As crazy stalker fan i pre ordered both on xbox and pc, wanted to play 24/7 but i just cant, needs at least 1 year to catch up. Still playing stalker gamma 300 hours in. Im too lazy to list things that are 'not good' in S2, there is a lot.
@@nikadatuashvili2306 im not a fan and i only played previous version for a few hours but a lot of things are better in previous version. i think stalker 2 is not bad at all but in the other hand, it needs more improvements
I actually stopped playing S2 once i learned about Anomaly. S2 looks and sounds amazing, but I can't praise much else. I hope S2 gets the Anomaly treatment in the future...
its mostly the og stalker games but wiht an open world ,much better story presentation and a lot of extra animations , honestly i wanted a bit more depth and customisation (not like in anomaly or its modpacks) like the ability to skin mutants like in the og games (so you wouldnt be bleeding money by fighting mutants for no reward) more meaningful gear upgrades at mechanics , harder mutants wich need different aproaches to kill besides pumping 5 mags into them ( to my knowledge the controller is the only one that does that), the ability to join a faction or build a reputation for yourself and with the faction like in clear sky ( they butchered the og factions :(, )
I would have loved a faction element that was more it’s own development outside of the main story. I hope to one day either build that myself or see others do it
I think I have to disagree with the story part. It feels more contrived for me. It may be the lack of A-Life and subpar fights but I found myself tuning out the story when that's half the reason I got the game.
btw this game is by default running raytracing, but the software variant called lumen, meaning there's no prebaked lighting and it's all simulated in real time. which helped the devs push out this game way faster and to not worry about that aspect at all almost.
@@toasttoni it is calculated by GPU, but in a different way so even gpus without ray tracing support can do it. And it's not using RT cores of Nvidia GPU. The difference in algorithm is that software luman makes approximation of raytracing. And a problem is when information about a scene is not present in a frame. I hope developers will add hardware RT in future updates
Lumen has been a shit experience for me, always. It just doesn't know how to do its job and it's either full on darkness or blinding light. Wish we had RT and baked lighting options for non RT cards.
This game has a CPU bottleneck issue on PC. My specs: RTX 4090, I9 13900K (Newest bios), 64GB DDR5 RAM@6400Mhz, 4TB M.2 NVMe Gen4 SSD, Windows 11 version 23H2. No flashlight shadow, no shadows for foliage, lighting system is inadequate and light does not 'bounce' enough. The AI in this game is very basic. With all this in mind. And AI routines that are hardly an improvement over the last Stalker game from 15 years ago. How does this game have a CPU bottleneck on high end CPUs? Is Unreal Engine 5 that inefficient for gaming?
I've not had CPU issues, but it does use the CPU pretty heavy. Even Xbox has had issues regarding the CPU load. I'd imagine combination of the engine, and the way they put everything together.
Got a 7600x3D, a 7900XT and 32 Gigs DDR5 6000, when I hit towns fps drops to low 50s, sometimes high 40s lol. Very bad optimisation I'd say but UE5 is not helping either.
Oh graphics options are inconsequential in this case but still I should add, Epic settings, 1440p, FSR 3.1 quality and no frame gen. Only hair is set to low cause I heard it helps.
I just finished the game and have been enjoying it since release. However I missed the many custom settings Stalker Anomaly offered me that catered to my playstyle. So I use about 20 mods that rebalance alot of the game, I just dont like engaging with weight managemant, bullet sponges or grindy mechnanics on a hardcore level. I also like to sell everything everywhere or go through kneedeep water without drowning :) Technically the game looks good but the lighting freaks out sometimes and draw distance is low. I wish it would be more optimized but UE5 is probably also the reason a small Dev like GSC could create such a game in the first place. A shame they didnt do more playtesting and ruined day one reviews for themselfs. Spawning enemies 5m in front of you and lying about A-Life was dumb. Some say they dont like the new map layout but I like it alot, liked the POI you come across. The main story is OK, but just like older Stalker titles some quests are designed in a BS way that just scream " bad game design" and atleast involve googling a solution... Some areas are off limits for now but I hope DLC will fix that :)
Dont compare s2 to gamma or mod stalker like that, while i agree that AI is dumper than OG but weapon in S2 are amazing, you have much more option to choose, like hell you can even attach masterkey underbarrel on the sniper and they have more rifle, smg, sniper and pistol are great in S2 compare to OG when there are ton of pistol but they all garbage, and they remove that instakill grenade throw which is my most favorite thing in S2 as well
man, I find gemma/anomaly have much better designed combat system..... in stalker 2 guns do minimal damage with body shots, enemy aimbots you, lands 90% of their full auto shots at range but each shot does very little damage, guns using same ammunition doing vastly different damage.......
Yeah, you're pretty spot on. It's old school STALKER type of damage scaling. Like SoC. Gamma and Anomaly are built off misery which tunes things WAAY differently, especially Gamma. It'll take time but I'm sure people will do similar things eventually
4:45 I got used to the long and short press Q and E actions quite quick. But sometimes I accidently pressed E instead of R so I was slowly eating bread in a fight instead of reloading my shotgun :( Also iam used to a the middle mouse button being a grenade quickthrow in Stalker Anomaly, very handy against Monolith groups but not available in Stalker 2 :(
I am a trilogy master and I have sunk hundreds of hours into all the popular modpacks and played many of the obscure russian packs as well. Last week I finally began Stalker 2 after deciding to wait for a few patches upon release. I have not finished the game but I am around 50 hours committed so far. My opinion thus far is a resounding ‘I don’t know’. I really just cannot decide how it is or what I think of it. There are some things that I absolutely love and some things I either hate or i’m just indifferent to. The pros: - I really love parts of the plot. I particularly find the Noontide / Faust / Strider plot very, very cool - I think Skiff is a another certified classic character which showcases GSC’s ability to create legends with every game - The updated / new anomalies is a sight to behold, new graphics and all. The Bulba is one of my favorites- so cool to see all the vehicles and debris warping and flowing with the gravity pull - Some of the updated suit / outfit designs are amazing. Ironically kinda reminds me of the controversial HD models for Anomaly. LOVE how Spark and Freedom look - It is so cool to see where legacy characters wound up and what they’re up to - *Some* parts of the zone are spectacular and I especially love the cloudy / blue overcast weather - The sound design is fantastic - I love the new detector and new artifacts / anomalous areas - The size of the map is a sight to behold (but we need more in it) The Cons: - Gunplay feels….idk clunky and heavy? - Hate the quick use system. Bring back F1-F4 - Stashes feel pointless most of the time - Horrible optimization - Over-reliance on blurry, mangled upscaling - Weapon selection and attachments feel kinda paltry - Controllers are…..weird looking? - Enemy Stalker behavior seems strange in gun fights. Slow side stepping and spamming grenades while headshotting you from faaaaaar away with buckshot is obnoxious - Exploration doesn’t feel as rewarding as it could, largely due to finding the same crap over and over - The HUD and map system feel very Far Cry? - The SIRCAA segment feels very Jurassic Park despite that phenomenal Wish Granter segment - I’ve tried both PC and Xbox and both seem to have a strange sort of input lag or weird acceleration that I don’t like. Aiming doesn’t feel as fast and snappy as I want it to - Some of the new design to legacy areas feels again very Far Cry / Dying Light - Don’t like the item re-design on Hercules and others - Ammo types impossible to read and difference in performance feels negligible. 556 rifles feel like pea shooters. SMGs feel heavy - The notion of accepting bugs because they’re ‘anomalies’ and all part of the fun of SlavJank™️ is very stupid and unacceptable in 2025 IMO - It needs a dynamic or procedurally generated side task feature to broaden our options of making money on the side besides the classic scavenge, sell repeat - Where is our faction identification when looting enemies or faction relations? - Binoculars? - Enemies should drop more diverse loot. We shouldn’t have to pull the trick where you kill someone and wait for another Stalker to loot them to THEN take them out and see if you get a suit - I HATE and I mean HATE the bloodsucker and grenade slow-motion. Let us disable that. - The save game corruption issue looms large over all release platforms and it’s totally f’d up that the best GSC can offer is telling you to backup the save file directory - that doesn’t work for everyone. You shouldn’t have to worry about losing dozens of hours in a modern game
I think they did not add binoculars because, especially on release, there was nothing to look at with them with the spawn radius (initially like 30m, now likely around 100m). Also, from old trilogy I played only CoP, but a lot of Anomaly/Gamma and I am sad about how they trivialized bloodsuckers. I would like the bloodsuckers to be more horrifying, stronger, but much more rare. Meeting one every 5 minutes in the Lesser Zone just makes them too common. But that is admitedly jsut my idea of what bloodsuckers should be...
