Test - STALKER 2 - Heart of Chornobyl: Test: The game world is the star of the sequel

An odyssey lasting more than seven years has come to an end. While the first STALKER took what felt like an eternity due to GSC Game World's over-ambitiousness at the time, this time the reasons are much more tangibly rooted in Russia's attack on Ukraine. The studio headquartered in Kyiv was at least partially relocated, and quite a few employees decided to join the defense of their country. Not easy circumstances for the development of a potential AAA title with such a scope of play, which has consequently been postponed several times. Now the final result is finally here and our excitement was great.

The opening of STALKER 2 - Heart of Chornobyl teaches us a certain humility. The first nimble mutant bites us hard in the butt, the second shows us that escape can definitely be a sensible option. Human opponents demonstrate their marksmanship and know how to flank, circumvent and drive enemies out of cover with grenades. We experience that abnormalities can sometimes be fatal and that radiation or bleeding wounds are not something to be trifled with. And that you shouldn't run into a settlement with your gun drawn.

The adventure in the contaminated zone is not a walk in the park, that quickly becomes clear and that's a good thing. With sparse, half-broken equipment, it's a matter of survival and never becoming careless. Sometimes you just stand there and desperately try to figure out what the developers actually want from you and how you should solve the situation. Well, you can choose different difficulty levels and simplify the survival trip a little if necessary, but the game itself doesn't really become easy and that starts with the wear and tear on the equipment and the immense repair costs.

Regardless, after the first few failures and a growing number of deaths, you slowly get into the flow. One thing quickly becomes clear: STALKER 2 more than deserves the title of survival horror. Survival is an art and the horror of hearing a noise or a grunt somewhere in the bushes or the sky turning red quickly becomes an everyday reality. You quickly think about whether you really want to get involved in every confrontation, especially since fights cost resources and wear out your equipment, or whether you would rather avoid suspicious areas. If you want to mark the superhero and shoot your way through the zone in run & gun style, you've come to the wrong place.

In any case, in the game you take on the role of Skif, one of the many stalkers who seek their fortune in the nuclear contaminated zone around the former Chornobyl nuclear power plant. There is no character creation, but that doesn't matter because you'll never see Skif anyway - first person. This is also supposed to make it clear that Skif is essentially a nobody, just one of many lucky hunters in the zone. And so, without any ifs or buts, you are thrown into the exclusion zone with minimal equipment, you receive a few instructions over the radio and, to top it all off, the last bit of equipment, including a valuable scanner, is taken from you.

Luckily, you meet a friendly lifesaver and your adventure really begins after you reach the first settlement and get to know the first clients and factions in the game. The main story takes some time to get going, but has a few surprises in store. There are also lots of side quests, some of which are quite tricky, and tasks where you simply earn money to repair or improve your equipment or buy ammunition and food.

There is a lot of human life in the zone, organized into factions and ramshackle settlements. People are very suspicious and often hostile towards strangers. Other stalkers, bandits, so-called security companies (also called mercenaries) - you wouldn't want to mess with people like that. Even if you can complete tasks for the factions, you never really feel like you belong or even feel safe. This form of loneliness is definitely a defining aspect of the game. There are plenty of decisions with consequences, but no moral sledgehammer is pulled out - there is simply no morality in the zone, everyone is next to themselves.

You have to get involved in the quite unusual and unfortunately often outdated game design, which doesn't take you by the hand every second. While there are quest markers, map markers, and other conveniences, you still often have to figure out what to do on your own. Even in combat there are some painful lessons to be learned.

It's a shame that the flow of the game is constantly interrupted, for example by looking at the map or your PDA. The inventory and equipment management in particular are quite annoying. Some important options such as stopping bleeding, healing or eating are assigned to hotkeys, but you still have to check your inventory often. There is also a limit on the carrying capacity, which has a pretty significant impact on movement speed and mobility. The interface design is anything but "modern", the game feels old-fashioned when it comes to micromanagement and the inventory could easily come from the first part of the series.

GSC Game World masters the keyboard of a survival shooter with flying colors, but of course it also has some weak points. The advantage is that you are always on edge because you never know what will happen next. You always look at your supplies, check how far it is to the next base, check the condition of your equipment and usually keep an eye on your wallet. Standard equipment includes food, ammunition, wound dressings, medipacks and anti-radiation agents. Luckily, GSC didn't overdo it and you don't have to hunt yourself to get food, ammunition and so on.

The downside is that the survival aspects can get quite tedious at times. The load capacity, for example, severely limits you. Fast travel is only possible between some settlements and is expensive. In addition, your stamina will be exhausted after a relatively short distance. If you don't want to complete the long routes at walking pace, it will cost you a lot of time. This makes it more difficult to improve your financial situation by selling items. The constant worry about food and sleep can also be tiring in the long run and affect the flow of the game.

