one of those reviews that i wish i could pick a neutral rating for, but i guess since i got 76 hours out of it and still have plenty more to experience, ill give it positive
performance sucks donkey balls, terribly optimized and i could barely reach 60 fps most of the time. if you cant handle huge perfomance drops, dont bother. there's also a major softlock around the midpoint the game that'll force you to either get mods to complete some quests or quit the game. im assuming this week's patch will fix the softlocks. as for crashes, i crashed only twice, which is very impressive for a stalker game.
the main quests are all complete nostalgia bait, spark might as well be freedom and ward might as well be duty. new lore is cool, the pacing is pretty well done until the very end, characters are good which is saying something, and there's lots of unexpected twists and turns. i especially loved the portion involving monolith, iykyk. i just wish there was more substance - less focus around old stuff, more focus on some new stuff. could have even brought in old cut concepts. some spoilers: it's really annoying that the entire game is just "hey guys do you remember strelok, scar, and degtyarev? do you remember c-consciousness? do you remember clear sky? do you???" also they have a system for picking different outcomes or sides to conflicts, but from my experience these choices don't have a lot of impact beyond skipping a boss fight or two and changing the endings. some side quests have some really involved choices with wacky conclusions, but they're always one and done and don't really affect the wider world (except for a certain side quest in Zaton, iykyk. if you're based, you'll side with *her*)
gameplay is stalker, through and through, but with a whole lot more travel time between places. sadly that travel time isnt really as exciting cause alife seems to be bugged, non functional, non existent, or whatever else. whenever something does happen, it feels incredibly artificial with dudes spawning behind you and sniping from 50-100 meters away. mutants just rush out of nowhere with seemingly no pattern or reason for wherever you are. there just isn't really any... substance to a lot of it? like, whether it's day or night, bloodsuckers will attack you. whether it's a dangerous area or not, you'll be attacked by flesh. the only thing that changes based on region are the makeup of stalkers you encounter, but, somehow that feels incredibly artificial. ill say the monolith part of this game spices things up just right and feels very natural.
the actual gunplay is great, guns are well animated and feel good to shoot. old arcadey stalker movement is there still with super speedy sprint. it's very fun to rush up with a shotgun, or snipe from afar, etc. ai though doesnt seem to flank as hard as they did in the original games, they struggle to put pressure on the player and instead resort to sitting still and chucking grenades. i played on highest difficulty, so i dont know if that influences the nade spam, but sometimes i felt like i was playing clear sky again. that's not to say they don't ever go towards the player, they do, it's just rare.
stealth is now finally viable for the first time in a stalker game, you can go around assassinating people completely undetected. i think one tap knife kills are lame, but going up behind an exo suit stalker with a shotgun and doming them in the back of the head is so satisfying. you can go through some areas completely undetected, it's even incentivised in some encounters.
the open world is a double edged sword - you get a lot of freedom of movement, you can go about encounters in however direction you want, and usually every structured area has multiple routes. the cons are that you're going to be running several kilometers many many times and that takes up a significant amount of playtime, you don't really have cover if you're caught out in the open, there's long stretches of nothing inbetween every point of interest, and i imagine alife will have a hard time trying to shine in the large expanse of open world once its fixed. the beauty of the original stalker maps is they naturally funneled you into the camps and areas alife would focus on, you were always gunna run into SOMETHING really. in stalker 2? i dunno, i guess you can go the long way around for everything and just avoid any consequences. some lategame areas get more linear and make such harder, but those areas most certainly were not made for open world gameplay or side quests, so i doubt alife will do much there.
one thing i will say the open world does really well are stashes - they are always some kind of puzzle, whether it be trying to find a key for a door, or an angle to shoot off a door lock, or a jumping puzzle, or all of the above combined. i loved hunting for stashes so much.

overall, this game is the mixed bag of all mixed bags. i liked it simply because it's more stalker in a prettier and higher budget package. the lore was scrumptious, i was hooked from start to finish. however, it's left a very bittersweet taste in my mouth, where i keep thinking about the game's potential. what i played was a fun amusement park ride, a one and done thing where i look back and just cant stomach a second playthrough. thinking about running for 20 hours between place to place, or dealing with grenade spam, or making different "choices" only to see the same story and gameplay again, or seeing no discernible stalker or mutant activity as i explore beyond the scripted handmade stuff, i dunno, it just makes me sad and stops me from hitting play again.
in the end, im satisfied with the game, and im really hoping that when patches, mod tools, and dlcs roll out that this game blossoms into something special. stalker is a unique series, its gameplay is uniquely stalker, its story is uniquely stalker, its world is uniquely stalker. it has just enough of the stalker ingredients to satisfy that itch, an excellent appetizer... now just give me this world with a functioning alife, extensive mods, and proper performance.