Key Takeaways
- Fallout used to make you feel the harsh reality of the wasteland, immersing you in the struggles of its survivors.
- But Fallout 4 leaned too far into power fantasy, having you fist fight a deathclaw within the first hour.
- Stalker 2 goes to show that a desolate, unforgiving wasteland is every bit as engaging as it used to be, and that games like Fallout don’t need to toss that aside for guns-blazing FPS action.
The very first Fallout game opens with the Vault Overseer choosing you, an ordinary, fresh-faced teenager in nothing but blue overalls, to venture out into the harsh wastes lurking above to find a water chip to save your people. Your mind is flush with what the surface might throw at you: towering Super Mutant armies? Raiders cruising the highway and kidnapping travellers? Feral Ghouls wasting away in the radioactive storms?
You alone have been entrusted with braving these insurmountable odds. Everyone back home is counting on you to save them. But as you step out of the Vault, a meagre handful of rats descend on you and gnaw at your flesh as you helplessly writhe in the infertile soil with the giant Vault door still in full view.
The first Fallout is humbling. Your sheltered background leaves you weak and naive to the realities of the new world. Recovering a water chip is no simple fetch quest; every single square inch of your path is deadly. But overcoming these odds is what makes the game so rewarding, as you find yourself hardened by the wasteland, becoming as rugged as its own edges. Nothing exemplifies this more than the ending, in which the Overseer refuses you re-entry, as you are now tainted, deemed unfit for civil, pre-war life.
Fallout 3 showed that Bethesda understood the grit of the series’ world when it took over from Black Isle Studios, but then came Fallout 4, which tossed that tone aside completely. You immediately dispatch a Vault full of overgrown mutant bugs while in a post-cryogenic fuzz, and then storm a town full of raiders like you’re a Vault-dwelling John Wick. The quest even culminates with you donning a full suit of power armour and fist-fighting a deathclaw in the streets of Concord.
Fallout 4 is a power fantasy: the wasteland is no longer a harsh, oppressive death trap, but a sandbox for you to bash Fallout action figures against each other in. It doesn’t really feel like Fallout anymore, losing so much of the edge that the other games had.
This has been a problem with the last few Bethesda games — Skyrim tossed aside many of the RPG elements of the series to make you the unstoppable Dragonborn, while Starfield puts you into the space boots of a multidimensional, superpowered Starborn. These games are less about immersing you in their worlds and more about making you an undefeatable titan, a force of nature barrelling through to the end.
It stands to reason that The Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5 will continue the trend, but Stalker 2 goes to show that an unrelenting wasteland is every bit as engaging as turning the player into radioactive Rambo.
The Wasteland Should Make You Feel Weak And Helpless
Stalker 2’s prologue opens with you climbing over a wall into the Zone in the thick of the night, and it’s immediately unnerving. You hear panicked gunfire in the distance, your liaison on the radio continually pushing you to leave, terrified of staying too long, and then you hear faint noises shuffling in the grass.
There’s a slight, shimmering silhouette in the dark smog, edging closer and closer, until eventually, a harrowing, twisted, monstrous face closes in on you. It takes a swipe and scurries off, leaving you in a hot sweat, bleeding out onto the mud. You scramble to put on a bandage and ready your weapon, but its invisible visage is already moving in for the kill.
You fire off your weapon, but it’s unfazed, still lunging, and so you’re forced to retreat. But it gives chase. One single enemy in the dark is enough to make you feel trapped — the world is open, yours to explore, and yet, in that moment, you feel the crushing weight of the Zone bearing down on you. The harshness of surviving in this barren dystopia is felt, because you are weak and helpless.
After a couple of these encounters, Stalker 2 lessens in intensity, but the first time you run into bandits, pillaging from those risking life and limb to retrieve artifacts, things are just as tense. Three gunmen alone, pushing at you from different angles, can easily dwindle your supplies if you’re not careful. You need to pick them off one by one without getting hurt, or you’ll get nicked, bleed, and be forced to waste precious bandages.
The sheer scarcity of resources, and the fact that every sliver of damage is impactful, makes the wasteland feel desolate, immersing you in the plight of those who have spent their lives surviving within it. Having to navigate the Zone means coming to understand it on a far more intimate level, while also bettering yourself as a tactical fighter who is as careful as they are deadly. That mastery is so much more rewarding than being handed everything on a silver platter.
You should be frail, struggling to hold your own against small armies of raiders, barely clinging on after encountering one Super Mutant on the road. These should be tense, exhilarating, and ultimately frightening moments, otherwise they just aren’t that engaging — Deathclaw Quarry wouldn’t be nearly as memorable if we walked in there in full power armour right after leaving Goodsprings.
Even the most mundane paths can be made interesting by making them tense. A field of nothing but dried up, dead grass, with no treasure or even quests, is still gripping if you have to cross it while avoiding the horrors of this new world. Stalker 2 understands what Fallout has forgotten: a cave with rats can be made interesting by throwing a feeble, fresh-faced Vault Dweller right into the thick of it.
Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl is the long-awaited follow-up to the apocalyptic first-person shooter. As a Stalker, you must venture into the deadly Exclusion Zone, contending with mutants and warring factions alike, in search of valuable artifacts.