how many times you have died, so it pays to save often (although it has a more forgiving tendency to autosave than you might have expected). Until Skif finds his feet, guns and ammunition are hard to come by, although dead bodies containing precious loot are plentiful for those who are bold enough to explore, and you soon amass a wealth of clues leading to handy equipment stashes.

Finding decent weaponry and clothing (such as a gas mask) is vital, because Stalker 2 isn’t one of those games in which your character’s stats steadily improve until he becomes some sort of superhuman. You’ll come across pockets of intense radiation, for example, which can only be traversed safely if you neck radiation meds beforehand.

GSC Game World has gone to town on the fantasy element of the Zone’s anomalies, which may spit jets of fire at you, electrocute you, suddenly propel you forward, or pull you into the air and rip your insides out. An anomaly meter warns you of their presence, but you have to be constantly vigilant, looking for subtle visual clues in the environment; as you amass a set of artefacts to attach to your belt, you begin to acquire the means of negotiating some of these anomalies, but you never feel truly safe.

Then there’s the Zone’s wildlife – often mutated and always fearsome. Giant wild boars will knock you down, while packs of dogs will circle around you, moving so erratically that targeting them with a gun is tricky. Shadowy, semi-invisible mutants will materialise in front of you and rake you with their claws. You’ll expend clips full of precious bullets trying to eliminate packs of giant, misshapen rats.

Luckily, Stalker 2’s sound design is fantastic: you really need to use your ears to anticipate enemy approaches and the game’s ambient noise fosters a delicious feeling of dread. Stalker 2 is far scarier than most games that class themselves as survival horror.

The Zone itself feels like Stalker 2’s main character. In this iteration, it’s as visually bleak as ever – when hanging out with the Ward military police your first glimpse of a vehicle that isn’t rusted to oblivion feels startling. Paint peels off every wall. The weather is filthy, as electrical storms known as emissions will insta-kill you if you aren’t in a building with a proper roof, and those are often hard to find. You spend a lot of time crawling around sewers and underground caves. And every 100 metres you traverse there’s something to find, a character to interact with or a new problem to deal with.

Visually, Stalker 2 may not quite represent the current state of the art, but the richness and believability – fantasy elements notwithstanding – of its huge open world is second to none. There are plenty of familiar areas from the first game, such as junkyard of Garbage, but they definitely look a lot better this time round and are far more interactive and teeming with life.

Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl – you’re going to need that (GSC Game World)

Story-wise, Stalker 2 feels surprisingly personal, since its narrative arc eschews convention. As you navigate Skif around the Zone, taking on side missions and helping or killing random people you encounter, you create your own story. Skif always has an overarching quest – initially to find a character called Solder, who he perceives as having betrayed him – but rushing through the main story while ignoring the vast plethora of other activities on offer is contrary to the whole point of the game.

Side missions help to equip Skif better for the main missions, and as the central story progresses, and he ventures deeper into the Zone, you start to encounter difficult moral dilemmas. For decades, games have boasted of storylines that are unique for each player, but Stalker 2 comes closer than most to achieving that – which also ensures a great deal of replayability.

Once again, the Zone contains a number of factions: the Ward, who are effectively the police; Justice, who concentrate on hunting mutants; and Freedom, who control the area’s economy (via a coupon currency). There are also bandits, traders, and technicians who will fix and upgrade your weapons – vital, since guns swiftly deteriorate and start to jam.

Despite their limited ammo the weapons are fantastic; you get a handgun as standard, but soon acquire an armoury of shotguns, sniper rifles, and every form of automatic weaponry. The one area in which the combat system is less than impressive is the clunkiness of wielding a knife, which proves disappointingly ineffective against enemies like rats and dogs.

Enemy AI can be variable; soldiers might snipe you from vast distance and spray you with fusillades up close, but then appear oblivious to your presence when you’re only feet away. Finding cover in firefights and tending your wounds is an essential tactic and, in general, Stalker 2 will exercise your tactical combat ability in full, but you’re never entirely convinced your opponents know what they’re doing.

The game’s script is not the most nuanced, and it’s noticeable that the game features very few female characters, but there are plenty of opportunities to, for example, sit down at a campfire and have a philosophical discussion with fellow Stalkers. There’s also plenty of rough-and-ready virtual camaraderie to be found, even if the dialogue is not always great.

It’s inevitable that such a big, open world game, laden with systems that are triggered when you reach certain areas, would contain glitches, and it does, but GSC Game World seems at least to have eliminated crash bugs, and during the review period no fewer than two large patches were made available. No doubt more will come after launch, but overall, given its size and ambitiousness, Stalker 2 doesn’t feel particularly buggy, even though there are certainly problems.

At launch, Stalker 2 is magnificent, and it will only get better with time. Its depiction of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone is an absolute tour de force and easily the best representation of the concept so far in a video game. Stalker 2 is a true sandbox game but with just enough structure to make it approachable for any player, in what is one of the most compelling gaming experiences of the year.

Formats: Xbox Series X/S (reviewed) and PC
Price: £49.99*
Publisher: GSC Game World
Developer: GSC Game World
Release Date: 20th November 2024
Age Rating: 18

*available day one on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass

Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl – that’s weird (GSC Game World)

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