I agree with pretty much everything you said, luckily I believe most of these issues will be surmounted by patches and community mods eventually Game has some gaping flaws right now but it's alright, a bit half-baked
My problem is that they were to scared to innovate certain aspects of stalker series and standardized things that make the unique stalker feel less apparent. They don't want to make hunger and obtaining ammo too necessary so instead loot is thrown at you at every opportunity and while this worked on the smaller scale maps of the first three games, in the open world we more incentive to explore new places. The parts that were standardized were less intrusive but still bothersome like the UI feeling too simple in design and while the cutscenes are cool, I kind of preferred how the other games relied more on a less involved approach like having the player themselves caught in the middle of a situation they're only a small part of rather than a premade scene where we lack control and also feel like we're the center of attention.
Game is good but the exploration isn’t well rewarded, i mean if you run for stlaker stash the disappointment is real. Bread, sausages, broken gun most of the time.. what’s the point if i can find all those stuff on a table inside all house or building ? 70% of mission are like, go here, find that and come back. I believe the game is too big for what it have to give.
My First play through I was deliberately not paying attention to bad parts just so I savor the moment. However, coming to a second playthrough, it does start to reveal a lot of shortcomings and glaring holes. I played a bit of ShoC in-between S2 and something's just felt weaker. Id say the atmosphere didn't hit entirely the e same (maybe the ambient music and lack of A-Life) but also the game felt like it as a linear story (main quest has its ups and downs), like trying the be Metro but in a open world, really wished for more interesting side content (especially with Duty an Freedom). Maybe with the DLC more will come and they just wanted to get it out so they could develop the future better, but yeah id say it as a 7ish.
The map is great, i like the recreations of the original areas. The vibes for me just feel off. You don't see people artifact hunting. You can't ask to accompany groups traveling. You aren't able to side with the bandits. There are hardly any Freedom and Duty quests. That's all besides my personal issues with the story.
The map feels weird because they shuffled locations around for realism. I don't like it, they should've stuck to how the maps were laid out in the original games.
The new layout of the zone doesn't bother me. It's the fact that 75% of the map is abandoned and unused in side quests. Lots of places are just occupied by mutants or zombies. Just a lot of wasted opportunities imho
I would consider it an 8/10 to me it has the stalker vibes for sure. I have a few gripes but hopefully theyll be adressed with patches. If not once we start getting overhaul mods it will be 10/10
to many bugs and the performance is just to bad to get that high sorry but more than most would say even a 7 is being generous. i give it a 6.5 it would be a 8 or 9 if it wasn't for how bad the optimization is. yes the game is being made in a war, but this game has been in development for many year' before the war even broke out so some things is understandable like some bugs and stuff but performance is not this is literally in the top 3 worst performing game's in the last 2 year's it is really bad. the reason that's unacceptable is because more than most people are either on 30 series or older or AMD 6k series or older. and even if you on 40 series or 7k series gpu's you still get less than desirable performance even while having a powerful car to run this game at 1440p 60 fps with just upscaling you have to have a 800 dollar gpu either a 4070 ti super or a 7900 xt, and for 1080p you have to have a 600 dollar rtx 4070 or a 7800xt to get a solid 60 fps experience without upscaling at 1080p at high settings not even epic settings btw. the performance of this game kills it more than any other thing going on with it. and that isnt counting the beefy CPU's that need to be paired with these beefy GPU's.. that's why this game don't deserve any awards or a high rating. its a 6 or 7 at best. if they fix some performance problem's then it will definitely be a 8 or 9. giving devs high praise when a game's performance is this bad only enables them to give you more of this in the future because you let them by with it once. their is alot of people that cant afford the latest and greatest parts. but the people that can are also no0t happy with performance like this. people don't pay 800+ dollars for hardware to barley run 60 fps. a 4090 is a monster GPU and it cant even hit a consistent 60 fps at 4k upscaled and it is the only gpu that can hit 60 65 fps at 1440p native without upscaling.
I think part of what disappoints me the most is gunfights just feel like a chore. I've started just running from when they spawn on my head and enjoying it more. Mission fights >>>>>> "random" encounters.
Ah, Stalker 2. It's simultaneously really disappointint and also an amazing game for me. The graphics are amazing, and aside from missing muzzle flashes that interact with dynamic shadows, the graphics are a massive upgrade over even the latest improvements in Stalker mods. Just a few things that really annoyed me and disappointed me: Lack of A-life even now (we were promised A-life 2.0, remember? So it should be a big improvement over the OG games, not just roughly approaching what we already had); Lack of player freedom and choices don't matter outside of what directly is decided to affect the story. Like areas being locked of. You're stuck in the Lesser Zone for quite a big chunk of time, and you can only go to the Cordon at best AFAIK, but maybe even that is locked off, I didn't check. There are also other parts of the map that are locked off until you progress thorough the story, with the worst offender being Pripyat. I mean seriously, you are pretty close to the end of the game when you finally get to explore Pripyat. Faction reputation doesn't really exist in the game. There's way too few options involving story elements. Like, at the end of the Spark ending, you can't even try to convince Scar that the C-Conciousness is playing him and are full of shit and they have bad intentions. Or you just can't destroy those damn pods for good. Someone always has to control the Noospheare. Side quests are few and far in between, and the timeout on them sucks a lot. Mouse acceleration was on by default and couldn't be disabled. I have no idea what GSC smoked that made them think that this was even a little bit of a good idea for an FPS game! Fortunately, it should be disabled by now according to the patch logs. Limited save slots, and less importantly, you can't name your saves. Like seriously, whyyyyy GSC, WHYYY?! The mutants are wayyyyyy toooooo tankyyyyyy. Lack of optimization even now. It sucks that I have to use fake frames to get a, not great, but acceptable level of performance - around 80 FPS on average. This should be native performance. Oh and this is with using upscaling too on 1440p. Frame gen artifacts were the most noticable with the lasers and red dot sights. They get doubled, tripled during movement. This is just what I could think of right now. Still, I had a lot of fun with the game. I have no desire to replay it though, so I just watched the other endings on UA-cam (I got 2 out of the 4 endings on my own). I'll wait for a major overhaul of the game from either GSC or from modders. Can't wait for Gamma 2 or Anomaly 2 (or something like that)!
I'd recommend disabling frame gen. The game plays much better at 40-50 FPS without it and the input lag you get with FSR. Other than that I agree completely.
Right I hear you, they are the start of the new game development where they're using frame gen and upscalers to get base performance up to acceptable standards. Not getting the game itself up to standards, and then using the fancy tech to push further. It's already becoming a pattern in the industry.
Recently beat the game and I really enjoyed it. I mostly agree with the review. Replayed the original trilogy with no mods in the month leading up to release and 2 really feels like a continuation of what those games did well. It's a little better in some ways and a little worse in some other ways but it's mostly just more of what I loved about the originals. It's got some flaws but overall a great game imo.
Honestly, S2 started pretty rough, I had game breaking bugs, poor performance and struggled a lot while playing it. But even then I never wanted to close the game and “wait for the patch” to only then play it. It has the most important thing - it feels like stalker, even without A-Life, even more so with it now. The story, although not smth I can call the best I’ve played, is really really good, some moments were just “ok, what? This is insane” (minor spoilers: doctor and SIRCAA, etc) so yeah, 7/10 is a great score for how this game is at this point in time
The best way I'd describe my problems with Stalker 2 is: It feels like a 2007 game with a modern coat of paint. As in, nothing feels definably NEW. It's like the devs put in all the bells and whistles for the OG fans to say "Woagh! I remember that from the OG games!" but didn't really do anything to make Stalker 2 *new*. Edit: And no I don't mean shoehorn in modern game concepts that would water down and ruin stalker, I mean certain things that either didn't age well or could be improved upon, or just plain old new things that a modern stalker game SHOULD have. Think about how Anomaly had an insanely expansive suite of customizable controls and graphics settings. Also Stalker 2 locks armor from the first games (The Monolith SEVA Suit) which can also be seen on NPCs- behind the Deluxe Preorder which I very much don't like.
