Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl lives up to its legacy with incredible atmosphere, engaging systemic gameplay and a fair amount of technical issues. Thankfully, GSC Game World’s day one patch has solved a lot of the woes suffered by reviewers, but the game still suffers from everything to minor, amusing bugs to more serious issues and heavy CPU utilisation. Suit up Stalker, let’s explore the lay of the land on PC and Xbox Series X/S.
Stalker 2’s greatest technical strengths are in its environments, full of foreboding ambience, authentic-looking props and chaotic NPC behaviour. The look and feel of The Zone is seared into the brains of many millenial PC players from the original 2007 cult classic, and the sequel hits many of the same notes while using generationally more advanced Unreal Engine 5 technology.
The wild vegetation, for example, stretches far out into the distance, making for some impressive vistas replete with grass, bushes and trees. This isn’t Nanite geometry – the game ships on Unreal Engine 5.1 versus the current 5.5 – so it’s possible to notice flips between different levels of detail. The vegetation’s shadowing also isn’t ideal, lacking treatment from the game’s virtual shadow maps (VSMs) or being wholly shadow casting only in screen-space. Still, it probably takes a lot of GPU cycles to enable such a consistent density and distance to the game’s vegetation, and the overall effect is still impressive.
Another strength is the game’s hard surface modelling and texturing, which must take up a significant proportion of the 154GB install size. Textures are uniformly extremely high-res, and any old piece of rusty junk holds up to close scrutiny. Model detail is enhanced through the use of Nanite, with real geometric detail backing up the high-res textures visible in bricks, concrete, machinery and broken-down vehicles. On most objects in the game world, it’s a struggle to find any visible polygon edges, and almost every asset looks like it belongs to the weathered game world it inhabits.