S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart Of Chornobyl review: a captivating survival shooter, even with bits falling off

We’re probably all past “And in the game” jokes by now, but it is fitting that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart Of Chornobyl is about venturing into a shattered world and enduring the worst of its logic-defying hardships to find the treasures within. This is a bold, uncompromising survival FPS that can easily capture you for days on end – but I can’t invite you back into the Zone without hammering in a few hundred warning signs reading “DANGER: BUGS”. In Ukrainian, obviously.

A quick recap: Heart Of Chornobyl is in fact the fourth S.T.A.L.K.E.R., built by a revived GSC Game World led by veterans of the original trilogy. It once again dumps you in an even weirder rendition of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, where a combination of nuclear fallout and (by now a series of) psychic experiment fuckups has left it teeming with mutants and mercenaries. Not to mention all the anomalies: patches of usually-deadly phenomena that poke their fifteen mutated tongues out at the laws of physics.

Many years have passed, both in-game and out, since our last visit, and while this hasn’t done the Zone much good – almost all of it remains a scarred, rusted hellhole – it has forced S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 to get with the times as a shooter. That doesn’t mean it’s now more Call of Duty than Call of Pripyat, mind. Gunfights are still tense, brutal affairs, with limited ammo, jamming-prone guns and aggressive enemies encouraging a methodical approach over running and gunning. It’s more that combat feels smoother and, dare I say it, more satisfying, with its slick animations and thunderous weapon bangs making for good times despite your own fragility. Some of the mutants are, by contrast, certified bullet sponges, but clearing a room of gasmasked thugs can still be and often is thrilling.

Again, that’s not to say that this is S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with the edges sanded down. For all its upgraded production values, Heart Of Chornobyl still makes clear that life in the Zone is horrible and likely short. Just tooled up for a big mission? Here’s three monster attacks and a bandit ambush so you’re limping and bulletless by the time you get there. Found some nice loot? Get ready to haul it off at baby crawling speed, because the weight carry limits mean you can only travel unencumbered by taking the absolute essentials. Favourite gun jammed twice before it can finish a single magazine? Sorry, moron, you should have spent three-quarters of your life savings to get it repaired by a technician, such as the ones that the main mission flow repeatedly drags you away from for hours at a time.

The friction isn’t just there to be cruel, though. It encourages planning and thoughtfulness, whether that means plotting a route across the map that allows for more frequent trading stops or a change to your artifact-laden loadout (valuable stat-boosting items pilfered from anomalies) to cover your stamina or carry weight deficiencies. My favourite of these magic, if usually self-irradiating orbs granted me a huge buff to stamina recovery, which made hoofin’ it across the Zone noticeably quicker. The decadent Western concept of fast-travel is available via freelance guides, but they’ll only take you between major settlements, for fees that are mighty steep in the early game.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s love of walking, however, is mainly just a means to nudge you towards most of its best bits. Chancing upon another visually striking, artifact-hiding anomaly, for instance. Or the genuine horror of a night-time Bloodsucker attack, the cloaking, tentacle-faced abomination taking bloody swipes at you from the darkness. Or getting caught in an Emission, a lethal map-wide psi-storm that turn the skies a hellish orange and sends you dashing for the nearest shelter. Or the brilliant moment when two (or more) of the Zone’s threats clatter into each other, rather than just you. When a pack of giant boars surrounded me on a fallen boulder, safe from their maws but lacking the ammo to fight back, an unlikely saviour appeared in a Bloodsucker, who slaughtered the pigs before circling me – only for some roving bandits to show up, aggroing the beast long enough for me to jump off and dash to safety.

Roaming around Heart Of Chornobyl provides ample opportunity for these memorable moments of overlapping murder sources. Psychic attacks – from specific enemies, or seemingly from the Zone itself – can inject some chaos into otherwise routine firefights, with deceptive voices floating into your ears and imaginary baddies mixed in with the real ones. It’s best to carry some psi protection tablets so these encounters don’t get too overwhelming, though the more fantastical aspects of the Zone can work in your favour too – I was grinning with mischievous joy when an Emission hit just as I approached an enemy base, sending all its guards running inside and leaving me to dash unimpeded (if also at imminent risk of becoming radioactive dust) into a side entrance.

This kind of thing might be music to the ears of starving S.T.A.L.K.E.R. enthusiasts, as will Heart Of Chernobyl’s success in maintaining another series highlight: the atmosphere. The modern Zone is as tense, lonely, and sometimes eerily beautiful as ever. It’s a collage of thick forests, decrepit Soviet architecture, and otherworldly warping that seems at once frozen in time and liable to lash out at any moment. It’s especially spooky at night: your head-mounted torch has the illuminating power of a vape pen LED, so navigating anywhere after sundown must be done without visual confirmation of anything that might be rapidly approaching from more than nine feet away from your face. Excellent storms here, too, with heavy winds, pounding lightning strikes, and thrashing trees that make it sound just like a mutant is barrelling through them.