Another issue I have with Stalker 2 is player choice or lack thereof, and the clear content decay the further you gut into the game. Choices basically don't matter, like with the Ninth mission I was expecting to be able to lie to those Loners to save the Ninth but its either side with them or side with him. There is no in-between or special outcome. And with the Poppy Field quest. Second time I did it I decided to pawn off the icon for the gun, and figured I'd go up to the Loner and say "Hey buddy, sorry to say but your icon wasn't there" but NOPE, no such option, I could either lie and tell him to get it himself sending him to his death, or just be a scumbag. Quests feel as static as Fallout 4's. Another good option is Scar and Spark. My first playthrough, I showed the monolith PDA to Korshunov cause it felt right. But despite me doing everything else for Spark, Scar was all "Sometimes bad people do good things. So tell me Skif, will you do good things?" and i was like WHAT THE FUCK HOW'D YOU EVEN FIND OUT. Then there's the fact that, the further you get from the Lesser Zone, the less side quests there seem to be. Lesser Zone was PACKED with interesting side quests, Cordon had some, but the further I got into the game the less I encountered just from exploring and talking to stalkers.
you don't get 90 fps without frame gen so there for you get good fps but you still get the smoothness/ input lag of 45 50 fps so the 90 fps isn't that great now if you got 65 70 fps then turned on frame gen it would feel like the higher fps get would actually feel like you was actually getting the higher fps. that's the problem with frame gen, It don't feel like higher fps sure you are getting higher fps. but the trade off is less smooth gameplay because of the input lag. you get the input lag of what ever fps you turned frame gen on at so if you get 50 fps and frame gen take you to 90 then you are still running around aiming and shooting at 50 fps while the picture is 90 fps. they need to fix the input lag frame gen makes, if they do that then frame gen will be better than raster performance. we will just have to see how good. Nvidia low latency 2 does once the 50 series come's out it is supposed to be much better than the current low latency Nvidia offer's they say some game's would get as low as 1ms input lag that is insane if it can get frame gen down to 15 or less it will be an Increditable. I wouldn't care to use frame gen at all then.
The only mods I use is weight, PC5 button layout & vender mods. Other than I don't get much crashes just the typical U5 stuttering and the crappt shader compilation that sometimes freezes and I have to restart ,but then the game loads instantly. A-life is a joke I only get the occasional bandits fighting. Way to much anomalies it's gets annoying. The guns fights are fun and I love the guns. The map can feel Sammy at time.
Previous games didn't have A-Life like you mentioned expect CoP i'd say, soc was pretty linear, i completed it maybe more then dozens of times and all felt similar it had nothing like "A-Life" just some timed spawns like wild territory bandit and merchs, cordon car park bandits etc, Clear sky on the other hand was obsessed with faction wars and you could see every living in pda which killed the probability factor and CoP... well in CoP they did manage it quite well with squads roaming around and fighting with mutants part but no faction wars... when I think about it A-Life that we want and see is in Anomaly and similar mods
@@WaveysGamingAdventure Absolutely, because of seamless open-world, new engine, graphics quality, war in ukraine... and so on, Stalker 2 released earlier than it should've but previous titles were also very lacking in polish when they released (except cop imo) but we all knew GSC just needed more time to refine the game, as they are likely still addressing the anomalies even now.
Actually, there is A-life in Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky. It is limited, but it behaves much better STALKER 2's bubble around player that spawns AI and delets them. NPC's are still travelling in games and engaging the threats regardless of player's presense. After main quest missions in area A-life activates, the world doesn't become lifeless. People usually don't return to previous areas and don't see it. About faction wars in CS. You can see the aftermath of the battle if you load from a different area. For example. Stalkers took control of the northern checkpoint that leads to Garbage. Player at Garbage can watch bandit squad moving there to retake it. They go through loading zone and fighting offline at Cordon. Eventually one of the squads wins, you travelling from Garbage to Cordon and can see dead bodies and remnants of surviving squad. A-life on og games works. Unlike in the new one
@@WaveysGamingAdventure it still has random spawns, most of the ai battles you see is just the game spawning an event, it's not actually using alife most of the time
My personal gripe with this game after having put like 40hrs in it is, that it just feels like UE5 Slop. And it feels bloated for some reason software wise, especially the fact that frame-gen and DLSS are just tacked on because they couldn't be bothered to try optimization before release. Atleast they're pushing on with patches and fixes
I hear you. I don’t have much exp with UE5, and while my 4070 works really well… i do not like the implications of the push towards the AI based upscaling tech. More an industry issue than a Stalker 2 issue, but this game is a pretty clear example.
@@WaveysGamingAdventure Yeah definitely not limited to just S2. The whole UE5 situation is just bad with studios moving away from in-house engines (Tho in GSC case starting from UE5 was probably for the better) and larger studios switching to UE5 so they can just cheaply outsource workloads. Upscaling for me feels like it isn't used anymore as a resource effective way to allow less powerful PCs to still perform well but more like a cheap and lazy way to "optimize" a game in combination with input-lag creating AI garbage.
how is the industry moving this way that gamers don't want? I mean I understand shareholders, and all the lack of care, but if the gaming industry has been taken over by suits who's even playing anymore? If none of us are a fan of UE5 bloat, I'm struggling with the news that the whole industry is headed this direction... how!
The only people really enjoying this game are the privileged PC players who get to instantly mod and fix every game they get while the rest of us on console are stuck with an unfinished broken game. This game has not changed since the day I bought it ever since they put out that 1.1 patch the only two differences are they patched the exploits and added random groups of NPC’s walking around the map. I’m enjoying the game but every time I play it now the enjoyment is getting less and less I don’t want to wait two years for this game to be what it was meant to be when I bought it
After hearing "Well! A Joke won't tell itself!" From every stalker I've passed while tripping over the infinite amount of medpacks and bread the Zone has to offer, I stopped playing. Stalker Gamma has absolutely spoiled me with the Zone and Stalker 2 can't even come close. I will say, I LOVE the visual and audio atmosphere of Stalker 2. It's absolutely fantastic! But the quality of life isn't there, Zone feels scripted, and I'm honestly really unhappy with the lack of weapons in the game. Everyone has a baby AK or a TOZ. Same color, same furniture, etc... Also... Why is his motivation for coming to the Zone so weak? His apartment was blown up? Just rent another one. That wasn't a home.
5:50 This is a story-driven game? It's a FPS. Like Doom. It's not an RPG: your character is a nonentity who changes guns and ammo to "level up." If this game had a story, I wouldn't have been so bored that I yawn-quit after 50 hours. It seems like a better game to people like yourself who came into the game having played the other Stalker games. The rest of us haven't a clue wtf is going on.
I never played the original trilogy but i was hoping they would expand on the mechanics for weapon manipulation and medical system. The fact that you have to instal a mod to get mutant loot and a better med system is kinda sad. Super immersive environment though, with mods im loving this game.
Dont compare S2 to mod stalker like gamma or anomaly, those are 2 diferrent game, for me S2 is a stalker game which they focus on to story telling, fast gameplay and gun fight unlike gamma for example when you grinding around 10 hour repeatly just to fix your broken ak
i dont think gsc would want to release a game people would complain about this much. i think a lot of the issues are because they HAD to release the game, they werent oblivious to its problems, just running out of money. lets not forget the devs come from a medium sized country at war with a super power. considering that i think they did good
I'm very excited for what the community builds on this, similar to Bethesda games. Also similar to Bethesda games, it AIN'T DONE. I've played it for about 80 hours and I enjoyed it, the bones of a STALKER game are there, but I'd probably objectively rate it about a 3/5 currently. The world is beautifully detailed but the things populating it are often janky and confusing. Everything points to "whoops, we ran out of money!" It'll be excellent eventually.
I've said this in other comments, but I really do love the game and I'm enjoying the heck out of it. Any fixes to this game that are suggested should be done through mods instead of by the developers directly to the game, is kind of screwing those of us that play on console. I don't have the money for a pc, or to build one anytime in the near future. People in the past have just said, well then just get a PC and do the mods. Well it's not that easy for everyone. If the modders are going to be the one to take care of a small fixes, then fine. But GSC should figure out a way to allow modders to port them to console. Where we can have some sort of command and be able to download the mods. Even if it's not every single mod available, but maybe at least a half dozen or a dozen or so mods that really do change the game for the better.
Just starting. Patch 1.1.3. Shader compiling crash at every start. Enemies just popped out into existence. Infuriating. But I agree with some people here. It doesn’t feel like stalker 1.
