one hundred and twenty hours deep.

Massive STALKER fan, and I like STALKER 2—my playtime proves it—but I also hate it. When Fallout 4 released, I had a similar experience: piling in hours and coming away with a negative perspective. Anyway, STALKER 2 is no different.

I will bullet point the issues:

• Unkillable Monolithian snipers in watchtowers. (Believe me, I’ve tried.)
• Ridiculously punishing anomaly. I call it "flashbag"—don’t know the canon name and don’t care. It’ll be modded out as soon as someone (maybe me) gets to it.
• Mutant health is ridiculously high.
• No binoculars and a general lack of tools to technically plan operations. (Likely a technical limitation.)
• Cheap scripted events in the main quest, like spawning mutants out of nowhere.
• Zero companionship with other stalkers throughout quests. Not asking for Skyrim-style companions, but we’re in the Zone—of course, we’d form groups for some missions. (Probably a technical limitation.)
• No real need for sniper rifles. (Same technical issue as the lack of binoculars.)
• After years of evolution, I’d have expected GSC to lean more into survival elements—more meds, an actual need to sleep, food, and drink. Instead, these are just gimmicks.
• Resource abundance and lack of variation. Endless salami, tinned tuna, vodka, and ammo everywhere.
• Lack of missions from NPCs like wanderers and barkeeps.
• AI is bad, both for humans and mutants.
• Subtitles or English dub replacing dialogue windows is not great for dyslexics like me who enjoy the Slavic voice acting. (Bring some looout! next time.)
• Awful economy, though it has improved somewhat since day one.
• Weapon and armor degradation happens way too fast.
• No NPC side chatter, which makes the world feel less alive.
• NPC longevity is nonexistent apart from bases—and I’ve even lost three friendly bases.
• Dog and rat animations are terrible. Dogs look weird and slinky; rats are stiff and awkward.
• Overall buggy game: main and side quests often require console commands to fix, invisible electric anomalies, infinite spawns, too many bloodsuckers, and mercs randomly spawning on a ladderless watchtower in Army Warehouse.
• Stats have been dumbed down to weak, medium, strong, and bars instead of numbers.
• Missing indicators for PSI tolerance and buffs from food, drinks, and meds.
• Removed minimap (which I’d disable anyway) replaced with a mindless "walk that way" compass, straight out of Oblivion.
• TTK difficulty slider removed in favor of a Fallout-style bullet-sponge slider.
• **fitting a rail to a weapon does not mean all rail attachments will fit.

There’s more, and I’ll keep adding. If anyone else has nagging critiques, I’d love to hear them.

Back to my Fallout 4 point: STALKER isn’t Fallout. It has no business being Fallout, but the newest entry in the STALKER world plays like a mindless looter shooter. Sadly, my monkey brain can’t put it down once I’ve started.

Just to sweeten this negative pit, I’ll add bits I like about this entry:

• Every location—from small towns to single rooms in apartment blocks—is hand-crafted, as if the dev working on them spent hours telling a story through set design. It’s been a while since I played any open-world RPG, but Skyrim and Oblivion don’t even hold a candle to the level of polish in some of these spaces in STALKER.
• I’m probably one of the lucky ones when it comes to performance. The game runs at 100fps most of the time. That’s not to say I don’t get crashes or need to restart for whatever issues plague this game, but overall, performance has been decent.
• The Arch anomalies are stunning and, so far, very interesting to interact with.
• No load screens after loading a save! After years of Anomaly, staring at the bar creeping slowly to the right and thinking, "One day I won’t have to deal with this," it feels like a luxury.
• Sidbitch is HD and greasier than ever.
• The story is good.