Stalker 2: Made in Ukraine. During a war. It's brutal, ambitious, and there will be bugs.
Deal with it...
By PETER HOSKIN FOR THE DAILY MAIL Published: 23:36, 28 November 2024 | Updated: 23:42, 28 November 2024 e-mail View comments Stalker 2 (Xbox, PC, £49.99 or included in Xbox Game Pass) Verdict: A brutal beauty Rating: Stalker 2 sure isn’t playing. The first thing it has you, a grizzled mercenary called Skif, do is clamber through messy sewerage pipes, past dead and mutated bodies, to irradiated badlands beyond.
On exit, you’re attacked by a horrible pig-thing which takes most of your bullets to put down. Soon after, you’re shooting into nothingness as an invisible monster zaps around. Sheesh! In this respect, this sequel is much like its predecessors — and, yes, the plural is right.
The first Stalker game came out in 2007 and was swiftly followed by two more, all set in an alternate sci-fi version of the Chernobyl exclusion zone. They’re all brutal and strange. Though none of their mysteries compare to the one about why this new sequel is numbered as the second.
Perhaps it’s because, coming 15 years after the last entry, Stalker 2 represents such a generational leap. In many ways, this game realises the ambitions of its forerunners. Its open-world Zone is vast and full of incident.
Its graphics make this place of rust and time-space anomalies utterly believable. Its gunplay is heartstoppingly precise. When it all works, this game is quite special.
I repeat: w.