I love the game. BUT. im literally at the end, but it keeps crashing as soon as i get to the top of the monolith base. Even when i get past that, the guy glitches and i cant see or get damage from him. So i have to reload to basically redo that part again, for it to continue to crash every time. Im on the basic xbox which is probably why, but this game is definitely for the pc or better xbox. I feel that its definitely not done yet, and the deadzones and sensitivity pull sooo hard with the basic aim assist. Turning is super slow even when maxed out maxed out. 8/10 Combat is great, story is refreshing, i get genuinely scared, upset, and happy when things go down
Getting to Припять was so sad. All this time and build up to walk into an ugly, empty area. Yes they’ve got iconic locations like the ferris wheel, hotel, culture centre but the textures are just poor at distance so it ruins the “awe” from seeing them from distance. 1440p, max settings and textures past 75m are just awful Seeing the Duga made me gasp audibly. Languages too. Only English and Ukrainian VA’s. I’d have liked Russian VA’s but I get the political issues
I was saying this on a previous stream, I would have liked to have more to do in Pripyat. It's such an iconic location, and to only spend a few missions in there was a shame. I didn't think it was that bad in terms of visuals. I did like the overgrowth and vegetation. But the color palette is a bit dull.
great review exactly what i thought the zone is great the ai ruined my game and when i found out the spawn director was spawning fake dead bodies well......
there are to many bugs and the performance is just to bad, but more than most would say even a 7 is being generous. i give it a 6.5 it would be a 8 or 9 if it wasn't for how bad the optimization is. yes the game is being made in a war, but this game has been in development for many year' before the war even broke out so some things is understandable like some bugs and stuff, but performance is not this is literally in the top 3 worst performing game's in the last 2 year's it is really bad. the reason that's unacceptable is because more than most people are either on 30 series or older or AMD 6k series or older. and even if you on 40 series or 7k series gpu's you still get less than desirable performance even while having a powerful card to run this game at 1440p 60 fps with just upscaling you have to have a 800 dollar gpu either a 4070 ti super or a 7900 xt, and for 1080p you have to have a 550 dollar rtx 4070 or a 7800xt to get a solid 60 fps experience without upscaling at 1080p at high settings not even epic settings btw. the performance of this game kills it more than any other thing going on with it. and that isn't counting the beefy CPU's that you need to pair with these beefy GPU's.. that's why this game don't deserve any awards or a very high rating. its a 6 or 7 at best. if they fix some performance problem's then it will definitely be a 8 or 9. giving devs high praise when a game's performance is this bad only enables them to give you more of this in the future because you let them by with it once. their is a lot of people that cant afford the latest and greatest parts. but the people that can are also not happy with performance like this. people don't pay 800+ dollars for hardware to barley run 60 fps. a 4090 is a monster GPU and it cant even hit a consistent 60 fps at 4k upscaled and it is the only gpu that can hit 60 65 fps at 1440p native without upscaling. if you need frame gen to get over 60 fps there is a big problem.
The game is great until it locks up, crashes or quests get nerfed. Any of these three will destroy your enjoyment. The rest of the bugs don’t help either.
Mu-ants. I don't think the fan-base is as huge as it seems. Tons of new and casual gamers just repeating the typical phrases on UA-cam. Armchair experts.
I think I want to stick with Anomaly; feel fully immersed in it. Next, and probably last, will be GAMA. Need a better card though. I don't think any card CPU combo is good with Stalker 2. All seem not up to task in the reviews. Want to fight mutants and other factions, not the software.
It's my first Stalker game. Bought the Ultimate edition after trying it on gamepass and waiting for 1.1 Right now, I want cigarettes, proper A-Life, and a HUD toggle key. I can't wait till it's all finished and polished. It'll be a rock solid foundation for Anomaly 2 I also downloaded Anomaly for when I finally get burnt out on Stalker 2.
Played the original Stalker for years. And with all the mods. I rate Stalker 2 a 10/10. This game will age perfectly, and we are only 2 months into modding. Listen to the Stalker OSTs when you play (turn off the in game music). Bor Ren and Der Club of Gore also goes really well as background music for Stalker.
I'm dead serious actually, I streamed my entire playthrough. We had one hiccup, but the game responded 15 secs later. Otherwise no crash. Christmas miracle tbh
Lotta Russian trolls out here trashing the game, It definitely needs work, but what a great base to build from!! It's a worthy successor to the originals. Enjoying it greatly!! 🙂
@@crazyforblues1967 oh piss off with the Russian trolls, they're just people from everywhere who haven't played and just want to hate on it just because it's the new thing to hate on. Lots of Russians love the game, bugs and all.
@@borderlineexperimental he is on point, why? Haven’t you watched the Stalker 2 documentary, which tells a lot about how Russians tried to hack GSC etc. Basically every world event which brings attention to Ukraine is under Russian trolls influence now. I have seen even screenshots of Russians hiring pay trolls to lower Stalker 2 rating on steam. I’m not telling there are some Russians who play the game and love it, but in Russia it is kinda illegal to buy something Ukrainian as you can be accused of supporting the Ukrainian army with the taxes payed on your buy.
@@borderlineexperimental nah tbh the game feels like a disappointment in some aspects. lacks the atmosphere and world building of the first few games. And i hate the green beret fcking bandits who can laser you from across the map.
Why ALIFE wasn't there on day one release was answered by GSC so the fault is on you here for failing to do the research for a review. No, I will not tell you the answer.
Haha oh no I know about that. Still doesn't help that they failed to deliver something they advertised in development. As far as the patch goes, it's pretty basic. They'll get there eventually, but I'm making note of everything.
I started playing on release date chief. As far as why I said what I said, they advertised a full A-Life (A-Life 2.0) in development. On launch, absolutely nothing. And while I credit them for the recent patch, it's just a patch (it's not a FULL A-Life). And it should have been there on day 1.
"I bought a brand new car and half the electronics wouldn't work. Everyone who bought it had the same problem- but it's okay, because they said they'd fix it later" "I bought a brand new desk, it's not varnished and all the drawers are missing from it. Everyone who bought it had the same problem- but it's okay because they said they'd fix it later" "I bought a brand new game, it was a buggy mess and was missing half its promised features, everyone had the same problem- but it's okay because they said they'd fix it later" Only one of these scenarios has a brigade of simps that defend multimillion dollar corporations for not releasing a finished product. It's valid criticism to say that the gaming industry needs to stop doing this, as it SHOULD be seen as not releasing a finished product. If any other product released unfinished, it would irreparably damage a brand's credibility, but gaming gets a free pass. Why?
@JoeyMills-y3v my twin tell me that but funny how he can't stop playing... he only seen bits of the old one ... I played the hell out of all if it boring your lucky I want that to beat missions In piece
Putting 20 shotgun rounds into a controller and it's still standing. Talk about bullet sponge enemies.
Correction: We got new mutants, the deer and (technically) the Bayun ;)
I pretend the deer doesn’t exist cause it made me mad hahahahah
@@WaveysGamingAdventure Haha true, one hell of a tanky mutant! 😂
The rat swarms are also new. No?
@@redsunoverparadise3260 Rats were technically in the old games, but yeah the swarms are new
As crazy stalker fan i pre ordered both on xbox and pc, wanted to play 24/7 but i just cant, needs at least 1 year to catch up. Still playing stalker gamma 300 hours in. Im too lazy to list things that are 'not good' in S2, there is a lot.
@@nikadatuashvili2306 im not a fan and i only played previous version for a few hours but a lot of things are better in previous version. i think stalker 2 is not bad at all but in the other hand, it needs more improvements
Why nobody talks about how dumb the enemy IA is compared to the originals? That's the first thing I noticed after just a couple firefights
Fun fact: the developers of the original stalker games went on to make the metro trilogy.
not ALL, some of them
@@Bodacious-doom It shows
They left to form 4A Games before Shadow of Chernobyl was released.
I actually stopped playing S2 once i learned about Anomaly. S2 looks and sounds amazing, but I can't praise much else. I hope S2 gets the Anomaly treatment in the future...
Oh it will
Let's just hope GSC releases some official modding tools soon
its mostly the og stalker games but wiht an open world ,much better story presentation and a lot of extra animations , honestly i wanted a bit more depth and customisation (not like in anomaly or its modpacks) like the ability to skin mutants like in the og games (so you wouldnt be bleeding money by fighting mutants for no reward) more meaningful gear upgrades at mechanics , harder mutants wich need different aproaches to kill besides pumping 5 mags into them ( to my knowledge the controller is the only one that does that), the ability to join a faction or build a reputation for yourself and with the faction like in clear sky ( they butchered the og factions :(, )
I would have loved a faction element that was more it’s own development outside of the main story.
I hope to one day either build that myself or see others do it
I think I have to disagree with the story part. It feels more contrived for me. It may be the lack of A-Life and subpar fights but I found myself tuning out the story when that's half the reason I got the game.
@@bradenhagen7977 yeah it can definetly drag on too much
btw this game is by default running raytracing, but the software variant called lumen, meaning there's no prebaked lighting and it's all simulated in real time. which helped the devs push out this game way faster and to not worry about that aspect at all almost.
cost at performance?
@ yes! a pretty big one compared to baked lighting, it's just raytracing and it isn't from your gpu, but the game itself
@@toasttoni it is calculated by GPU, but in a different way so even gpus without ray tracing support can do it. And it's not using RT cores of Nvidia GPU. The difference in algorithm is that software luman makes approximation of raytracing. And a problem is when information about a scene is not present in a frame. I hope developers will add hardware RT in future updates
@ truth!!!!
