Great Sequel and Great gameplay and atmosphere
but
but
still has performance issues
I will come back to it after several updates

Overall TL;DR

- The gameplay is fun: The gunplay feels convincing, the anomalies are cool, quests are varied (enough), and enemies are mostly satisfying to fight against. The progression is staggered but feels rewarding getting new guns, armor, artifacts, etc.
- The atmosphere is VERY immersive: I'm impressed with most of the sound design, the dark and grimy aesthetic, and the sheer size of the map chalk full of weird places and events to happen across that many others may miss.
- The story and it's characters are interesting, and even though I've only just completed one run of the game after 80 hours, I don't really follow the timeline (this is my first STALKER game). Even so, I enjoy how much choice you have, along with the number of dynamic developments that happen throughout the narrative that potentially change your perspective on it's characters, factions, events, the Zone, etc.

This game hooked me like no other for the better part of a few weeks, it's a really cool game. I'm going to play more.
However, my overall rating, being around a solid 8/10 if I had to give it one at this time, tanks almost 2 or 3 number grades due to the amount of bugs, crashes, and framerate issues I've suffered. Thankfully, it wasn't prevalent enough to turn me off from the game.

Some Issues I've Experienced TL;DR:

- At best on High 1080p, DLAA, Frame Gen Off with an RTX 3080 and an i9 9900k, the game averages a bit above 60 FPS but only goes down from there in towns (and especially some boss fights that regularly freezed my game mid-fight). I expected a lot more performance out of this game from the hardware that I have.
- 25% of the time Shader Warming (which you must do on every game launch) crashes or refuses to finish
- The town of Rostok regularly crashes my game if I stick around for more than a few minutes. (It might have something to do with DLSS or Frame Gen?)
- A side quest involving collecting 4(?) monster collars is permanently bugged and non-completable. (Perhaps due to finding one and giving it to another NPC earlier in the story, to which it should fix itself accordingly but just doesn't?)
- At one point of the game I saved right before an emission occurred. The emission main quest marker came up (overriding my current main objective marker) and I went to the shelter and stayed there until the emission ended. However, the emission main quest marker never went away and seemingly permanently hid all main objective markers. My only solution to this at the time was to reload a save earlier and hope an emission didn't happen too close to a save. For some reason this was only an issue for me in the early mid-game.
- The UDP pistol would bug out if you dual-wield it with the scanner and then melee attack. After this, certain actions weren't inputting correctly until it was put away. This made me give up on the pistol.
- Even with top-tier armor and full health, there are still enemies (on Stalker difficulty) that can one shot you at any range without much feedback, which is as frustrating as it is confusing.
- MANY instances of clattering physics objects, dead NPCs spawning standing up before laying down, physics bugs with NPCs colliding with walls and objects, unflattering animations for quickly firing the pistols, etc. Much like the janky third-person shadow animations, this isn't too important of an issue for me, but it'd be nice to have them fixed.


In conclusion,

This game is awesome and has a lot to offer. I'm looking forward to playing more and receiving updates.
However, it's hard to run, and there's jank to put up with. Definitely do your research first.

The atmosphere and vibe are great

The ai is bad. Pretty bad.

There's no nightvision.

I've uninstalled the game, it's just really bad honestly all around. It's unplayable by shadow of chernobyl standards.

Im 6 hours in about and im installing mods to try to patch together something I can enjoy. (mods are themselves not being developed well enough yet) The ai seriously ruined immersion - I really wanted to like it and I want difficult ai honestly, but the level of it that I experienced turned me down.

To summarize, the ai is built dumb, but it's given superpowers to make it seem smart - and the end result is aimbot, no-stealth-to-speak-of , and just really strange behavior all around; dogs diving behind cover when you jump on a foot tall wooden pallet, enemy ai sniping you with shotgun from 500 feet away with perfect accuracy - Enemy ai mag dumping into a wall point blank with enemies on the other side (on the otherside of a building on the otherside of a wall inside another building) - sometimes it feels like ai is way too aware, like they'll see you in pitch black without your flashlight on, other times it's like a warzone , endless gunfire, mutants, explosions and stalkers are inside a building nearby totally unaware. you can't easily understand what is happening, who's an enemy, if dogs ran away or they're cartoonishly waiting in ambush around the corner... It really breaks the depth they've built up and the immersion which I think were pretty great going in.


there's times where a group is being attacked by a mutant and if you show yourself, will just start shooting at you while the mutant kills them, or work together with the mutant against you. It's small things like this that really confuse what is even happening. There's times where you're in a group of (for me It was at least 20+ friendly npcs who had spawned) and then I was just completely singled out getting shot at from 200+ feet away without anyone else doing anything - only for a minute later the whole lot of them dying due to at least 10 thrown grenades - Around that point I had a shotgun and tried shooting a guy and it was like the entire shotgun round was missing them with no flinching or cares given - only for them to turn around and blast me in 2-3 shots without a chance of surviving.

I really want it to be more of a s.t.a.l.k.e.r. game, I played through the last one's and it's about the skill you develope and the investment you made - and things like the ai purposely hiding from you when you're in a tactical position (a group of 20 dogs all perfectly hiding behind cover) honestly seem really bad for that (despite there being a possible lore reason) .

Also the tankyness of the ai needs balancing I think

Many have said that these are necessary balances on ai, that if you jumped to a 1-2 foot tall object, it's too easy to cheese the ai .. why doesn't the ai jump ? seriously, dogs, 2 foot tall object - do dogs not jump in reality?

I have gone a fair amount into the story and it really disconnects sadly from other games narrative devices and it reduces the player autonomy, which is not good. There's story driven cutscenes that you are completely forced into, which are just not super great and then it does the very classic "here you have a completely inconsequential choice and if you decide to do nothing that also leads to the same outcome anyway" ... Really it tries so much to appear like a new modern game, and it defies the narrative structure of other games, which made them what they were, having a very tense kind of buildup, heavily immersive, and it relied much on the unique player's experience with pacing being something the player would engage in, not something that was entirely fixed by the plot structure of the storyline.

Much of the game tries to do weird innovations like cutscenes and timed 1 time choice events and I just have to ask, what was wrong with the other games? If anything I'd like more lively ai and activity but that's about it, this game strays far from that upgrade with various attempts to make it seem more movie-like, asserting a narrative without the unique pacing the other games employed ...

there's apparently no night vision which was something I was looking forward to. The game does this kind of thing where it alludes to expectations the player has, but never follows through, and just presents a movie-like cutscene driven narrative that heavily diminishes the immersion and buildup ...

The graphics seem super good, I've yet to see a rainstorm, only the odd lightning storm, that's about the greatest thing I've seen in the game in terms of innovation .. It has the issue that it's wide as the ocean with the depth of a puddle