S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl GBAtemp review
Computer
Product Information:
- Release Date (NA): September 5, 2024
- Release Date (EU): September 5, 2024
- Publisher: GSC Game World
- Developer: GSC Game World
- Genres: First-Person Shooter
- Also For: Xbox Series X|S
Game Features:
S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2 Heart of Chernobyl, or S2HC as we shall address it in this review, was first announced in 2010, was meant to be released in 2012, got cancelled, reappeared in 2018 with a release date of 2018, was delayed by the Ukraine war; and now, at the end of 2024, the game has finally made it to gamers on PC and Xbox consoles, but was it worth the wait?
S2HC is a game that has Half-Life 2 vibes about it. Visually, it has a definite air of Valve with desolate settings, murky colour palette, physics-driven objects, and ragdoll-powered NPCs. The game leans into fire effects, reflections, layers of grass, highly detailed models, geometry and textures, but is it all style and no substance? Mostly, it's complicated, in my opinion anyway.
Stalking Staples
What begins as an exciting and adventurous foray into the radioactive landscape of Chornobyl, with A-Life AI-driven events that unfold as you encounter them, quickly becomes an orienteering chore, with random supernatural objects striking you in the head, mutants are complete bullet sponges that drop nothing and you have no damned idea what's going on most of the time.
The story beats begin with you, Skif, taking up the mission of investigating an anomaly that has appeared and decimated your home, and you are smuggled into "the zone" by a scientist, Professor Hermann, to study these anomalies and ultimately solve the mystery by force, and make some cash on the way.
The game itself is pretty standard PC FPS fodder, with the main objectives consisting of running to a POI and investigating whatever is going on or collecting something. I won't go into what the objectives are or what you have to do because I don't want to share any spoilers as per usual.
Where the game excels is through its atmosphere. The environments are alive and kicking with enemies and things to check out. Decrepit buildings, outlook towers, and flogged-out vehicles litter the landscapes along with cave systems and desolate buildings. Chornobyl looks incredibly detailed and extremely well populated with flora, fauna, characters and enemies.
The A-Life system means that NPCs are getting on and doing stuff by themselves. An example of A-Life building the world is that you might see NPCs doing something on day one, but you'll come across them again several days later with far better stats and gear, or worse dead. The latest patch updates A-Life to version 2.0 and brings fixes and new mechanics that make the simulation of the population even more believable.
NPCs have purpose, missions and objectives they're partaking in outside of your vicinity. Within your immediate environment, they engage you and either attack or retreat depending on your gear and abilities. It's a clever system that has been pioneered since 2007, and does bring something to the game that you won't see in many other titles.
Radioactive Waste, Almost
My most prominent issue with S2HC was the obscene number of times I died at the beginning. EIGHT times in 24 minutes.
It turns out that half the problem was quest items I am required to collect not spawning, and bloodsuckers spawning directly next to me, killing me instantly without me getting a warning whatsoever. This led me into a spiral of simply not wanting to continue with the ridiculously drawn-out process of waiting for the game to load again after each death.
Yes, it takes forever to load, even off of an SSD. Booting the game up took almost 20+ minutes to compile shaders, and then dying and waiting to reload an old save took time to load back in, but just to have it happen on loop, was extremely frustrating and draining.
Bear in mind that I am a console player, and a PlayStation owner at that, so it's rare I delve into PC gaming, and all the aforementioned migraine-inducing issues I struggled through are more than likely why I stick to the simplicity of console gaming. It's not unheard of, but it is rarely this raw and broken when a game is released on a console.
There was a part of me that nearly gave up on this review. I was this close to jacking it all in because I was so pissed off with my experience with this game as a whole. Thankfully, with the latest V1.1 patch and an overwhelming desire to delete my progress and start it all again, I wiped my painstakingly poor one-hour and thirty-four-minute profile and then finally managed to eke out a few proper hours of gameplay that would let me form at least a reasonable overview of the game as a whole with its emergent gameplay.
I'm glad I did persevere, and I'm glad that the V1.1 patch came to my rescue in the 11th hour, otherwise, this piece might have gone straight into the trash. As a result, I managed to forge my way several hours into the storyline and had quite a few encounters that proved the game's mechanics to me.
I think that S2HC is a game that will continue to grow and evolve, but surely that shouldn't be the case, the devs already had a lot of time behind this title.