Lumen has been a shit experience for me, always. It just doesn't know how to do its job and it's either full on darkness or blinding light. Wish we had RT and baked lighting options for non RT cards.
It's a good day when wavey uploads a video
This game has a CPU bottleneck issue on PC.
My specs: RTX 4090, I9 13900K (Newest bios), 64GB DDR5 RAM@6400Mhz, 4TB M.2 NVMe Gen4 SSD, Windows 11 version 23H2.
No flashlight shadow, no shadows for foliage, lighting system is inadequate and light does not 'bounce' enough. The AI in this game is very basic.
With all this in mind. And AI routines that are hardly an improvement over the last Stalker game from 15 years ago. How does this game have a CPU bottleneck on high end CPUs?
Is Unreal Engine 5 that inefficient for gaming?
I've not had CPU issues, but it does use the CPU pretty heavy. Even Xbox has had issues regarding the CPU load. I'd imagine combination of the engine, and the way they put everything together.
Got a 7600x3D, a 7900XT and 32 Gigs DDR5 6000, when I hit towns fps drops to low 50s, sometimes high 40s lol. Very bad optimisation I'd say but UE5 is not helping either.
Oh graphics options are inconsequential in this case but still I should add, Epic settings, 1440p, FSR 3.1 quality and no frame gen. Only hair is set to low cause I heard it helps.
I just finished the game and have been enjoying it since release. However I missed the many custom settings Stalker Anomaly offered me that catered to my playstyle.
So I use about 20 mods that rebalance alot of the game, I just dont like engaging with weight managemant, bullet sponges or grindy mechnanics on a hardcore level. I also like to sell everything everywhere or go through kneedeep water without drowning :)
Technically the game looks good but the lighting freaks out sometimes and draw distance is low. I wish it would be more optimized but UE5 is probably also the reason a small Dev like GSC could create such a game in the first place. A shame they didnt do more playtesting and ruined day one reviews for themselfs. Spawning enemies 5m in front of you and lying about A-Life was dumb.
Some say they dont like the new map layout but I like it alot, liked the POI you come across.
The main story is OK, but just like older Stalker titles some quests are designed in a BS way that just scream " bad game design" and atleast involve googling a solution...
Some areas are off limits for now but I hope DLC will fix that :)
Limited amount of guns & mods.
Garbage enemy ai - feels like the mindless fallout 4 super mutant AI not the OG stalker AI that fights tactically.
Dont compare s2 to gamma or mod stalker like that, while i agree that AI is dumper than OG but weapon in S2 are amazing, you have much more option to choose, like hell you can even attach masterkey underbarrel on the sniper and they have more rifle, smg, sniper and pistol are great in S2 compare to OG when there are ton of pistol but they all garbage, and they remove that instakill grenade throw which is my most favorite thing in S2 as well
man, I find gemma/anomaly have much better designed combat system..... in stalker 2 guns do minimal damage with body shots, enemy aimbots you, lands 90% of their full auto shots at range but each shot does very little damage, guns using same ammunition doing vastly different damage.......
Yeah, you're pretty spot on. It's old school STALKER type of damage scaling. Like SoC.
Gamma and Anomaly are built off misery which tunes things WAAY differently, especially Gamma.
It'll take time but I'm sure people will do similar things eventually
4:45 I got used to the long and short press Q and E actions quite quick. But sometimes I accidently pressed E instead of R so I was slowly eating bread in a fight instead of reloading my shotgun :(
Also iam used to a the middle mouse button being a grenade quickthrow in Stalker Anomaly, very handy against Monolith groups but not available in Stalker 2 :(
Hahaha I still have trouble with the long press here and there.
Can't program that into my brain as easily
I am a trilogy master and I have sunk hundreds of hours into all the popular modpacks and played many of the obscure russian packs as well.
Last week I finally began Stalker 2 after deciding to wait for a few patches upon release.
I have not finished the game but I am around 50 hours committed so far. My opinion thus far is a resounding ‘I don’t know’.
I really just cannot decide how it is or what I think of it.
There are some things that I absolutely love and some things I either hate or i’m just indifferent to.
The pros:
- I really love parts of the plot. I particularly find the Noontide / Faust / Strider plot very, very cool
- I think Skiff is a another certified classic character which showcases GSC’s ability to create legends with every game
- The updated / new anomalies is a sight to behold, new graphics and all. The Bulba is one of my favorites- so cool to see all the vehicles and debris warping and flowing with the gravity pull
- Some of the updated suit / outfit designs are amazing. Ironically kinda reminds me of the controversial HD models for Anomaly. LOVE how Spark and Freedom look
- It is so cool to see where legacy characters wound up and what they’re up to
- *Some* parts of the zone are spectacular and I especially love the cloudy / blue overcast weather
- The sound design is fantastic
- I love the new detector and new artifacts / anomalous areas
- The size of the map is a sight to behold (but we need more in it)
The Cons:
- Gunplay feels….idk clunky and heavy?
- Hate the quick use system. Bring back F1-F4
- Stashes feel pointless most of the time
- Horrible optimization
- Over-reliance on blurry, mangled upscaling
- Weapon selection and attachments feel kinda paltry
- Controllers are…..weird looking?
- Enemy Stalker behavior seems strange in gun fights. Slow side stepping and spamming grenades while headshotting you from faaaaaar away with buckshot is obnoxious
- Exploration doesn’t feel as rewarding as it could, largely due to finding the same crap over and over
- The HUD and map system feel very Far Cry?
- The SIRCAA segment feels very Jurassic Park despite that phenomenal Wish Granter segment
- I’ve tried both PC and Xbox and both seem to have a strange sort of input lag or weird acceleration that I don’t like. Aiming doesn’t feel as fast and snappy as I want it to
- Some of the new design to legacy areas feels again very Far Cry / Dying Light
- Don’t like the item re-design on Hercules and others
- Ammo types impossible to read and difference in performance feels negligible. 556 rifles feel like pea shooters. SMGs feel heavy
- The notion of accepting bugs because they’re ‘anomalies’ and all part of the fun of SlavJank™️ is very stupid and unacceptable in 2025 IMO
- It needs a dynamic or procedurally generated side task feature to broaden our options of making money on the side besides the classic scavenge, sell repeat
- Where is our faction identification when looting enemies or faction relations?
- Binoculars?
- Enemies should drop more diverse loot. We shouldn’t have to pull the trick where you kill someone and wait for another Stalker to loot them to THEN take them out and see if you get a suit
- I HATE and I mean HATE the bloodsucker and grenade slow-motion. Let us disable that.
- The save game corruption issue looms large over all release platforms and it’s totally f’d up that the best GSC can offer is telling you to backup the save file directory - that doesn’t work for everyone. You shouldn’t have to worry about losing dozens of hours in a modern game
Definitely agree with many of your points.
I had fun, can’t say I didn’t. But there’s more this game can give, for sure.
@ Hey at least we now have backpack animations baked into the core game with no threat of busy hands :)
I think they did not add binoculars because, especially on release, there was nothing to look at with them with the spawn radius (initially like 30m, now likely around 100m). Also, from old trilogy I played only CoP, but a lot of Anomaly/Gamma and I am sad about how they trivialized bloodsuckers. I would like the bloodsuckers to be more horrifying, stronger, but much more rare. Meeting one every 5 minutes in the Lesser Zone just makes them too common. But that is admitedly jsut my idea of what bloodsuckers should be...
I agree with pretty much everything you said, luckily I believe most of these issues will be surmounted by patches and community mods eventually
Game has some gaping flaws right now but it's alright, a bit half-baked
My problem is that they were to scared to innovate certain aspects of stalker series and standardized things that make the unique stalker feel less apparent. They don't want to make hunger and obtaining ammo too necessary so instead loot is thrown at you at every opportunity and while this worked on the smaller scale maps of the first three games, in the open world we more incentive to explore new places. The parts that were standardized were less intrusive but still bothersome like the UI feeling too simple in design and while the cutscenes are cool, I kind of preferred how the other games relied more on a less involved approach like having the player themselves caught in the middle of a situation they're only a small part of rather than a premade scene where we lack control and also feel like we're the center of attention.
2:41 There's exactly 0 screen-space reflections, they're all lumen.
Game is good but the exploration isn’t well rewarded, i mean if you run for stlaker stash the disappointment is real. Bread, sausages, broken gun most of the time.. what’s the point if i can find all those stuff on a table inside all house or building ?
70% of mission are like, go here, find that and come back.
I believe the game is too big for what it have to give.
Yeah I would have been nice to have another element to all the exploration. I wished that brought more to the factions and their relationships.
