S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 review: a glorious and beautiful pain in the ass

There’s a particular feeling when you’re wandering alone in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl. Perhaps you’re squelching through wet, misty marshland, flanked by gigantic reeds. A dark purple sky of unbroken cloud takes up half of the screen; gigantic rusty machinery creates an odd and unnerving silhouette. You hear gunfire in the distance. The sound moves closer, followed by the unmistakable groans of a mutated beast. The sensation sharpens of being pitted against a wilderness that doesn’t care whether you live or die. This is not an unpleasant type of survival. To call the Zone home is to feel an almost elemental sense of freedom: a fantasy of existing purely in the moment, putting one foot in front of the other. 

You had better like walking because in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, the absorbing and currently buggy sequel to the trailblazing trilogy of shooters from the 2000s, you do a lot of it. The map, based on the real-world exclusion zone created in the wake of the 1986 nuclear disaster, is 64 kilometers squared. Objectives tend to be found in derelict buildings dotted about the hostile terrain. You set out on another long trek (hopefully with a functioning gas mask), clasping a metal bolt alongside your rifle. It’s wise to toss the bolt in front of you regularly to test for anomalies: some cause the air itself to warp and bend; others make tiny shards of skin-shredding glass to hover in the atmosphere. Coming into contact with any of them can prove swiftly fatal.

This version of the Zone is a glorious and beautiful pain in the ass, able to hold its own with other Zones littered throughout pop culture: the restricted site found in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 movie Stalker or Area X in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach novels. It’s thrilling to see Ukrainian studio GSC Game World depict its native landscape so evocatively and in a way that runs counter to much of the prevailing wisdom about how an open-world video game should look and function.

In S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, the Zone is conspicuously horizontal. Forget about “see that mountain”; when you do get a good view, all you see is a shimmering expanse of bog and grassland. The color palette is notably muted: a smudge of murky browns, queasy greens, and charcoal blues — rich, earthy, sometimes squalid. The Zone’s inhabitants are almost all depressed men swilling energy drinks. Have they come to this extreme environment because they are in flight from something at home? Or because the environment mirrors some hidden part of their own psychological makeup?

For Skif, our spiky protagonist, the answer turns out to be both. His home outside the Zone is set ablaze by a rogue anomaly. He enters looking for answers before getting embroiled in a plot to seize a valuable piece of tech. From there, the narrative branches. You’re free to chum up with various factions like a professionalized military group called the Ward or a band of metaphysical dreamers led by a guy called Scar. But I quickly lost track of who I was in cahoots with and who I wronged. The tangled web of motivations, grudges, and backstories was often inscrutable. Like Tarkovsky’s Stalker or Annihilation, the quest here felt slippery and ever-changing, so I simply stalked toward my quest marker with the score of evocatively discordant synths swirling in my ears.

The first few hours are punishing. Without much cash, you scavenge damaged weapons prone to jamming. In time, and with a gradually expanding arsenal of exactingly rendered weaponry, the game softens. The kind of emergent, AI-driven moments that made the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise a cult classic also begin to materialize from the metaphysical ether. At one point, I agreed to flush out some mutants from a building for a pair of fellow stalkers. As I was doing so, a rival group opened fire on us, all while a pack of rabid dogs ravaged both parties. The ensuing three minutes were bloody, chaotic, and quite brilliant. At another moment, I led a group of enemy stalkers back to the base of a faction that lives on a gigantic, irradiated trash heap. As my enemies neared the perimeter, guards assumed their defensive positions and unleashed fire in one seamless, dazzlingly orchestrated concert. 

But S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 doesn’t just replicate the achievements of its forebears. The open world furthers the moody, proto-walking sim elements of the originals. Because this Zone is so large, preparation is even more key than in previous games. This occurs alongside a tapestry of navigation, combat, resource management, and crucially, rest, all set against a day-night cycle that genuinely affects gameplay. During especially long stretches of walking, there is much space to contemplate your own actions. In my own case, why did I feel compelled to ruthlessly murder nearly every major NPC despite being on otherwise good terms with them? The Zone has a habit of remaking anything that comes into contact with it, and I fast transformed into another of its monsters.

When S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 works as intended, it’s an emergent sandbox capable of producing simultaneously bleak and hilarious moments, all while giving the illusion of a world functioning independently of the player’s inputs. But perhaps inevitably because of the game’s troubled development — which saw over half of the development team move to Prague from Kyiv because of the Russia-Ukraine war — there is some unevenness.

The biggest issue is combat. While gunplay is crisp and responsive, enemies frequently look in the wrong direction to the threat that they should be facing. Stranger is the way that some human foes (not the mutants that actually possess the ability to become invisible) miraculously appear out of thin air. Another odd glitch saw a character’s head become detached from their body during a cutscene. The following gunfight had a farcical quality. Should I be aiming where the head is hovering or where it should be? These moments, which appear too frequently to be waved away, dispel the Zone’s otherwise convincing illusion. 

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 has arrived in a manner that feels tantalizing close to greatness. About 10 hours into the game, the wide-eyed poetic outsider, Scar, lays out his take on the Zone. There is a “dark” side, which has the capacity to strip humans of their free will, and there is the “shining” side — the wondrous, miraculous aspect of this changed place that casts the very essence of life in a new light. “We want the shining Zone to reveal itself,” says Scar longingly. 

With a few patches, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 may yet become this “shining” version of itself. As it stands, the game requires you to submit to the spell that is being cast. The rewards for those who can overlook the wonky combat, bodies that glitch through scenery, and other audio-visual quirks are considerable. That core feeling of raw survival in an uncaring environment — lightning cracking in the distance, rain lashing down, and the disquieting noise of far-off gunfire — never wanes.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl launches on November 20th on Xbox and PC.