Recent reviews by Ziilrik

Alright, I usually don't do this, but I felt like this needed to be done. I'm a long-time Stalker fan and found out about this game from CoP. It was a long time ago; my father bought me a Polish game magazine called CD Project, and this volume had the original CoP on the CD. I had never heard of that game at that time (I was maybe like 12-13) and decided to play it, and oh boy, that was one scary as ♥♥♥♥ game and hard as ♥♥♥♥ too... But I loved it. Some years later, I got my first Steam Account and also played the two other titles, but they never felt the same as CoP. I usually replay the story of it once a year.

In 2018 I heard for the first time about a sequel... The mysterious second part. It should have come out in 2021... A couple of years later, I finished school, joined the army, and started officer school, and only now has it finally come out after all those years. And at the very end, when I'm finally able to play it, I feel disappointed. Let me explain why. I'll start with the pros.

Pros:

Amazing new world. It's so beautiful compared to the old Stalker games. The weather, the effects, and the nature are definitely something to look at while you wander around. Especially some anomalies are so wonderful yet so deadly.

Big variety of guns and armor. If you played the old titles, you know that you had like 3-5 guns at most from a specific type of gun (For example: SR from CoP. You had the SVDm-2, the Vintar BC, and SVUmk-2. All of those also had a special variant, but that's it). It's just so refreshing to use something different instead of sticking to one gun, which you found after 2 hours of the game and stuck with until the end.

Way more zones and content. I'm sitting now at 30 hours, and I think I'm at most at 30% of the game. I could replay the old titles already twice in this time.

More mutants with new skills. All of the old games had pretty much very similar mutants. Stalker 2 comes with some refreshing new ones.

Some cool and new anomalies with a lot of new artifacts and also different types of those.

I love the malfunctions; it's way better to see a case stuck in my weapon than hearing only the click mid-fight.

Finally, Psy damage actually scrambles your brain instead of slowly taking your health bar away.


And this brings me pretty much to the cons, which there are a lot of, in my opinion. To be honest, even too many for a game that was in development for 6 years.

Cons:

The zone might be wonderful, but its optimization is ass. I have a 3080 and a Ryzen 7 3800x with 32 GB RAM... and I swear to God, my game stutters, and I can't play on higher settings than Low. Otherwise, my FPS drop to 20-30.

The zone is empty. You run through the zone, and besides a group of dogs and bandits sometimes spawning behind you, nothing happens. Nothing at all. There are no fights in the distance between two factions and some mutants, or mutants getting into anomalies only to get ripped apart. The zone feels dead and not alive.

Mutants are just a waste of ammo. Sometimes you can loot some of them, but only because of the quest items. Otherwise, no trophies or anything.

Some of their abilities are literally making me wanna kill myself... yeah, I’m talking to you, Psy Dogs. Like, there is no way to counter the ability, and it can be used way too quickly.

Humans are way too easy to kill and almost never have anything on them besides bread, sausage, 3 bullets, a broken sawed-off, or a makarov, and rarely a medkit. In CoP, the further you got, the better items the enemies had. Now an elite monolith has some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ breadcrumbs, 5 cheap bullets, and vodka.
They also barely scratch you. Sometimes on Veteran difficulty, I can stand in the open and keep hitting meds, and they won't take me down. Even a close-quarter shot from a shotgun can be tanked.

Anomalies are a joke. Even on Veteran, you can survive each of them at least once. You have only one artifact in each (before an emission resets it), not like in CoP where you could even find up to three. The detectors are, in my opinion, overpowered. I can work with the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Echo one and still find them without problems.

Artifacts are worth trash; only the rarest ones can get you some cash (After 30 hours, I found like 60% of the cheapest ones, 39% of the medium ones, and 1% of legendary ones).
You need like 3-5 artifacts to get some basic repairs and basic ammo for the game.

They also have some mediocre buffs. While in the older games, you could have some nice combos; now it's not worth touching besides legendary ones.

Way too few attachments. Stalker 2 advertised with massive amount of weapon modifications. Well, too bad you get like one scope, a silencer, and maybe a bigger mag or quick-change mag. I didn’t expect as many attachments as from Tarkov, but come on... even CoP had like 7 different scopes.

Upgrading weapons is not satisfying. In CoP and other titles, a basic AKSU without any attachments and upgrades could barely hit something further than 50m away with 30 shots. In Stalker 2, you can be John Wick with a Makarov because of how good the weapons work. There’s absolutely no learning curve for understanding the pros and cons of weapons because all of them shoot with laser precision.

Lack of different loot. There are a lot of weapons and armors but barely any other loot. You have 3 drinks, 2 energy drinks, 4 food resources, 3 medkits, 3 other medical resources, and that's it. After 6 years of development, I expected at least double the amount... That's why it's so annoying seeing those 30 times in a row in a stash.

Stashes are trash. In CoP, you didn't have that many of those, and all of them were quest rewards, but a lot of them had amazing loot. Now, in Stalker 2, almost all dead bodies, random PDAs, or missions give you those. After playing for 5 hours, I have like 20 icons on my map with stashes, of which maybe 1 is really worth checking, while the rest consist of 1-2 meds, 2 drinks, 60 bullets, and 2 food provisions.

The story is meh. While the main story is interesting, I feel like most of my side quests have no impact at all besides one or two, which still only change small things. And why IN THE NAME OF GOD do most of the quest conversations end in "talk and get shot by NPC" or "shoot NPC"?

Talking to random stalkers gives you only one conversation about "What's new in the zone?" No more random encounters with quick travel-type NPCs.

Shooting most of the NPCs doesn't give you many penalties. If you don't like somebody, well, shoot him. It's not like it matters that much.

I miss achievements from CoP that gave you some boosts here and there after finishing missions or reaching some quotas.

Economy got fixed by Patch 1.0.1 and is now playable. You can actually get some money instead of paying with your liver to repair your makarov.

Characters are ugly, and a lot of them look very similar. No matter who you are going to meet, most of them shine because of how oily their skin is.

A lot of old characters are changed so much you can barely recognize them. I know a zone can be hard on one, but come on, some faces don’t even look close to the old ones.

A lot of places got reworked so much they are barely similar to the old designs... why, just why?

Fall damage. I swear to God, if I drop from like 5-6m with a 20kg backpack, I might sprain both of my feet or break my legs... BUT I WOULDN’T DIE EVERY ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ TIME!!! From my 100 deaths so far, at least 40 were from fall damage because I thought this wouldn’t kill me.

Sleeping. You can't choose anymore if you wanna wake up at 3am, 10am, 4pm, or 11pm. You cycle only between night and day.

The night is way too long, and the day way too short. I feel like I’m playing in some atomic winter where the day goes by way too quickly.

NO NVG, NO NIGHT SCOPES, and the flashlight is literally the only thing you have, and it's as strong as a small candle.

The energy drinks are, in my opinion, one of the worst implemented buffs compare