S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl

Jesus fucking Christ what a fucking trash fire.

I remember the PC Gaming magazine that first teased the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R game, it sold this survival/extraction shooter concept of a brutal dynamic world, you went in looting and if you didn’t make it out before dark you would hold up in an apartment, hearing firefight and mutants while you waited for dawn.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R never lived up to those promises, the open world was broken up into maps, helicopters and vehicles where pulled the night before release, they “worked” but the change to the maps and world unbalanced everything.

After many years of DLC and stand alone expansions to the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R I had high hopes for S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2, I expected a brutal version of a single player COD:Warzone. Gunfights, roving assholes, and helicopters sweeping past strafing mutants, the storms and environment as much a threat as any any enemy. You would work your way into the zone, you would scavenge and explore.

INSTEAD what i got was a single player MMO?!?! what fucking joker balanced the economy in this game? Terrified that the player would scavenge and find useful stuff, or mule trash back to the vendor they put the player on a strict linear curve. Just like any MMO where boars drop 3 copper and 1 vendor trash item, the bandits here in full combat gear drop 1 sausage and 9 bullets, their guns are worn out and red so you can’t even sell them, you can’t loot clothes or armor of a corpse, they might as well just drop 10 copper and skip the other stuff. Not only is the combat and looting boring and unrewarding, the game design fights the stupid economy at every step. In Far Cry 2 you would automatically pick up ammo, and if you wanted to pick up a weapon you had to interact with it, in this game where most guns are literally worthless you press “F” to pick them up, or long press “F” to take the ammo out. DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW FUCKING MENTAL THIS IS! This more than maybe any other fact shows how the game and economy fight. Yahtzee said that some games feel like the game designer and story writer had worked in different rooms and refused to communicate, the same thing can be said about this game with the game designer and economist.

This is not even touching on the level design, it’s own unholy mess! This foliage is so dense you can’t see more than 10 meters in front of you, there are so many encounters, anomalies, bandits, and mutants infecting every square cm of the world it feels like Dead Island 2, a town stuffed to the gill with zombies, instead of this dangerous and rewarding landscape. When you make the world so dense with shit, nothing feels special, and the stupid environment hazards don’t even host artifacts, it just makes moving around anywhere a pain in the ass, and the whole game feel like trying to swim in crude oil.

There are many other problems, the mutants are bullet sponges and it feels like just mag dumping into them is the only way to deal with them (“bUt ItS a SuRvIvAl GaMe” you say skulling a bottle vodka. I WOULD AVOID EVERY COMBAT IF THE ENVIRONMENT ACTUALLY LET ME SEE ENEMIES BEFORE I STUMBLE INTO THEM!!) Trust me i would like nothing more than engage with the systems in this game as little as possible, not because they are scary or intimidating, but because they are so unrewarding the only winning move is to not play!

I have seldom seen a game THIS at odds with itself, none of the systems compliment each other, it’s not a brutal or difficult game, it’s unrewarding and boring in the extreme.

When i was in Chernobyl and we drove by the starting area of S.T.A.L.K.E.R 1 me and did some other blokes in bus did the Soyjaks point meme, because it was iconic and recognizable. If you want the starting zone of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 just shove your head in a bush.

Mods did wonders for the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R, I am not really interested in the hardcore survival stuff, but the ability to more freely explore and experience the world is great. I had much more fun with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. G.A.M.M.A. on GoG than i did with the sequel.

Fedora: Heart of Linux

All that being said, it did run very smooth on my fedora machine. Heroic game launcher makes gaming on Linux a real smooth experience, i am very happy to be able to install a game and press play without having to spend 30 minutes in the terminal.