Key Takeaways
- Stalker 2 captures survival well but falls short on introducing key enemies like the original game.
- You can encounter the iconic Bloodsuckers and Controllers, but Stalker 2 lacks the intense terror of the originals.
- Stalker 2 loses the original’s natural, unscripted horror edge, making enemies feel like video game setpieces.
Whether you’re furtively stepping through a minefield of anomalies and following the beep of your artifact tracker, or ducking for cover in a blasted out Soviet complex, Stalker 2 manages to recapture the rugged, heart-pounding sense of survival the original trilogy had remarkably well.
But for all its excellent moments, the way it introduces key enemies isn’t a patch on the original game. Nothing in Stalker 2 comes close to recreating the terror of venturing into Shadow of Chornobyl’s best location, Agroprom Underground.
Agroprom Underground is where Stalker rolls up its sleeves and gets serious. By the time you arrive at this complex, you’ve had a few hours of fighting bandits and soldiers, taken back encampments, and likely survived a few anomalies and irradiated wild dogs. But Agroprom is a dark, wet, and cramped marathon through a seemingly endless maze of corridors.
Meeting The Bloodsuckers
Aside from the army standing between you and its exit, Agroprom introduces two of the Stalker series’ most iconic enemies. The first is as you take your first steps into the facility, with a roar heralds the arrival of your very first Bloodsucker. It’s fast, it hits hard, and, worst of all, it’s nearly completely invisible, quickly shattering any impressions of safety you might have still clung to with a panic-inducing fight for survival.
It’s been years since I last played Shadow of Chornobyl, but I can remember that encounter vividly. Stalker 2, on the other hand, makes the Bloodsucker one of the very first enemies you encounter in the Zone. It has all the hallmarks of a great Stalker moment, with the night and the quiet giving way to a horrific fight. But something’s not quite right about it.
Whether it’s the ample room to move around, or the foliage helping you track the nearly invisible enemy easier, it lacks the cloying terror of Agroprom. You haven’t accidentally set foot in the lair of a deadly mutant, you’ve encountered a miniboss in an open area designed specifically for you to fight it in.
Later Bloodsucker encounters are a lot better, like a tricky fight with one in a flooded building on Wild Island. These are great moments, but that all-important first encounter is squandered.
The Bloodsucker in Shadow of Chornobyl’s Agroprom is only the start. You become a one-Stalker army taking down everything in your path and scrape through by the skin of your teeth in by far my favourite part of not just Shadow of Chornobyl, but the entire Stalker series.
Bloodied and worryingly low on ammo, you finally see the exit down a long corridor. You inch towards it, only to hear an uncanny yell from the way you came. The camera is violently wrenched away from you, as it rushes in to reveal Stalker’s biggest threat: the Controller.
An Unforgettable Moment
While Bloodsuckers are the closest thing Stalker has to a mascot, Controllers are its most memorable. Psychic mutants that can create hallucinations while pelting you from range, fighting them is a disorienting shock to the system. Like the Bloodsucker, encountering your first Controller is a moment that sticks with you long after you’ve left Agroprom.
All the way through the opening hours of Stalker 2, I was dreading encountering a Controller. I knew it’d be coming eventually, so every shadow had a Controller in it, every corner had one just around it, ready to turn my temporal lobes into goop. I kept psyching myself out, too worried to go into the next room because of what I was absolutely sure was going to be there. Until it finally was really there, and I came away slightly deflated.
In Stalker 2, it’s likely you’ll encounter your first Controller on Wild Island. A pair of brothers tasks you with venturing into a nearby factory – or, rather, one brother gives you the job while the other moans and clutches their head. The factory is full of the zombies of their companions, and there’s constant chatter of a monster lurking beneath the building.
It might as well have had a neon sign and parade blaring ‘There’s A Controller Here, Mate, Steady On!’.
You fight your way through the complex, dropping Zombies and scavenging their remains until you’re a walking armoury, until you uncover the dreaded overly designed arena space. A wide room with lots of cover, at the end of a long, almost dungeon-like building, and tucked away at the back is the Controller, waiting for you to engage like you’d both just rolled for initiative.
It’s a cool moment, but it feels very much like a video game. Stalker isn’t about trundling from setpiece to setpiece, it’s about having the horrors of mankind’s folly charging at you and turning your organs into pate. It’s meant to feel natural and unscripted, even when it clearly was.
Agroprom was a highlight of the original game because it highlighted the indifference of the Zone. Nothing here cares if you survive or not. If you can’t work out the Bloodsucker, or you can’t get around a Controller, that’s fine – you’ll just die. Stalker 2 feels like it’s lost that almost cruel edge to the series, when I just want it to kick my arse.
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.
- Platform(s)
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Xbox Series X and Series S
, Microsoft Windows - Released
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2024-00-00
- Developer(s)
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GSC Game World
- Publisher(s)
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GSC Game World
- Engine
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Unreal Engine 5
- ESRB
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