Stalker 2 review – a brutal and rewarding FPS

My time with Stalker 2 has been difficult. I’ve had to battle the horrors of The Zone, anomalies that hide in plain sight, and the survival game’s many technical issues to keep my head above water. Stalker 2 is an effort to bring the much-beloved cult series up to modern standards and to a wider audience, now with the support of Microsoft and a day-one release on Game Pass.

Stalker 2 is a first-person, open-world survival game with a storied development. It’s been 15 years since both the series’ and GSC Game World’s last release, Stalker: Call of Pripyat. Stalker 2 was first announced in 2010, canceled in 2012, then revived in 2018. The conditions for this creative process have been extremely turbulent. While I can only review the game in front of me, I’d be remiss not to consider these external factors.

Stalker games are based in and around an area called The Zone, a large exclusion area set up by the army after not one but two Chornobyl disasters rendered the space… odd. Uninhabitable isn’t the right word here, as there are several small populated towns, but these nuclear disasters caused a change that, to this day, nobody quite understands.

Many a peril has since developed, and you’ll have to get knowledgeable quickly if you want to survive even the shortest excursion out in the wilds. Anomalies, for instance, are localized hazards that can cause all kinds of bodily harm if you don’t look where you’re going. It could be a large bubble that covers you in acid or a mini-hurricane that’ll spin you so fast you burst – the variety is morbidly impressive.

You begin the game with a rudimentary detector that lets off a beep whenever an anomaly is nearby. It doesn’t tell you exactly where these deathtraps are; it just lets you know that one is close. This beep was both a comfort and a bone-chilling reminder that death is everywhere. It’s also a measure of how much I had adapted to The Zone during my time. At first, I’d freeze up whenever a beep went off, scared to move without knowing what was ahead. After a while, I knew what to look for, like my eyes had become accustomed to The Zone’s specific brand of dank, not breaking stride for anything.

The skill and craft of a stalker is how well they know their environment, which translates extremely well here. There is no leveling system in Stalker 2; you don’t put extra points in your leg skill to run faster; there are no eye upgrades to see in the dark – your improvements come through equipment and personal experience. Come face to face with a horror for the first time and it’s quite the shock – several corpses later, you know how to handle the situation perfectly.

NPCs are, in general, impressed with your feats. After all, stalkers are those best equipped and often desperate enough to venture into places others fear even talking about. The flip side of calling The Zone your home, however, is that you don’t really belong anywhere else, and must often earn the trust of others who see you as a mysterious loner before they’ll let you in on the good stuff (a warm bed, mostly).

The missions you pick up from the game’s factions and strange inhabitants range from teaching someone a lesson (try not to shoot them, but also it’s fine if you shoot them) to fetch quests, and pretty much anything you can think of in between. Your role is a fixer, a delivery person, an exterminator. Any job will do.

I didn’t feel beholden to any one of the game’s factions or persons of interest, and following a rather lengthy dressing down about how I should pay this ‘big boss’ more respect, I simply dropped a grenade at his feet and scampered away, picking through the bodies in the aftermath. It came back to bite me later, but I’d made my bed, and I was more than willing to sleep in it.

The ‘me against the world’ feeling is strong here, and while you can align yourself with a faction for some perks, the way I’d been treated steeled me against humanity. Dealing with others became a necessary evil – I’d trade weapons and supplies, and collect jobs, but small talk was off the menu.

For a game that tries and often succeeds in immersing you into its world, Stalker 2’s NPCs present some issues. I started to avoid towns due to the near-constant inane chatter between their denizens and the almost laughable quality of the voice acting. Accents veer off course, while tone and intonation oscillate wildly – as a person with a distinct accent myself, I often meet people who claim they can mimic it, only to be met with something that would border on offensive if it wasn’t so funny. It felt like the team had approached the office joker, asking which accents they’d mastered, only to be met with a simple “yes.”

It was at odds with the rest of my experience. Everything is so serious, death is around every corner, yet that one guardsman tells the same joke, the same way, every time I’m in earshot. I once got waylaid on a mission, and sleep deprivation soon began to creep in. I was punished for my lack of sleep with disembodied voices: constant NPC barks in my head, around and around, for the 1km trek back to base. It was a fascinating hell, and a mistake I never intend to make again.

I had a few of these pocket adventures during my playthrough; little experiences that weren’t scripted, usually stemming from my own mistakes. The scarcity of ammo, meds – even sleep – put you in situations that feel truly desperate, which is where the ingenuity of Stalker 2 shines.

Everything Stalker 2 does feels very deliberate. From aiming your weapon to opening your inventory, it’s all slow and, at least at first, a little clunky. Initially, I couldn’t aim to save my life (literally, in some cases), having to steady myself before each shot, worried about not killing my target, and also the fact I could count my ammunition on one hand.

I learned from my mistakes the hard way: by dying. Some of my deaths couldn’t have been foreseen – being hit in the head repeatedly by a floating briefcase, for instance – but perishing in situations that I could have avoided often taught me something. Be more cautious, check your corners, and maybe don’t step into the big pile of glowing yellow goo.

The ease with which I could perish wasn’t helped by the litany of technical issues I had early on in my playthrough. Wind anomalies would launch NPCs up into the atmosphere (funny). Dramatic moments were spoiled by characters getting stuck in their default pose (a bit funny). And, often, the game would crawl to a single-digit frame rate during important moments (not funny). A day-one patch has resolved a lot of the technical issues that plagued my early forays into The Zone, and while things still aren’t perfect, it has improved the situation from ‘broken’ to ‘potentially humorous jank’. The fact that this game exists at all is a testament to the grit of the dev team, who have a fascinating making-of documentary about the game here.

Stalker 2 is an experience that rewards those who persevere. It might not be for everyone – run-and-gun aficionados likely won’t get much out of this FPS game – but if it clicks with you, you’ll get to explore a world that feels deliberate, brutal, and often satisfying. To exist in The Zone is to struggle, but once I began to understand my surroundings and the machinations of its people, the wasteland started to feel comfortable; like something I could control.