This map is 10x the size of the original basically and everyone thinks A life is just as easy to implement LMAO
My First play through I was deliberately not paying attention to bad parts just so I savor the moment. However, coming to a second playthrough, it does start to reveal a lot of shortcomings and glaring holes. I played a bit of ShoC in-between S2 and something's just felt weaker. Id say the atmosphere didn't hit entirely the e same (maybe the ambient music and lack of A-Life) but also the game felt like it as a linear story (main quest has its ups and downs), like trying the be Metro but in a open world, really wished for more interesting side content (especially with Duty an Freedom). Maybe with the DLC more will come and they just wanted to get it out so they could develop the future better, but yeah id say it as a 7ish.
The map is great, i like the recreations of the original areas. The vibes for me just feel off. You don't see people artifact hunting. You can't ask to accompany groups traveling. You aren't able to side with the bandits. There are hardly any Freedom and Duty quests. That's all besides my personal issues with the story.
You are my hero.
The map feels weird because they shuffled locations around for realism. I don't like it, they should've stuck to how the maps were laid out in the original games.
The new layout of the zone doesn't bother me. It's the fact that 75% of the map is abandoned and unused in side quests. Lots of places are just occupied by mutants or zombies. Just a lot of wasted opportunities imho
I would consider it an 8/10 to me it has the stalker vibes for sure. I have a few gripes but hopefully theyll be adressed with patches. If not once we start getting overhaul mods it will be 10/10
to many bugs and the performance is just to bad to get that high sorry but more than most would say even a 7 is being generous. i give it a 6.5 it would be a 8 or 9 if it wasn't for how bad the optimization is. yes the game is being made in a war, but this game has been in development for many year' before the war even broke out so some things is understandable like some bugs and stuff but performance is not this is literally in the top 3 worst performing game's in the last 2 year's it is really bad. the reason that's unacceptable is because more than most people are either on 30 series or older or AMD 6k series or older. and even if you on 40 series or 7k series gpu's you still get less than desirable performance even while having a powerful car to run this game at 1440p 60 fps with just upscaling you have to have a 800 dollar gpu either a 4070 ti super or a 7900 xt, and for 1080p you have to have a 600 dollar rtx 4070 or a 7800xt to get a solid 60 fps experience without upscaling at 1080p at high settings not even epic settings btw. the performance of this game kills it more than any other thing going on with it. and that isnt counting the beefy CPU's that need to be paired with these beefy GPU's.. that's why this game don't deserve any awards or a high rating. its a 6 or 7 at best. if they fix some performance problem's then it will definitely be a 8 or 9. giving devs high praise when a game's performance is this bad only enables them to give you more of this in the future because you let them by with it once. their is alot of people that cant afford the latest and greatest parts. but the people that can are also no0t happy with performance like this. people don't pay 800+ dollars for hardware to barley run 60 fps. a 4090 is a monster GPU and it cant even hit a consistent 60 fps at 4k upscaled and it is the only gpu that can hit 60 65 fps at 1440p native without upscaling.
Overall, disappointed but i still have hope. The zone feels dead and NPCs are so undercooked. Im having fun but cant recomend it quite yet.
I think part of what disappoints me the most is gunfights just feel like a chore. I've started just running from when they spawn on my head and enjoying it more. Mission fights >>>>>> "random" encounters.
Ah, Stalker 2. It's simultaneously really disappointint and also an amazing game for me. The graphics are amazing, and aside from missing muzzle flashes that interact with dynamic shadows, the graphics are a massive upgrade over even the latest improvements in Stalker mods.
Just a few things that really annoyed me and disappointed me:
Lack of A-life even now (we were promised A-life 2.0, remember? So it should be a big improvement over the OG games, not just roughly approaching what we already had);
Lack of player freedom and choices don't matter outside of what directly is decided to affect the story. Like areas being locked of. You're stuck in the Lesser Zone for quite a big chunk of time, and you can only go to the Cordon at best AFAIK, but maybe even that is locked off, I didn't check. There are also other parts of the map that are locked off until you progress thorough the story, with the worst offender being Pripyat. I mean seriously, you are pretty close to the end of the game when you finally get to explore Pripyat.
Faction reputation doesn't really exist in the game.
There's way too few options involving story elements. Like, at the end of the Spark ending, you can't even try to convince Scar that the C-Conciousness is playing him and are full of shit and they have bad intentions. Or you just can't destroy those damn pods for good. Someone always has to control the Noospheare.
Side quests are few and far in between, and the timeout on them sucks a lot.
Mouse acceleration was on by default and couldn't be disabled. I have no idea what GSC smoked that made them think that this was even a little bit of a good idea for an FPS game! Fortunately, it should be disabled by now according to the patch logs.
Limited save slots, and less importantly, you can't name your saves. Like seriously, whyyyyy GSC, WHYYY?!
The mutants are wayyyyyy toooooo tankyyyyyy.
Lack of optimization even now. It sucks that I have to use fake frames to get a, not great, but acceptable level of performance - around 80 FPS on average. This should be native performance. Oh and this is with using upscaling too on 1440p. Frame gen artifacts were the most noticable with the lasers and red dot sights. They get doubled, tripled during movement.
This is just what I could think of right now.
Still, I had a lot of fun with the game. I have no desire to replay it though, so I just watched the other endings on UA-cam (I got 2 out of the 4 endings on my own). I'll wait for a major overhaul of the game from either GSC or from modders. Can't wait for Gamma 2 or Anomaly 2 (or something like that)!
I'd recommend disabling frame gen. The game plays much better at 40-50 FPS without it and the input lag you get with FSR. Other than that I agree completely.
@hazelnut2002 I tried that, but the visual jitter bothered me way more than some input lag. So I compromised and used frame gen.
Right I hear you, they are the start of the new game development where they're using frame gen and upscalers to get base performance up to acceptable standards.
Not getting the game itself up to standards, and then using the fancy tech to push further.
It's already becoming a pattern in the industry.
Recently beat the game and I really enjoyed it. I mostly agree with the review.
Replayed the original trilogy with no mods in the month leading up to release and 2 really feels like a continuation of what those games did well. It's a little better in some ways and a little worse in some other ways but it's mostly just more of what I loved about the originals. It's got some flaws but overall a great game imo.
Honestly, S2 started pretty rough, I had game breaking bugs, poor performance and struggled a lot while playing it. But even then I never wanted to close the game and “wait for the patch” to only then play it. It has the most important thing - it feels like stalker, even without A-Life, even more so with it now. The story, although not smth I can call the best I’ve played, is really really good, some moments were just “ok, what? This is insane” (minor spoilers: doctor and SIRCAA, etc) so yeah, 7/10 is a great score for how this game is at this point in time
I did like the story once it developed, got interesting towards the end
@ it was a bit confusing, ngl, also it bugged out for me so I didn’t know what was intended, but still was super cool!
The best way I'd describe my problems with Stalker 2 is:
It feels like a 2007 game with a modern coat of paint. As in, nothing feels definably NEW. It's like the devs put in all the bells and whistles for the OG fans to say "Woagh! I remember that from the OG games!" but didn't really do anything to make Stalker 2 *new*.
Edit: And no I don't mean shoehorn in modern game concepts that would water down and ruin stalker, I mean certain things that either didn't age well or could be improved upon, or just plain old new things that a modern stalker game SHOULD have. Think about how Anomaly had an insanely expansive suite of customizable controls and graphics settings. Also Stalker 2 locks armor from the first games (The Monolith SEVA Suit) which can also be seen on NPCs- behind the Deluxe Preorder which I very much don't like.
Another issue I have with Stalker 2 is player choice or lack thereof, and the clear content decay the further you gut into the game. Choices basically don't matter, like with the Ninth mission I was expecting to be able to lie to those Loners to save the Ninth but its either side with them or side with him. There is no in-between or special outcome. And with the Poppy Field quest. Second time I did it I decided to pawn off the icon for the gun, and figured I'd go up to the Loner and say "Hey buddy, sorry to say but your icon wasn't there" but NOPE, no such option, I could either lie and tell him to get it himself sending him to his death, or just be a scumbag. Quests feel as static as Fallout 4's.
Another good option is Scar and Spark. My first playthrough, I showed the monolith PDA to Korshunov cause it felt right. But despite me doing everything else for Spark, Scar was all "Sometimes bad people do good things. So tell me Skif, will you do good things?" and i was like WHAT THE FUCK HOW'D YOU EVEN FIND OUT.
