IGN STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl Final Review

Underneath the technical shortcomings is a refreshingly brutal single-player FPS.

[pwnmaster3000]

Honestly having a really bad impression at first, the game grew on me.
I would give this game right now a 7/10, because of the bugs. Game crashed 3 times on me on Xbox and I only have 10-15 hours of gameplay.
But when they finally fix the game, I’ll say 8.5/10-9/10

[Obscure_Observer]

Overall the game is great and I´m loving it so far, but there´s definitely lots of fixes, balance and quality of life improvements to be made.

Fighting Bloodsuckers is annoying while fighting Poltergeists is almost unbearable given that some weird bug will prevent you from seen their glowing mist and spot their location on most encounters. Friendly NPC´s AI needs some serious works as they won´t react to most of your actions even if you have a gun pointed to their heads. The Geiger counter also needs improvement, as it will not tell you precisely what levels of radiation you are exposed to.

Fortunately, the developers are active on Discord, listening to fan feedback and working to resolve these issues as we speak. GSC Game World confirmed that the first post-launch patch should drop this week and hopefully iron out most of those issues.

[pwnmaster3000]

Okay thought I was the only one. Like that flash anomalies one. I was like how the hell am I suppose to know where they are at. No signs, I’m just running and healing. Honestly a lot of the enemy movement is weird.

[LonDonE]

i agree, the game at its core is a great game and the world begs to be explored.. but the bugs and constant performance issues on all platforms is a big problem.
lol at the monsters who are invisible, man they were driving me mad, i was like da fudge is killing me!!!
I hope this upcoming patch is not again some massive file size.. like at this point i have given up with modern games being super inflated in size and badly optimised. On series x, i pre loaded the game and was shocked at the size of it, but there is some stupid glitch on series x where the game then downloads the full game again on launch day.. this has happened now for me with multiple games.. with stalker it was super annoying as 150gb being downloaded twice is not on.

MS need that looked at and sorted, wonder if others have faced this issue? I have seen it mentioned online, hopefully is sorted but thats not the games fault more something to do with Microsoft pre loading..

This game reminds me so much of metro, really want another metro game open world.. but at least metro games run like a dream and are usually very well optimized, stalker devs need to sort the performance issues before launch vs after.

[TheNamelessOne]

It is a great game. A very good follow-up to the originals. It just needs a lot of patching lol.

[Killer2020UK]

Seems very true to the original then!

[RaidenBlack]

And the original still gets played today ... peaked 2.5K players in 2022

[repsahj]

What happened to this game? It looks generic now compared to the awesome previews.

[Cockney]

I see these relatively high scores for a mediocre bug ridden game and I ask myself why, then it hit me, sympathy votes for the Ukrainian devs undergoing hardships.
Maybe their time would have been better spent defending their country

[RaidenBlack]

They're kicking enemy's as* both in reality and same time, virtually ~ that very few countries can pull off properly
I say to them keep at it, win at every front ... coz from outside, a coping jealous will always be a coping jealous

[Cockney]

They're doing neither, the game is floundering as is they're patriotism

[Cockney]

Ign is right this game is a chore to play "chornobyl"

[Traecy]

This past weekend I tried the first 45 minutes of playing & to me it was boring. I may try it again during my break this week to see if it gets any better.

[jznrpg]

I don’t know about this game as I haven’t played it but a lot of games take a handful of hours to really get going. Some never get good though

[Seraphim]

Only us RPG lovers know the real struggles of getting a game to open up lol. Although, I would argue a lot of non RPGs are taking far to long to get going too.

[badz149]

A known bug ridden game getting an 8 from IGN. Talk about hypocrisy against gamers! Remember Days Gone, IGN? That game's launch was nowhere as bad as this but seems like IGN couldn't stop talking about the ocassional bugs and slapped it with a 6.5. what has changed, IGN? Is it the war?

[TwoPicklesGood]

Calm down champ