Don't worry, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl is still weird as hell
Sure, there's a bigger budget and some shiny Unreal Engine 5 additions, but GSC Game World is committed to keeping Stalker weird
It's been a good week to be into shooters. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6's Season 1 launch has added a few cool new maps and weapons to the game, Valve released official gameplay footage of the canned Half-Life 2 Episode 3 and then Stalker 2 has – improbably – delivered the best big-budget shooter of the year.
Yes, we're talking about Stalker 2 today. Yes, it is buggy. Yes, it is broken in places. No, that doesn't matter, because above all it is sublime. The developers at GSC Game World have turned every dial up to 11, taking the weirdest or most interesting choices at every fork in the road.
The original Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl was a janky 2007 shooter made by Ukrainian studio GSC Game World, based on the 1979 Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker, itself inspired by sci-fi novel Roadside Picnic. Shadow of Chernobyl was full of bugs but created an atmosphere unlike anything else, with the Metro franchise and Escape From Tarkov owing a heavy debt to GSC's work. The trilogy of Shadow of Chernobyl and its two expansion-cum-sequels is messy and bugs are part of the experience, but their vibe and storytelling are so strong that shooter fans are happy to put up with the weirdness and dive in anyway. These are foundational texts of Eurojank.
I wasn't sure we'd be this lucky. I got hands-on time with Stalker 2 at Gamescom in 2023 and while the Stalker vibe was impeccable, it was a little too buggy. The game was developed in an actual warzone so it's totally understandable, but after copping a delay, Stalker 2 has come out as one of the most interesting AAA games of the year. The emergent sandbox at the heart of Stalker 2 is the game's primary selling point. It means you could just as easily find yourself getting mauled by savage mutant dogs, get gunned down by heavily armed bandits or even just stagger out of a cave to find a dead military patrol (and all of their gear) there for the looting.
The gunfeel of Stalker 2 is fairly ropey. I expect mutants to be able to take a kicking, but human opponents can often eat a few bullets to the torso without seeming to notice. It lends something to the vibe. The best way to win a fight is to prepare, set yourself up and scope out your opponents before announcing your presence with a few choice headshots. This doesn't always happen, and what you get instead are scrappy fights where you try to turn a battle to your advantage against inescapable odds. This can take a few different forms, but I secretly love having to jog away from several mutants in desperation, hoping to find some men with guns or a dangerous anomaly to solve my problems for me.
This doesn't mean I'm a coward, you understand. I'm just doing what I have to do to survive. Things are tough in The Zone.
Not that GSC cares if you survive. The first opponent most players will fight in the campaign is an invisible enemy that you're barely warned about beforehand. Dropping into a bunker you see some guards outside fighting someone in the dark, but it's not until you walk out into the field yourself that you realise your opponent is invisible and coming right for you. My first fatality came later in the prologue, when another invisible mutant possessed several nearby crates and battered me to death with them.
Most of these dangers require a little bit of working out and GSC will drop vague hints but rarely tells you everything up front. It's easy to read a fire-belching anomaly, but invisible gravity anomalies are more terrifying: these can kill you instantly if you don't listen to the beeping of your detector. There are a lot of ways to die in The Zone, and the game keeps track of every single death, giving you your death total with every time you see the continue screen.
Stalker 2 is brutal, but rarely unfair. Worse, even though you know there's probably danger in every sunken cave and half-destroyed facility, you'll clamber eagerly into each, ready to face the horrors within. Stalker 2, just like its predecessors, is about the joy of exploration, and the weird and wonderful things you'll see as you scuffle around looking for loot.
The games play the same and feel the same. But the big difference is that Stalker 2 takes advantage of two decades of advancements in FPS design, making it much easier to play, and the much bigger budget that GSC clearly has at their disposal now.
Systems like weapon upgrading feel quite clunky as you spend your limited credits on polishing the barrel of your pistol or coating your handguard with non-slip polymer, but no matter how out there the ideas get, it still feels intuitive and quite polished. It's difficult but never onerous, and diving into the depths of the game is constantly rewarding.
The game's fidelity is astounding too. Sure, sometimes you'll walk into a room and a sleeping NPC will be floating off of the bed, or you'll kill someone and their neck will stretch impossibly into the distance. But it sure looks pretty. The lighting is some of the best I've seen all year, and walking out of the gunsmith's garage into bright sunlight in the very first town will momentarily blind you, the bright glare of the sun burning that moment into my memory. Elsewhere, The Zone is a desolate wasteland, but it's hard not to see the beauty. A lethal poppy field you'll encounter a few hours in could be an oil painting. That is, if you find it during the day. After dark, it looks like a horror movie – one with expensive sets, at least.
