There are many reasons why an endeavour as complex as creating a huge open-world video game sometimes doesn't pan out the way it should or could; absolutely millions of things that can and will go wrong at the best of times, no matter how much hard work goes in.

Add in the stress of being at war during the development of your project - and a whole bunch of other issues to boot - and it's not hard to fathom why S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, as much as we can see the love and hard work on-screen at all times, has turned out to be one of the worst experiences we've had this console generation. It's obviously been a ton of work for the dev team to get to the point they're at right now, and we are willing them to come good in the end, but boy-oh-boy does this long-awaited sequel need an absolute ton of work to get it anywhere near decent.

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And that's hard to say, it brings us zero joy as huge fans of the original; as fans who love the slow-moving difficulty, weirdness and Euro-janky goofiness of this series. We wanted this to be a nice big surprise at the end of our 2024, an irradiated dream to dig into over the festive period but, alas, what we've got is an almost overwhelming mess.

From the get-go, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 feels like something that has no idea what it's meant to, or even wants to be. We've got a huge, and oftentimes beautiful, chunk of the Chernobyl wasteland. It's very fancy to look at, and very precise in its real-world details. None of this is in doubt, it's one of the most impressive open worlds we've roamed - aesthetically. It's dramatic and dark, brooding in all the right ways, and when a storm rolls in...man...it sure does look incredible at times. However, this is also a wasteland that's got almost nothing of worth to offer even the most fervent of Stalker fans, really.

In sitting down to play the thing, in attempting to settle into a rhythm or get into its various systems, we're met with nothing but badly executed ideas, dire AI, awful dungeon design, a bemusing "artifact" system, bland guns, rubbish anomalies, cheap and annoying mutant attacks, disappointing loot stashes, atrocious voice-acting (in English), bargain bin writing, and a core narrative that is almost incomprehensibly terrible. That's only for starters, by the way.

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The much-vaunted A-Life system, this clever mechanic whereby NPCs live out their own routines, get into inter-faction gunfights and all that good stuff - the stuff that generates endless fun in a world like this - is absolutely 100% missing in action. It's nowhere to be seen. OK, maybe you'll run into a bunch of guys fighting with each other, sure, but that's it. A messy gunfight, usually involving a bunch of enemies who simply materialise out of thin air in front of you, with no real feeling that there's any intelligence at play. Even in run-of-the-mill combat, the many enemies you face here rarely get anywhere near clever.

So, the issues go much deeper than stuff that can maybe added in or fixed later. The 'artifact' system - whereby you find artifacts in anomalies and then slot them into your gear to add buffs and debuffs - is another good example of this. We expected to be collecting tons of these, using the game's (currently useless) scanner to scoop them all up, and then writing you lot tasty big guides on how to find them all. But we've got about six in our possession, none of them do anything interesting, and we pretty much found them all by accident. They're in the game, we've no doubt, but after 40+ hours of playing we've given up on being interested in them. They feel pointless and we don't care at this stage. This goes for most of your gear, though, as when an invisible spark of magic radiation energy can zap you to death in one hit without any notice, rhyme or reason in this all-new zone, there's not much point in prepping for anything.

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This is also a zone that seems at odds with what we thought it would, or should, be. A world that, far from making things tough for you, is crammed to bursting point with guns, ammo, medicine, bandages...enough gear to outfit a platoon of Stalkers. We've been dropping mountains of gear (and bullets for crying out loud!) just to stay underneath the over-encumbrance point. It never feels like you're struggling for food or guns. In fact, if anything, you're struggling to find things to shoot with them. Struggling to find anywhere to sell them, even, because finding a vendor will likely take you hours of dying, bugging out, glitching into things, fighting invisible enemies and getting lost in bland underground bases.

Now, to be positive for a moment, what's here still has some promise - amazingly. There's still magic in moments where you creep your way slowly into some enemy encampment and use stealth attacks to brutalise everyone. Sometimes the bugs and annoyances, the cheap deaths and never-ending nothingness of the main missions give way to a perfect storm of atmosphere and danger, and then you're briefly in the zone as you expected it might be this time around. These moments are so fleeting, though, and they get more rare as the game goes on.

We can't see how it will meaningfully improve anytime soon, either. There's just so much wrong at the moment. The gear is bland and monotonous, the guns feel OK, sure, but they are nothing to get excited about. There's depth to the attachments and upgrades, yep , but even tens of hours in, we had very few of these things in our possession. The game also felt extremely slow to us, because of bugs and performance issues, and the fact we seemed to be ground to a halt most of the time due to some unforeseen issue that messed up a mission or had us restarting and reloading old saves.

