GSC’s return to the Zone is ambitious, atmospheric, and astoundingly buggy
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
The friction isn’t just there to be cruel, though. It encourages planning and thoughtfulness, whether that means plotting a route across the map that allows for more frequent trading stops or a change to your artifact-laden loadout (valuable stat-boosting items pilfered from anomalies) to cover your stamina or carry weight deficiencies. My favourite of these magic, if usually self-irradiating orbs granted me a huge buff to stamina recovery, which made hoofin' it across the Zone noticeably quicker. The decadent Western concept of fast-travel is available via freelance guides, but they’ll only take you between major settlements, for fees that are mighty steep in the early game.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s love of walking, however, is mainly just a means to nudge you towards most of its best bits. Chancing upon another visually striking, artifact-hiding anomaly, for instance. Or the genuine horror of a night-time Bloodsucker attack, the cloaking, tentacle-faced abomination taking bloody swipes at you from the darkness. Or getting caught in an Emission, a lethal map-wide psi-storm that turn the skies a hellish orange and sends you dashing for the nearest shelter. Or the brilliant moment when two (or more) of the Zone’s threats clatter into each other, rather than just you. When a pack of giant boars surrounded me on a fallen boulder, safe from their maws but lacking the ammo to fight back, an unlikely saviour appeared in a Bloodsucker, who slaughtered the pigs before circling me – only for some roving bandits to show up, aggroing the beast long enough for me to jump off and dash to safety.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
Off the top of my head, here’s a very partial list: radio voices losing the radio filter effect mid-sentence. Your character gaining a radio filter effect when he shouldn’t. The artifact indicator light on your starting detector not working. The HUD compass disappearing. Audio stutter. Game stutter, despite compiling shaders on every goddamn launch. Character mouth flaps not working in cutscenes. Flashing textures. The enemy awareness indicator showing every time you unpause. Subtitles showing when you’ve switched them off. Weapon crosshairs expanding to the edges of the screen during a conversation.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
I didn’t witness anything completely, impassably game-breaking, but did come close with one mandatory objective that refused to complete; my entirely accidental workaround to this was storming off in a huff until, about 700 metres down the road, I got a radio call thanking me for a successful mission. After which, I could slope back and progress the story. But that was only after an hour or so of bumbling around, reloading and restarting, until I’d essentially given up. Guides ed Ollie has also informed of an incompletable side mission early on, though I missed that one myself.
GSC say they’re launching with a “Day 0” patch that could address some of these bugs, but there’s just so many, so diverse in nature, that it’s hard to see S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 releasing in anything approaching rock-solid shape. In fairness, part of this isFallout: New Vegassyndrome, where some level of impropriety is inevitable given the game’s ambition and scope; blasting through the main questline took me just shy of 40 hours, and completing all the side missions and unmarked encounters apparently takes that up to 100. And you still won’t see everything in a single playthrough, given the branching storyline that twists and turns depending on your faction choices.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
Is it a good enough game, though, that you should headbutt your way through such a dense wall of bugs? I personally think yes, having not played or really thought about any other games for all the previous five days that I’ve been lost in the Zone. At the very least, that question should probably be more a matter of whether it’s worth playing now, or in six months' time, when updates and the promised mod support might have more thoroughly patched it up. And even in the latter case, that’s probably not an alien concept to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fans.