Patch After Patch
As mentioned above; I find this game extremely divisive. On the one hand, it looks great, it has a story that is actually engaging, an impressive arsenal of weapons, gadgets, and items, supernatural mystery, and a massive open world to explore. On the other hand, the game is overly confusing from the get-go, the controls are quite frankly a nightmare for non-keyboard and mouse gamers, and (pre-patch) it locked up, crashed, or you died every two minutes, even in rookie mode!
I had countless issues even getting the game to run. I thought it might be issues with my laptop, or drivers or, something, but it turns out the game was an acknowledged buggy mess at launch.
To initially download S2HC, I had to wait an astonishingly lengthy four hours for it to download and install when I had a stable 150Mbps internet connection, which should barely take 2 hours. Once I eventually began the game I was met with a crash followed by an instant patch to install, which I had hoped would be a QOL patch, fixing up minor things that were missed before release, and hopefully smoothing out the experience for me, but alas it wasn't the silver bullet I wished for. Sure it prevented crashes, but now I was exposed to the jankiness of the game's ruthless difficulty.
Given the game came out in September and I was only installing it at the beginning of November, there would be two months of feedback for the developers to sift through, address, and drip feed patches. Thankfully they have listened and are actively appeasing the community regularly.
To date, there have already been three major patches with varying sizes. The first and second, 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 were 14 GB and 8 GB respectively and were designed to address crashes and major issues. The latest patch, version 1.1 which was released on the 19th of December, was a whopping 110 GB in size and claims to fix over 1800 things, balancing the game more and making it far more accessible to first-time players with a more lenient currency system, more interactions, and less obstructive monster encounters that were completely unfair; as I initially found out.
The base game weighs in at 130 GB alone, and the developers state that 160 GB is the preferable storage size to have squirrelled away for this title, but I can foresee a lot more patches incoming, including the multiplayer modes, but notably not a cooperative mode, that the developers have promised will come post-launch, eventually.
A Clear Basis for Greatness
Generally, S2HC is a fantastically massive game with plenty to unveil in the world of Chornobyl. You have boss encounters, NPCs all over the place with distinct personalities and traits, and plenty of missions to get to grips with. Resources were sparse at first, but with a recently re-jigged currency system to make it more fair, you can now get more for your money to stock up with, and better trades than you could originally meaning slightly less taxing, and more rewarding, progression.
Overall animations are sublime, with gun and reload animations, and even little moments like eating food out of a can with a knife, all very well observed and well implemented. Your hunger meter reminds you to keep your health up and your radioactive meter dictates when you need to take something to drop those levels and get back to safety.
There is so much granular detail, on everything, like dirt and scuffs on equipment, layers of dust on screens, and corpses strewn everywhere with a story behind their death poses. The water is reflective and shimmery, energy effects crackle and flare across the scenery, fire engulfs the environments, dirt and dust plumes around you, and sparks punctuate the industrial biome where needed.
Textures are also incredibly well made. I noticed animated textures used to simulate bubbling chemicals and flaming embers. I think it's rare to see in modern games, usually a texture is static and lighting or emitter effects layered to it, but this appears to achieve similar effects with what could essentially be a looping gif-like texture. Clever stuff!
I love the fact that if you find cool stuff, it's purposefully tricky to access, so you can find a clever way into, around, or through the bunkers and buildings, avoiding booby traps, to obtain these things. alternatively, you can cheese them, locks can be broken, walls hopped, and using clever physics you can get into buildings in ways the developers probably didn't intend you to.
It's the expansive 60-square-kilometre open world that makes this game something to keep going back to. It's got character, and charm that demonstrates the developer's passion for this world they have created.
One thing I noticed that slightly irked me, was that grass and foliage go straight through characters when you're wading through the vegetation, it's minor I guess, in the grand scheme of things, but to be honest I found it quite distracting when following other characters to certain places, and even when trying to hunt NPCs and mutants from a distance. With a game of this scale it's one immersive effect they seem to have glazed over.
It will take you roughly 40+ hours to complete the storyline, depending on your proficiency in S.T.A.L.K.E.R games, but it has replayability thanks to it never feeling the same each time, though story beats that ask you to make choices all seem to lead to the same path, rather than truly branching off into alternate outcomes.
Verdict
- Incredible systems, and amazing detail
- Openworld exploration is nice
- Plenty to do and find
- Technical issues aplenty
- Difficulty spikes
- Constant patching