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Even on Series X, this one is a mess of bugs. From framerate hitches that manage to persist with VRR switched on, to missing NPC models and egregious loading times upon EVERY. SINGLE. DEATH. We've had entire groups of enemies blink into existence in front of us, for crying out loud, and rival factions materialising into a scene and turning on us en-masse before we can prep a defense. This is A-Life? We've also died countless times from radiation that didn't show up on our little radiation meter. Although - the compass barely works on the UI here, often forgetting to show the distance to your next objective, so that's not really a surprise.

Speaking of the UI, and the menus and inventories in general, it's all fairly appalling. Managing your gear feels designed for PC circa 2004, and is incredibly overly-fussy and slow. The on-screen UI, in particular the managing of quick-access spots, is farcical, too. You have four slots, two left and two right on the D-Pad, and you'll need to long-press a key to access two of these. As you use items, the slot contents are moved around, so sometimes you long-press to heal and the first aid has moved, so you die. Seriously, though.

There are .dll file names hovering over dead enemies and items, one of our outfits is a loaf of bread (this one seems fairly common), floating bodies are commonplace...there's no real point continuing. The fact that A-Life doesn't work properly, and the fact that your enemies and other threats will spawn in behind you, killing you from a spot you'd already meticulously checked and cleared...this stuff is game-breaking at the end of the day. For a Stalker game to mess these things up, it's very hard to see where you're meant to enjoy as a player. There's nothing worth fighting, nothing worth exploring for, no way to dig in and play the role in a satisfying way.

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We know there's always a bit of to-and-fro over this sort of janky, tough game. The hardcore fans will tell you that you just can't deal with the brutality of the zone, that your deaths are skill issues and so on. But we've served our time with Stalker, and plenty of adventures that have walked the same ultra-tough path before it. This isn't about skill problems or a lack of ability. It's a poorly made product, an experience that fails to provide fun for your hard-earned money, and something that you would never - not in a million years, we reckon - recommend any newcomer or gamer who isn't knowledgeable about the franchise. That says a whole lot.

If you want to give us a big, hard game world to survive and stalk in, if you want us to engage and indulge in tough and time-consuming stuff like this, you're going to need to ensure that every death is fair. Here, almost every single death is the exact opposite. And that's unforgiveable. We've also found the wasteland to be almost entirely devoid of life, upon further investigation. Strike out across its map to uncover new regions, walk away from where the narrative is taking you, and you'll likely find yourself running across very pretty, but totally empty, scenery. It's mind-boggling, in fact, just how little there is to see - beyond the promise of the real-world tourist attractions of the area - or get interested in. A big, empty, boring world with a smattering of messy camps and enemy-infested areas. No matter how good it looks, there's no getting away from the reality that it's almost impossible to have fun here. There's nothing to get hooked into. Unless you like roleplaying an accident-prone wally of a Stalker.

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There's tons more to rake over; the enemies have no tactical nous, and mutants - which should always be a highlight to fight - are the worst kind of invisible, cheating, cheap, bullet-sponge annoyances to deal with. The story is appalling for the first 20 hours, before some things (boring things) start to happen. We won't ruin any of that here, of course, except to say there are a few nods to the original game for fans that manage to stomach the task of getting that far.

Main missions are often very hard to follow, with nonsensical conversations doing little to help, and in running from one to the next we often found ourselves completely unaware of what the hell we were meant to be doing. There are choice-driven moments crammed in, but really these seem a bit much, a bridge too far, especially when even the basic stuff is barely holding together. None of these woes are helped by an early-game plot about scanners which is beyond boring as a way to introduce the game's janky-ass factions.

Side activities are underwhelming - this is a big scary zone, so you don't get the usual glut of open-world fun and distractions (we are all for this strict adherence to a vibe, if it's done well) - and most side stuff takes the form of NPC missions that cover fetch quests and turgid camp invasions; all only serving to further lay bare the mess that is this game's combat.

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It's been one of the biggest disappointments we can remember in quite some time, this. It's such a shame, especially when you catch the odd whiff of OG-Stalker magic here and there. But, our experience has been a Anthem/Cyberpunk 2077-level mess, really. There's no other way to dice how hard it fumbles what should be a fascinating experience. Thank goodness we can all try it on Game Pass in the meantime, and keep our fingers crossed that the incoming hotfixes and larger patches can get it where it needs to be in the future.

Conclusion

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is a pretty big mess. In its current state, this is a badly-judged game in almost every way. The new zone is incredible to behold at times, for sure, but it's a world at odds with itself; full of gear and guns, but with precious little in the way of enemies that challenge you to use them. The story is terrible, the A-Life system is AWOL, and the acting and writing is atrocious. Stalker 2 is cheap in how it kills without warning, is packed full of bugs and performance issues on Series X, and is devoid of mostly anything that makes it feel worth playing for very long.

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