Then there's the fact that, the further you get from the Lesser Zone, the less side quests there seem to be. Lesser Zone was PACKED with interesting side quests, Cordon had some, but the further I got into the game the less I encountered just from exploring and talking to stalkers.
you don't get 90 fps without frame gen so there for you get good fps but you still get the smoothness/ input lag of 45 50 fps so the 90 fps isn't that great now if you got 65 70 fps then turned on frame gen it would feel like the higher fps get would actually feel like you was actually getting the higher fps. that's the problem with frame gen, It don't feel like higher fps sure you are getting higher fps. but the trade off is less smooth gameplay because of the input lag. you get the input lag of what ever fps you turned frame gen on at so if you get 50 fps and frame gen take you to 90 then you are still running around aiming and shooting at 50 fps while the picture is 90 fps. they need to fix the input lag frame gen makes, if they do that then frame gen will be better than raster performance. we will just have to see how good. Nvidia low latency 2 does once the 50 series come's out it is supposed to be much better than the current low latency Nvidia offer's they say some game's would get as low as 1ms input lag that is insane if it can get frame gen down to 15 or less it will be an Increditable. I wouldn't care to use frame gen at all then.
The only mods I use is weight, PC5 button layout & vender mods. Other than I don't get much crashes just the typical U5 stuttering and the crappt shader compilation that sometimes freezes and I have to restart ,but then the game loads instantly. A-life is a joke I only get the occasional bandits fighting. Way to much anomalies it's gets annoying. The guns fights are fun and I love the guns. The map can feel Sammy at time.
Previous games didn't have A-Life like you mentioned expect CoP i'd say, soc was pretty linear, i completed it maybe more then dozens of times and all felt similar it had nothing like "A-Life" just some timed spawns like wild territory bandit and merchs, cordon car park bandits etc, Clear sky on the other hand was obsessed with faction wars and you could see every living in pda which killed the probability factor and CoP... well in CoP they did manage it quite well with squads roaming around and fighting with mutants part but no faction wars... when I think about it A-Life that we want and see is in Anomaly and similar mods
Right but you get the idea. There were things happening in the previous titles.
Prior to recent patch, Stalker 2 had just random spawns.
@@WaveysGamingAdventure Absolutely, because of seamless open-world, new engine, graphics quality, war in ukraine... and so on, Stalker 2 released earlier than it should've but previous titles were also very lacking in polish when they released (except cop imo) but we all knew GSC just needed more time to refine the game, as they are likely still addressing the anomalies even now.
Actually, there is A-life in Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky. It is limited, but it behaves much better STALKER 2's bubble around player that spawns AI and delets them.
NPC's are still travelling in games and engaging the threats regardless of player's presense.
After main quest missions in area A-life activates, the world doesn't become lifeless. People usually don't return to previous areas and don't see it.
About faction wars in CS. You can see the aftermath of the battle if you load from a different area. For example. Stalkers took control of the northern checkpoint that leads to Garbage. Player at Garbage can watch bandit squad moving there to retake it. They go through loading zone and fighting offline at Cordon. Eventually one of the squads wins, you travelling from Garbage to Cordon and can see dead bodies and remnants of surviving squad.
A-life on og games works. Unlike in the new one
you say this but how old is that game and the ai feels leagues above this shit still
@@WaveysGamingAdventure it still has random spawns, most of the ai battles you see is just the game spawning an event, it's not actually using alife most of the time
It’s great. The end,
My personal gripe with this game after having put like 40hrs in it is, that it just feels like UE5 Slop. And it feels bloated for some reason software wise, especially the fact that frame-gen and DLSS are just tacked on because they couldn't be bothered to try optimization before release. Atleast they're pushing on with patches and fixes
I hear you. I don’t have much exp with UE5, and while my 4070 works really well… i do not like the implications of the push towards the AI based upscaling tech.
More an industry issue than a Stalker 2 issue, but this game is a pretty clear example.
@@WaveysGamingAdventure Yeah definitely not limited to just S2. The whole UE5 situation is just bad with studios moving away from in-house engines (Tho in GSC case starting from UE5 was probably for the better) and larger studios switching to UE5 so they can just cheaply outsource workloads.
Upscaling for me feels like it isn't used anymore as a resource effective way to allow less powerful PCs to still perform well but more like a cheap and lazy way to "optimize" a game in combination with input-lag creating AI garbage.
I cannot put it in words. But yes. Unreal Engine and me, we will never be friends. It's feeling like... gpu bloatware...
I know exactly what you mean. When I first loaded in it felt like I’d seen this game before. Just generic UE5 assets and no unique personality
how is the industry moving this way that gamers don't want? I mean I understand shareholders, and all the lack of care, but if the gaming industry has been taken over by suits who's even playing anymore? If none of us are a fan of UE5 bloat, I'm struggling with the news that the whole industry is headed this direction... how!
Worst part about this game is that you have to fight and kill “ flash “ at the end.
9/10 after patches, could use a few inventory related tweaks
I really liked the game but it’s very slavjank for sure and the performance is crap but still my GOTY for 2024
The only people really enjoying this game are the privileged PC players who get to instantly mod and fix every game they get while the rest of us on console are stuck with an unfinished broken game. This game has not changed since the day I bought it ever since they put out that 1.1 patch the only two differences are they patched the exploits and added random groups of NPC’s walking around the map.
I’m enjoying the game but every time I play it now the enjoyment is getting less and less I don’t want to wait two years for this game to be what it was meant to be when I bought it
That’s totally fair
Especially regarding consoles, that’s where it’s a real drag when the game isn’t in good shape on launch.
After hearing "Well! A Joke won't tell itself!" From every stalker I've passed while tripping over the infinite amount of medpacks and bread the Zone has to offer, I stopped playing.
Stalker Gamma has absolutely spoiled me with the Zone and Stalker 2 can't even come close.
I will say, I LOVE the visual and audio atmosphere of Stalker 2. It's absolutely fantastic! But the quality of life isn't there, Zone feels scripted, and I'm honestly really unhappy with the lack of weapons in the game. Everyone has a baby AK or a TOZ. Same color, same furniture, etc...
Also... Why is his motivation for coming to the Zone so weak? His apartment was blown up? Just rent another one. That wasn't a home.
Did you play the original trilogy?
@JF-vz1ju No, I discovered the trilogy too late, and unfortunately, it's too dated for me to get into.
Hahaha yeah I know, Gamma and Anomaly have so much more into them really
@@BeccaTKawaii Plenty of mods out there to make it look and feel like a new game.
@@BeccaTKawaii these are games from like 2007 and onwards lol they arent even that old
This game had more meaningful parkour/ platforming than Indiana jones 😂
It's very good!
When devs. release mods. toolkit fro this game it will be crazy another decade , just imagine tons of guns, monsters, something like gamma did.
Yeah like gamma and anomaly, but soooo much bigger lol
5:50 This is a story-driven game? It's a FPS. Like Doom. It's not an RPG: your character is a nonentity who changes guns and ammo to "level up." If this game had a story, I wouldn't have been so bored that I yawn-quit after 50 hours. It seems like a better game to people like yourself who came into the game having played the other Stalker games. The rest of us haven't a clue wtf is going on.
I mean, it is literally story-driven.
But exactly as I said, it's slow to develop. Which makes new audiences not very interested.
game is jank but still pretty damn fun and challenging
GOTY
I never played the original trilogy but i was hoping they would expand on the mechanics for weapon manipulation and medical system. The fact that you have to instal a mod to get mutant loot and a better med system is kinda sad. Super immersive environment though, with mods im loving this game.
Yeah it still has the same features as the old titles. They didn't bring in anything else, but it's not too big a deal.
Dont compare S2 to mod stalker like gamma or anomaly, those are 2 diferrent game, for me S2 is a stalker game which they focus on to story telling, fast gameplay and gun fight unlike gamma for example when you grinding around 10 hour repeatly just to fix your broken ak
i dont think gsc would want to release a game people would complain about this much. i think a lot of the issues are because they HAD to release the game, they werent oblivious to its problems, just running out of money. lets not forget the devs come from a medium sized country at war with a super power. considering that i think they did good
It was right before holidays too
I'm very excited for what the community builds on this, similar to Bethesda games. Also similar to Bethesda games, it AIN'T DONE.
I've played it for about 80 hours and I enjoyed it, the bones of a STALKER game are there, but I'd probably objectively rate it about a 3/5 currently.
The world is beautifully detailed but the things populating it are often janky and confusing. Everything points to "whoops, we ran out of money!"
It'll be excellent eventually.
Yes that's right. It's the new baseline. So much that can be done with it from here.
I've said this in other comments, but I really do love the game and I'm enjoying the heck out of it. Any fixes to this game that are suggested should be done through mods instead of by the developers directly to the game, is kind of screwing those of us that play on console. I don't have the money for a pc, or to build one anytime in the near future. People in the past have just said, well then just get a PC and do the mods. Well it's not that easy for everyone. If the modders are going to be the one to take care of a small fixes, then fine. But GSC should figure out a way to allow modders to port them to console. Where we can have some sort of command and be able to download the mods. Even if it's not every single mod available, but maybe at least a half dozen or a dozen or so mods that really do change the game for the better.
