Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl – The Big Preview

Oct. 16, 2024

With exclusive access to the long-awaited return to the Zone, we spend hours going hands-on and talking with the dev team about the Xbox must-play

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Several years have passed since the last Stalker, but The Zone – a combination deadly nuclear wasteland and treasure trove of supernatural relics – isn’t something we’ve been able to forget. Naturally, GamesRadar+ jumped at the chance to enter it once again, jetting off to Prague in the Czech Republic to get an exclusive look atStalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, which has quickly become one of Xbox’s biggest exclusives of the year.

There, we got to spend several hours going hands-on and talking with the developers at GSC Game World about the long-awaited revival, bringing Stalker to a modern audience, and how they’ve tackled Stalker 2’s massively expanded open world. Playing the game is a great place to start as we dive into everything you need to know about it, but it’s also provided an excellent jumping off point for considering the nature of its brutal-yet-rewarding mechanical loop, especially with how it has evolved alongside its similarly post-apocalyptic contemporaries. We’ve also taken a look back at classic Stalker as well – refamiliarizing ourselves with the roots of this iconic series has allowed us to better appreciate how much it has grown.

The Big Preview

Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyl hands-on impressions: Spending three hours playing Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, we report back on the game’s opening and being let loose on the sprawling Zone to weave our own stories of desperate survival. Demanding and immersive, Stalker 2’s post-apocalyptic grit feels fresh compared to its contemporaries. Far from being sanded down, this modern shake up of the classic Stalker spirit polishes and adorns its edges. Enhancing the freeform promise of the originals, this truly huge world more greatly empowers you to approach missions your way. After our session, we find ourselves desperate to recommend the game to everyone else who became obsessed with the likes of Fallout’s survival mode and The Last of Us' Grounded modes – a good sign indeed.

But don’t just take our words for it! Allow us to show you what impressed us about Stalker 2 as well. Building off our time spent going hands-on with Stalker 2, we’ve put together a video version that really allows us to demonstrate why we’ve been so eager to talk about all the mishaps we got into across The Zone. The ruined landscape is at once grim and oddly beautiful, making it all the easier to become immersed as you struggle to survive against all hope while also marveling at the dangerous creatures and strange anomalies that lie in wait. Even if, like the protagonist,we might sometimes have no idea what’s going on.

Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl interview: “It’s a level of freedom that you can explore yourself, as long as you can survive in this world of hard rules”:We sit down with GSC Game World’s Zakhar Bocharov after our gameplay session to dive into The Zone, and discuss its brutal take on exploration. While the aim is for everyone to be able to find their own way into being immersed within Stalker 2, even supporting a Story Mode difficulty, plenty of care has been taken to make sure the world remains grounded. Whether it’s counting bullets as you weigh up whether to risk a shootout, or trying to figure out the best way to get from one end of the map to another unscathed, the emphasis is on the huge open world being available to explore “as long as you can survive”. The likes of Fallout, Metro, and The Last of Us have played with this approach, but it’s one that feels at home with almost every design decision in Stalker 2.

Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl interview: “We don’t want this game to be forgotten in a week”:Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl’s ambitious and expansive open world is a great approach that really makes the game feel like it deserves the numeral in the title. It’s also, on a technical level, much more difficult to pull off. GSC Game World is well aware that means Stalker 2 will take some serious polishing to function, and is “dedicated” to doing so. Far from just getting it out the door, the team “really care about what players think” and are aiming to continue to update with that in mind. This is where the dev’s experience with the previous Stalker games comes in, as given the dedicated fanbase it’s an arena they’re used to playing in. Bocharov tells us more about how they’ll approach that release, polish, and update cycle.

Stalker: Shadow of Chornobyl isn’t the mind-bending prospect it once was, but that’s only because we have it so good:To get a better sense of how far GSC Game World has come with Stalker 2, we look back at the very game in the series. Specifically we revisit its freeform promise of being able to approach situations from almost any angle, and compare to how the promise has evolved across the years among its peers as well. That promise was much different back in the day than it is in a modern context, but that’s what makes Stalker 2 all the more exciting. The spirit of that original promise still holds true, even if the approach is now something a little bit different. But join us round the campfire, and let us return to the tales of old for a moment!

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