If you’ve never entered the world of STALKER before, get ready, because this shooter loves to make things difficult for you. Get out of your head the image of frenetic gunfights in the middle of Chernobyl devastated by the nuclear disaster of Modern Warfare. Forget the action scenes with explosions and impossible moves. We cannot even find in the Metro saga an excessive similarity to the experience of this video game. STALKER is something else. It’s cruel. It’s relentless. And it’s also a game that makes you feel tremendously alone.
It drops you into an inhospitable world in which everything around you is a mortal danger, and you have no choice but to try to survive. We have already had the opportunity to play STALKER 2 in Los Angeles just after Microsoft’s Xbox Games Showcase 2024, and although we still have a lot to see and a lot to try, there are reasons to follow it very closely. We tell you.
Back to Chernobyl
Returning to the exclusion zone has been like returning home. Everything looks much better, logically, since it’s been almost 20 years since the original game was released. But the important thing here is that the sensations with the new game from GSC Game World are the same. Is it your first time? Get ready for a real hell awaits you. STALKER 2 is one of those titles in which it seems that nothing is happening around you, and when you least expect it, an enemy appears and kills you. This causes you to play with tension, to walk very slowly looking around you; in short, to enjoy and suffer from its atmosphere in equal parts and to understand the environment to try to survive. Because if you get too confident, you will most likely die.
The demo we tried was just what we expect from a STALKER. A wide natural space in which anyone would want to get lost, if it weren’t for the radiation and the mutant beasts, of course. But in its way, at the same time, it is a very beautiful setting that invites exploration. These first steps were surprisingly calm given how disturbing the environment always is. In the distance we saw the occasional mutant animal around, swarming, but with no intention of attacking. Things got ugly as we progressed.
Because the demo likes to revel in contrast, and it takes you hand in hand with this beautiful natural landscape inside a dark abandoned bunker. The mission? Flashlight in hand, we began to move through that labyrinthine setting in search of information and a computer that we had to extract from The Zone. As you can imagine, here the feeling of terror is much greater, and GSC Game World revels in what it knows how to build so well: atmospheres.
Death, always lurking
Do you remember the damn Bloodsucker? Surely seeing it again will give you more than one nightmare. If you don’t know Call of Pripyat, Clear Sky, or Shadow of Chernobyl and this is your first time with STALKER, get ready, because this is just a small sample of a bestiary of terrifying creatures. Imagine being on edge exploring a dark area, with hardly any ammunition, and suddenly one of these Bloodsuckers appears charging like crazy. Even worse. One of the not very nice unique abilities is that he can turn invisible.
So scares are guaranteed. These are the kinds of threats that make the action of STALKER 2 so interesting. As we said, it is a game in which it seems that nothing is happening, that you are calmly searching for equipment and loot in a threatening but abandoned house, and where immediately after leaving it you are running for your life while a pack of mutant dogs. Or maybe you’ll run into some assailants armed to the teeth who will shoot you as soon as they see you show your head. As if that were not enough, in Heart of Chornobyl the mysteries of the area also return since death lurks in the form of electrical anomalies that move around the stage, and if you touch you die instantly. Of course, there is radiation, and we have already seen storms and tornadoes in the trailers that will turn everything upside down.
We already told you that the world of STALKER is not friendly at all, so there is a point of self-management of our resources that is still very important when it comes to taking care of our well-being in such an inhospitable environment.
Although in this demo there hasn’t been much time to hit shots and it is more focused on building the setting, there has been the occasional skirmish. The sensations with firearms are good, but if you are not used to the style of the series it will be difficult for you because its traditional harshness is maintained here. This is not as simple as pulling the trigger, it is not an arcade. Everything takes time and we have to think about things with a certain margin if we do not want to succumb to all the threats in our world. But it’s like a good music album, it may be a little difficult to get into because everything is a bit hard, but when you get used to it you discover that everything is growing inside you.
From what it seems we will have a sufficiently varied arsenal so that we can face the dangers of The Zone as we prefer, either using stealth or more direct action. In addition to combat and exploration, the game will challenge us with some more adventurous moments, so to speak, in which we will have to use various gadgets to find our objectives. Of course, we will also have time to improve our equipment and buy new weapons and protection against the elements of this post-apocalyptic world. And it’s important, so exploration has a good reward behind it. If you don’t equip yourself properly, a radioactive river can kill you in a matter of seconds. Or, to give another example, if you have no bandages left and you suffer many wounds, you may bleed to death.
STALKER 2 is a bit somewhere between a shooter and a survival game due to all the dangers it faces you with so few resources at your disposal, but that is the magic of this saga. And as you can see, the game looks very good. The settings and characters have a high level of detail, and the reloading animations are amazing.
It is evident that there are still details to be polished but the game is much better and more polished than when we had the opportunity to see it last year, and its authors promise that STALKER 2 will run at 60 FPS also on Xbox Series, although for now the test was only 30. In general terms, and taking into account the conditions in which the game is being developed in Ukraine, it is almost a miracle that it looks and moves so well.
We wanted to return to the world of STALKER and this new contact with the action-shooter video game for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and Game Pass has been satisfactory. We won’t go into details, but the demo wants to link the facts of this game with those of previous titles, so in that sense, we are very excited about the nods to those of us who have been here from the beginning. Without further ado, it has become clear to us that STALKER 2 has not lost one bit of the rawness with which this saga greeted us almost 20 years ago, transporting us to a fearsome world in which it is impossible to feel safe. If it’s the type of experience you’re looking for, mark September 5 on your calendar, because if you’ve come to suffer, in STALKER 2 you’re going to suffer… for the better.