Conclusion

The wait is over—we're Stalkers again! Fifteen years have passed since the last installment, Call of Pripyat, and at long last, we can venture back into the Zone to face its relentless challenges. After multiple delays, GSC Game World finally released their newest entry yesterday. As someone who loved the earlier titles and spent endless hours exploring every inch of the map, this release feels like a homecoming.

In Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, you control Skif, a survivor thrown into the dangerous Zone after being betrayed. His adventure revolves around seeking justice while uncovering the secrets of the irradiated wasteland. As you navigate the vast map you'll encounter warring factions like the militaristic Ward and the anarchic Spark, and you'll evolve from a vulnerable greenhorn into a resilient survivor. The story is well-done and interesting, it's full of moral dilemmas and survival, highlighting the harsh realities of life in the Zone.

The Zone is filled with threats, from ruthless bandits to terrifying mutants like Bloodsuckers. Players begin with basic gear but can gather a variety of weapons, armor, and tools as they progress, though everything degrades quickly, requiring constant upkeep, which can be annoying. You also have to eat/drink from time to time. Combat varies between trivial and intense—fairly randomly, not sure if this is intentional. Anomalies and radiation create further hazards, making exploration and survival a challenge, especially on the higher difficulty levels, where you have to manage your resources efficiently.

Graphics
Despite the use of Unreal Engine 5, which is the best engine right now, the graphics of Stalker 2 look dated. I dug up some screenshots of Fallout 76 from 2018, and it looks almost the same! Check out our screenshots, some areas look really nice, especially when light and shadows are properly used. Most parts of the world look pretty boring though, with some strange full-on lighting during daytime that lacks all shadows and ambient occlusion. At night, things are too dark, and it's difficult to find your way (increasing the gamma setting helps). While we've seen incredible renderings of NPCs in Hellblade 2: Senua's Sacrifice for example, people in Stalker 2 look subpar, especially for 2024, despite both games using the same engine. Technically, Stalker 2 is a "2022" game that was delayed several times, so this isn't completely unexpected. Many outdoor areas of the world look good and are well-crafted, indoors not so much. Here there's very little geometry to see, and things look "flat," I do have to give the map designers credit for building good layouts (most of the time). But even at the highest setting, textures don't look very interesting and lack the detail that made Unreal Engine 5 games famous.

Shader Stutter and Accessibility
Unreal Engine 5 is designed to avoid shader stutter, and it's a non-issue in most games using that engine. Unfortunately this didn't work out with Stalker 2. When you first play the game, say the first hour or two, you'll constantly encounter stuttering. This is particularly unexpected because there's a relatively long "compiling shaders" screen during the game's startup. On the first load or after updating drivers, it takes between 3 and 10 minutes. Strangely, this screen shows up every time you start the game, although it runs much faster—how did this get through QA testing? After around two hours there's very little stutter, probably because all the additional shaders are now compiled. What's always noticeable, particularly in open world areas, is that there's a lot of geometry pop-in on distant objects, which can be quite distracting. The frame pacing is also pretty bad and movement feels "uneven."

On the other hand, I really like that you get to pick from several difficulty settings, and can change them seamlessly during your playthrough. This makes it much easier to beat a difficult encounter, or an unbalanced one, which happens from time to time. There is no DRM, which is a welcome change—you can actually own your game.

CPU Bottleneck
Stalker 2 is heavily CPU-bound, especially when you enter areas with multiple NPCs. In towns, I often ended up with 50% GPU load only, which of course cut frame rates in half, too. That's why for some of our testing I'm using a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which does a fantastic job at avoiding the CPU bottleneck. On the other hand, I noticed that shader compilation at startup was much faster with the 14900K, which has more cores and threads available to perform that work.

Effects & Upscalers
Stalker 2 has support for NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS, and there is also support for Frame Generation, from both AMD and NVIDIA. DLAA and FSR Native is supported, too—very nice. Sadly, ray tracing is not supported. Although Unreal Engine 5's Lumen technology is utilized for lighting and reflections, which look good, there is no hardware ray tracing support; Lumen operates entirely in the shader-based version.

With this review we've added performance testing for the upscalers from AMD and NVIDIA, you can more than double your FPS using DLSS and FSR. We'll also have our usual, separate, image quality comparison article up soon, too.

Hardware Requirements
Hardware requirements pretty high, but not crazy. On the other hand, if you take the graphics into account you might think differently. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p, Epic settings, you need a RTX 3070, RX 7700 XT or RTX 4060 Ti. Got a 1440p monitor? Then you need a RTX 3090, RTX 4070 Super, RX 7900 XT or faster. 4K60? Only the mighty GeForce RTX 4090 can achieve 62 FPS here. The RTX 4080 reaches around 50 FPS and AMD's RX 7900 XTX hits only 46 frames per second. As always we opted for our own custom test scene, which is located in a larger outdoor area. If you stand in a CPU limited area, like the NPC settlements, FPS can be much lower, depending on your CPU power. Please also note that we did NOT test with the press review version, which is full of bugs and issues. We used the public Steam version, which includes a 140 GB Day One Patch and runs A LOT better. I didn't encounter a single crash in several hours of gaming. There were also no major bugs or issues, but I had to reload an older savegame once, because an NPC was missing. Overall a very decent experience, that's definitely much better than what some reviews report. Why would such a buggy build be sent to reviewers, shouldn't the goal of reviews be to test the product that potential buyers can expect to receive?

VRAM
Our testing shows that Stalker 2 is very well-behaved in terms of VRAM usage. Even at 4K you're barely hitting 10 GB; lowest settings runs at around 6 GB, so virtually all cards can handle the game without problems. Interestingly, some AMD cards with 8 GB VRAM take a pretty big performance hit at 4K, while their NVIDIA counterparts are not affected. This is probably due to the GPU architectures managing their memory differently. Enabling frame generation on top adds another 1-2 GB, not a problem at all.

Overall, Stalker 2 is a solid new release that's definitely worth your time if you liked the originals, Fallout or similar games. Waiting for a few patches is definitely a good idea, hopefully they'll add some quality of life improvements, too. No fast travel? WTF. So far, I've been enjoying my playthrough of Stalker 2 and will definitely play some more.