STALKER 2 - Heart of Chornobyl is at its strongest when you're out in the wilderness and completing your missions (even if they're not always imaginative) or when you just start out and examine the numerous points of interest. The game is somewhat reminiscent of the old virtues of Skyrim. If you see a building or something else on the horizon, there may be more mutants or more or less rich loot there. But hidden dealers or the hiding places of other stalkers are always a great thing. What's particularly cool is that other stalkers' hiding places keep appearing dynamically and randomly in the game world.

The fights and firefights are really fun, especially if you modify and improve the equipment - which is urgently needed later in the game. GSC does not rely on level progress and role-playing skills, but rather the equipment and your own playing skills are the be-all and end-all. So you are always on the lookout for better equipment, weapon attachments, armor improvements and of course artifacts. However, they usually not only have advantages, but also serious disadvantages. You then have to decide for yourself which of these is more important to you.

The atmosphere in the open game world, which is divided into different areas, is really impressive. The constant change of time of day and weather conditions is really beautiful to see. When a thunderstorm passes through the zone and lightning strikes next to you (and if you're unlucky, even hits you) or you have to quickly seek shelter because a deadly radiation emission passes over you, it's not always pleasant, but the zone is still never boring - although it is vast and sometimes very desolate and deserted. GSC made the right decision not to overload the game world. This way she can breathe and you can let the silence and loneliness work their magic on you.

It's very nice that the game world still seems alive despite all the barrenness. In addition to the dynamically appearing stalker hiding places mentioned, something is always happening in the game world. Mutants and stalkers move through the zone, fighting among themselves, and the anomalies are not necessarily statically limited to certain places. The A-Life 2.0 system represents a comprehensive living environment in which the player's actions also have a direct influence on the zone. This is definitely noticeable.

And then there are the imaginative anomalies. A poppy field that gets you high and simply kills you if you stay there for too long. A pulsating energy field that pulls you into its core and destroys you mercilessly. Electricity, poison, fire - or just splinter fields that give you bleeding wounds. Plus mutations, sometimes fast and aggressive, sometimes with telepathy, sometimes with telekinesis. Cool.

Technically speaking, STALKER 2 – Heart of Chornobyl is rather mixed. The environments in the Unreal Engine 5 graphics are almost dreamily beautiful in their dystopia, even if there isn't exactly a lot of variety. The game world appears very natural and real and was not simply created using a random generator. The buildings and interiors also look good. The representation of the NPCs, however, could be significantly better. The animations seem a bit stiff and the dialogues in particular remind you of Starfield or other Bethesda titles, and not in a good way. The characters are static, their facial expressions seem wooden and the production is not really convincing. Sure, it serves its purpose, but beautiful is different.

There is still room for improvement when it comes to fine-tuning the game. The balancing seems okay and reasonably balanced, but the economy is a bit unfair, especially when it comes to repair costs, especially since repairs are often more expensive than buying a new one. Bugs are undoubtedly still present. Our test version, which we received about a week before the release, received a few updates and patches, and this morning a completely new client was even added. But there were still problems in all versions, even if things have gotten better. Nowadays it's mostly just small things like graphical errors, flickering textures and strange physics errors.

GSC has fixed the biggest construction sites in the last few days. In the most recent build, there was still strange light/shadow flickering in a building and vegetation pop-ups visible in the distance. We haven't had the initial crashes recently. We are glad that our initial fears regarding the first test versions were not confirmed - at least not to this extent.

The performance is definitely positive. STALKER 2 – Heart of Chornobyl ran very smoothly with “epic” detail settings and with a good and stable refresh rate. There are also upscaling options such as AMD FSR and NVIDIA DLSS with frame generation to make gameplay even smoother. NVIDIA Reflex is also on board to reduce latency. In 1440p in 21:9 format on epic settings with DLSS and frame generation, we achieved well over 100 fps on an RTX 4070 Ti.

First impression of the Xbox version: unfortunately we only had a PC version available beforehand and now we quickly took a look at the Xbox version. Accordingly, the performance mode seems to be running pretty smoothly so far and at least looks appealing. We would advise against using quality mode because the frame rate did not seem to be very stable at 30 fps. But we will take a closer look at this and of course add to the test.

Unfortunately, you can see from the game that GSC Game World had to curb costs at some point after all the postponements. The game is only available with English and Ukrainian voice acting, unfortunately there is no German dubbing. So you have to make do with German subtitles. At least the menus and the interface are available in German. Unfortunately, the voice output is not convincing either. The speakers often sound quite unprofessional and show little to no emotion. You could almost think that one or two NPCs were set to music by AI.