An aside: I wonder how much of this is down to the use of Unreal Engine 5. Last year I spoke to Joseph Hall, the director of visual effects on 2023's mage-'em-up Immortals of Aveum. The game was pretty so-so, but it looked incredible, and Hall said that Unreal Engine 5 had allowed the relatively small team at Ascendant Studios — Hall had come straight from shipping Call of Duty games — to punch way above their weight. As the engine is becoming more widespread, we're seeing the tech pushed further and further.
To reinforce the Eurojank feel. GSC has the money to pay for American and British voice work now, but the localisation is still terrible in a charming way. "Holy fucking cow," explains one soldier, completely devoid of emotion. Colleagues at PC Gamer have suggested that the voiceover work is better in the game's native Ukrainian. I'm quite taken with the oddly inflected British side characters and Skif's oddly delivered American lines so won't be changing, even if I miss out on better performance.
The game is... buggy. Several missions needed me to load a save to finish them, and a few I had to leave and come back to later. You wouldn't be blamed for coming back to play it in six months if you've got other stuff going on. Maybe it's just me, but I find the friction Stalker 2 offers up to be compelling, so I'll be plugging away even as GSC patches the game into shape.
I'm desperately trying not to spoil any of the surprises at the heart of Stalker 2, and also not sure that I've even uncovered half of them myself, but I still want to applaud it for doing the impossible: this is a big budget remake of a dusty franchise that's best known for having good ideas, a strong sense of identity and slightly iffy execution. All of that is present and correct here. That it was finished in an active warzone makes this all the more impressive, but I'd also be recommending you play Stalker 2 if it was made in an air-conditioned office in California.
A few weeks ago I asked, with some despair, what big-budget title was going to take some big swings, and I think the answer is Stalker 2, which is full to the brim with bizarre moments and exciting experiments. As the back half of 2024 becomes increasingly full of incredible shooters, here I am, asking you to fit yet another into your backlog.
Out this week
Stalker 2 is out today, and is definitely the tentpole of this week. I always link to Steam pages, but it's also coming to consoles and in particular you can play it for free right now on Xbox's Game Pass, so if you're curious there's really no reason not to give it a go beyond the huge download.
I've also played a fair bit of Void Crew in early access and think it could be fun if you have friends to play it with. It feels like FTL except instead of one person controlling the spaceship, up to four players can come together to try and keep a ship moving. Elsewhere, Star Wars Outlaws is coming to Steam and Strinova is on my radar for being a multiplayer shooter where you can choose at any time to switch between a 2D and 3D battlefield, which is curious.
- S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2: Heart of Chornobyl - Nov 20
- Star Wars Outlaws (Steam release) - Nov 21
- Strinova - Nov 22
- Void Crew (1.0 release) - Nov 25
Gibs
- Luke Winkie's Wired piece from the start of 2023 on what it takes to build a game in a warzone is good context for Stalker 2's development. The eyes of the world's media have moved on a bit now, but the war is continuing on.
- Cyberpunk blockchain extraction shooter Off The Grid is hosting a $600k tournament with players like Scump, xQc and Lvndmark taking part, yet I've never heard anyone say a thing about it that doesn't reference the fact Neil Blomkamp is the chief creative officer at studio Gunzilla Games. I haven't played it myself, but influencers of this calibre rarely get involved in events like this for free, so I'm curious about exactly how much money they're spending on this marketing push.
- Half Life 2 got an update to celebrate it's 20th anniversary! There's director's commentary and a heap of fixes and tweaks. There's also Steam Workshop support now, but the biggest thing is this huge documentary they produced. We're almost definitely never going to get another game in the main franchise, so it looks like this is the most complete version of the game we're ever going to get. It's £0.85p on Steam right now and comes with Episode 1 and 2 bundled in, too.
- Andy Samberg and Charli XCX dropped this song about snitching on their neighbours as part of last week's SNL. It slaps. The best thing I can say about Andy Samberg (and the Lonely Island) tracks is that they're comedy songs but the music is always solid too. This is a summery pop tune that I've listened to three times while writing this newsletter.