There’s a great sense of place to Heart Of Chornobyl, and not just thanks to this atmosphere-building. Every single NPC is uniquely named – another returning series quirk – and while buildings and locales are technically static, there is something alive and storied about them, from the simple creaking of long-abandoned metalwork to the hidden tunnels and scribbled notes that flesh out Chornobyl’s lost hamlets. It’s a compelling argument for handcrafted open worlds over the lifelessness that procedural generation so often brings.

Another authentic S.T.A.L.K.E.R. touch, albeit one that’s more enjoyable ironically, is the jank. Yes, Heart Of Chornobyl might have tightened up the combat and smoothed out the controls, but look elsewhere and you’ll see the stitching. As well as some unfinished gluing, and more than a little haphazard welding. In-game cutscenes, for example, often start with a lurch, as its NPC actors visibly spawn in before folding into their intended poses. Then there’s the faction system, which lets you choose which of several different merc and stalker bands to cosy up with or betray – but if you’re mates with one faction before abandoning them later, some of their soldiers won’t get the memo, standing by while you waltz past their defences or even start stabbing their colleagues in plain view.

Much of the outright bugginess is benign, in an almost charming kind of way: think ragdoll corpses flailing out of control, or props held by an NPC falling out of sync with their character model so you end up having a conversation with their Walkman headphones. That’s funny! I can live with that. But scout’s honour, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 on the whole is easily the most borked FPS I’ve played in years, often in ways that aren’t quite so amusing.

Off the top of my head, here’s a very partial list: radio voices losing the radio filter effect mid-sentence. Your character gaining a radio filter effect when he shouldn’t. The artifact indicator light on your starting detector not working. The HUD compass disappearing. Audio stutter. Game stutter, despite compiling shaders on every goddamn launch. Character mouth flaps not working in cutscenes. Flashing textures. The enemy awareness indicator showing every time you unpause. Subtitles showing when you’ve switched them off. Weapon crosshairs expanding to the edges of the screen during a conversation.

I didn’t witness anything completely, impassably game-breaking, but did come close with one mandatory objective that refused to complete; my entirely accidental workaround to this was storming off in a huff until, about 700 metres down the road, I got a radio call thanking me for a successful mission. After which, I could slope back and progress the story. But that was only after an hour or so of bumbling around, reloading and restarting, until I’d essentially given up. Guides ed Ollie has also informed of an incompletable side mission early on, though I missed that one myself.

GSC say they’re launching with a “Day 0” patch that could address some of these bugs, but there’s just so many, so diverse in nature, that it’s hard to see S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 releasing in anything approaching rock-solid shape. In fairness, part of this is Fallout: New Vegas syndrome, where some level of impropriety is inevitable given the game’s ambition and scope; blasting through the main questline took me just shy of 40 hours, and completing all the side missions and unmarked encounters apparently takes that up to 100. And you still won’t see everything in a single playthrough, given the branching storyline that twists and turns depending on your faction choices.

I also don’t think it’s overly sentimental to point out that unlike whichever Bethesda-published bugfest you could name, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 has been forced to take shape amid real-life horrors. This is a dev team that’s been forced out of their Kyiv home (and in one especially tragic case, slain) by an invading force that commits war crimes on an apparently daily basis. Even if you never make it far enough to see the credits’ unsettlingly long In Memoriam section, simply knowing these circumstances is enough to make “Urrrrrgh, game don’t work” complaints – as if calling the helpline for a malfunctioning toaster – seem churlish at best.

Somewhat surprisingly, Heart Of Chronobyl is not overtly anti-war itself, choosing instead to stay true to the themes of human ambition vs. our cosmic insignificance that have been central to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. since its origins as the sci-fi novel Roadside Picnic. It is, however, more keen than previous games on highlighting Ukrainian culture. Radios play a mix of classic and contemporary tunes by real Ukrainian artists, and you get the option to use Ukrainian voice acting (with subtitles in your local language) as a single-click toggle on the initial setup. Traipsing through the Zone, you might even notice a number of bus shelters with eye-catching mosaic art, an enduring expression of Ukrainian artistry amid Soviet-era oppression.

I’ve been battered and sometimes frustrated by S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, but ultimately there is something admirable about its commitment to challenging you – especially when it simultaneously provides just enough tools to avoid becoming unfair. Between that, its punchy shooting, and some properly superb atmosphere-building, it’s done enough to earn the mantle of Good Game.

Is it a good enough game, though, that you should headbutt your way through such a dense wall of bugs? I personally think yes, having not played or really thought about any other games for all the previous five days that I’ve been lost in the Zone. At the very least, that question should probably be more a matter of whether it’s worth playing now, or in six months’ time, when updates and the promised mod support might have more thoroughly patched it up. And even in the latter case, that’s probably not an alien concept to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fans.

This review is based on a retail version provided by the publisher.