Yeah it gets back to cutting corners on the optimization.
While high end PCs are able to grapple with it, lower end hardware and consoles are stuck.
Just starting. Patch 1.1.3. Shader compiling crash at every start. Enemies just popped out into existence. Infuriating.
But I agree with some people here. It doesn’t feel like stalker 1.
Yeah I've been having the shader crash but it is just a restart for me.
@@WaveysGamingAdventure Have you played a game before that REQUIRES A SYSTEM RESTART to play? Welcome to Stalker 2.
I love the game. BUT. im literally at the end, but it keeps crashing as soon as i get to the top of the monolith base. Even when i get past that, the guy glitches and i cant see or get damage from him. So i have to reload to basically redo that part again, for it to continue to crash every time. Im on the basic xbox which is probably why, but this game is definitely for the pc or better xbox. I feel that its definitely not done yet, and the deadzones and sensitivity pull sooo hard with the basic aim assist. Turning is super slow even when maxed out maxed out. 8/10
Combat is great, story is refreshing, i get genuinely scared, upset, and happy when things go down
Absolutely agree on the score. And I believe it will be strong 9\10 after patches and DLCs
Getting to Припять was so sad. All this time and build up to walk into an ugly, empty area. Yes they’ve got iconic locations like the ferris wheel, hotel, culture centre but the textures are just poor at distance so it ruins the “awe” from seeing them from distance. 1440p, max settings and textures past 75m are just awful
Seeing the Duga made me gasp audibly.
Languages too. Only English and Ukrainian VA’s. I’d have liked Russian VA’s but I get the political issues
I was saying this on a previous stream, I would have liked to have more to do in Pripyat.
It's such an iconic location, and to only spend a few missions in there was a shame.
I didn't think it was that bad in terms of visuals. I did like the overgrowth and vegetation. But the color palette is a bit dull.
great review exactly what i thought the zone is great the ai ruined my game and when i found out the spawn director was spawning fake dead bodies well......
there are to many bugs and the performance is just to bad, but more than most would say even a 7 is being generous. i give it a 6.5 it would be a 8 or 9 if it wasn't for how bad the optimization is. yes the game is being made in a war, but this game has been in development for many year' before the war even broke out so some things is understandable like some bugs and stuff, but performance is not this is literally in the top 3 worst performing game's in the last 2 year's it is really bad. the reason that's unacceptable is because more than most people are either on 30 series or older or AMD 6k series or older. and even if you on 40 series or 7k series gpu's you still get less than desirable performance even while having a powerful card to run this game at 1440p 60 fps with just upscaling you have to have a 800 dollar gpu either a 4070 ti super or a 7900 xt, and for 1080p you have to have a 550 dollar rtx 4070 or a 7800xt to get a solid 60 fps experience without upscaling at 1080p at high settings not even epic settings btw. the performance of this game kills it more than any other thing going on with it. and that isn't counting the beefy CPU's that you need to pair with these beefy GPU's.. that's why this game don't deserve any awards or a very high rating. its a 6 or 7 at best. if they fix some performance problem's then it will definitely be a 8 or 9. giving devs high praise when a game's performance is this bad only enables them to give you more of this in the future because you let them by with it once. their is a lot of people that cant afford the latest and greatest parts. but the people that can are also not happy with performance like this. people don't pay 800+ dollars for hardware to barley run 60 fps. a 4090 is a monster GPU and it cant even hit a consistent 60 fps at 4k upscaled and it is the only gpu that can hit 60 65 fps at 1440p native without upscaling. if you need frame gen to get over 60 fps there is a big problem.
bugged as f i cant play this game without crashing every 5 minutes i hate it.
The game is great until it locks up, crashes or quests get nerfed. Any of these three will destroy your enjoyment. The rest of the bugs don’t help either.
Very true.
I've been fortunate so far, only one quest broken. But I've had many people share issues. From a software standpoint, it's rough.
Mu-ants. I don't think the fan-base is as huge as it seems. Tons of new and casual gamers just repeating the typical phrases on UA-cam. Armchair experts.
It crashes alot on Xbox
Ahh that’s a shame my friend
I wished it would have been better but can always get what we want 🙃
@WaveysGamingAdventure i still love the game, but I've noticed 80% of the time I'm in my inventory/personal storage, especially just in Rostok.
I think I want to stick with Anomaly; feel fully immersed in it. Next, and probably last, will be GAMA. Need a better card though. I don't think any card CPU combo is good with Stalker 2. All seem not up to task in the reviews. Want to fight mutants and other factions, not the software.
I've been good with the performance so far. But that's just my experience, I know others haven't had such a good time.
It's my first Stalker game. Bought the Ultimate edition after trying it on gamepass and waiting for 1.1
Right now, I want cigarettes, proper A-Life, and a HUD toggle key.
I can't wait till it's all finished and polished. It'll be a rock solid foundation for Anomaly 2
I also downloaded Anomaly for when I finally get burnt out on Stalker 2.
:D
Played the original Stalker for years. And with all the mods.
I rate Stalker 2 a 10/10. This game will age perfectly, and we are only 2 months into modding.
Listen to the Stalker OSTs when you play (turn off the in game music).
Bor Ren and Der Club of Gore also goes really well as background music for Stalker.
The OST is actually quite good
@@WaveysGamingAdventure So good! I searched it for years and they even made unofficial mod OSTs too.
The Zone lives on!! 🥳
STALKER 2 never crashed? You lost me there.
I'm dead serious actually, I streamed my entire playthrough. We had one hiccup, but the game responded 15 secs later. Otherwise no crash.
Christmas miracle tbh
Ai content?
Lotta Russian trolls out here trashing the game, It definitely needs work, but what a great base to build from!! It's a worthy successor to the originals. Enjoying it greatly!! 🙂
@@crazyforblues1967 oh piss off with the Russian trolls, they're just people from everywhere who haven't played and just want to hate on it just because it's the new thing to hate on.
Lots of Russians love the game, bugs and all.
@@borderlineexperimental he is on point, why? Haven’t you watched the Stalker 2 documentary, which tells a lot about how Russians tried to hack GSC etc. Basically every world event which brings attention to Ukraine is under Russian trolls influence now. I have seen even screenshots of Russians hiring pay trolls to lower Stalker 2 rating on steam.
I’m not telling there are some Russians who play the game and love it, but in Russia it is kinda illegal to buy something Ukrainian as you can be accused of supporting the Ukrainian army with the taxes payed on your buy.
@@borderlineexperimental nah tbh the game feels like a disappointment in some aspects. lacks the atmosphere and world building of the first few games. And i hate the green beret fcking bandits who can laser you from across the map.
Why ALIFE wasn't there on day one release was answered by GSC so the fault is on you here for failing to do the research for a review. No, I will not tell you the answer.
Haha oh no I know about that.
Still doesn't help that they failed to deliver something they advertised in development. As far as the patch goes, it's pretty basic. They'll get there eventually, but I'm making note of everything.
LOL
I don't get it. You say you started playing last week, yet you keep rambling on about A-Life not working, when it has been fixed last year already.
I mean, what's the point of doing your review later than others, if you're still penalizing the game for issues that were fixed already?
I started playing on release date chief.
As far as why I said what I said, they advertised a full A-Life (A-Life 2.0) in development. On launch, absolutely nothing.
And while I credit them for the recent patch, it's just a patch (it's not a FULL A-Life). And it should have been there on day 1.
"I bought a brand new car and half the electronics wouldn't work. Everyone who bought it had the same problem- but it's okay, because they said they'd fix it later"
"I bought a brand new desk, it's not varnished and all the drawers are missing from it. Everyone who bought it had the same problem- but it's okay because they said they'd fix it later"
"I bought a brand new game, it was a buggy mess and was missing half its promised features, everyone had the same problem- but it's okay because they said they'd fix it later"
Only one of these scenarios has a brigade of simps that defend multimillion dollar corporations for not releasing a finished product. It's valid criticism to say that the gaming industry needs to stop doing this, as it SHOULD be seen as not releasing a finished product. If any other product released unfinished, it would irreparably damage a brand's credibility, but gaming gets a free pass. Why?
A-Life doesn't work. Watch the video that compares original A-Life with the abomination they call A-Life 2.0.
First
Its boring trash imo.
@JoeyMills-y3v my twin tell me that but funny how he can't stop playing... he only seen bits of the old one ... I played the hell out of all if it boring your lucky I want that to beat missions In piece
It can be a good game if they really spend the next year with improvements. Mostly a-life and engine optimisation.