
Enter the Chornobyl Anomalous Zone — a vast open world where anomalies, mutants, and rivals stand in your way. Explore, scavenge, and try to survive in this brutal and dangerous land. Evolving with every update, now overhauled and crowned with UPDATE 2.0.
Most likely between $89.7M and $254M. How we estimate →
Checked against 8 developer-reported games
| Store | Price | Score | Revenue · chart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Steam | $59.99 | 80% | approximately $149.4M |
| Xbox | $59.99 | 68% | — |
| PlayStation | $59.99 | 89% | — |
| Epic | $59.99 | 90% | — |
Matched by title. Prices and chart positions are each store's US storefront; Epic charts worldwide. * critic score.
Cheapest copy: ≈ $29.66 on Xbox · Türkiye (−51%). Compare 30 prices in 14 markets →
Reviews
Themes across 3290 recent reviews and how positive each mention is. A keyword signal, not full sentiment analysis.
positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up
Reviews
the ogs are better
Hey folks. Look to your left. Look to your right. Now look at me. I'm not your average Stalker but I am here to tell you this is an excellent game. It's true that at launch it was a nearly unplayable mess but it's also true that the game has been regularly updated with much needed fixes and improvements. I see a lot of people complaining about this game and I'm here to tell you 'git gud'. I don't play games to be an elite gamer. I play for the joy of the experience. Sometimes you have to push yourself to reach the required ability, and this game is definitely a game that forced me to grow as a gamer! As of the latest patches I'm getting consistent 70-90+ FPS @ 3440x1440 with settings on Ultra (DLSS, no scaling, no frame generation). In nearly 600 hours the game might have crashed to desktop once with a couple freezes here and there. Atmospherically, nothing comes even REMOTELY close to wandering the Zone. If you are like me with hundreds to over a thousand hours in Fallout: New Vegas, Witcher 3, etc - this game genuinely feels like you are in rural Ukraine. Grashoppers, dragonflies, and other flying insects will fly around you as you walk. There are spiders, frogs, mice (normal ones, not dangerous mutant ones!), bats, ravens, fish etc that populate the world and they appear based on region, time of day, and weather. The environment sounds are rich and nuanced with bushes, grasses, and various surfaces all sounding different in wind, rain, or if walked on or hit with a bullet. The game has excellent built-in headphone HRTF for precise sound location and realistic environments. Turn off the music (it's excellent but it blocks the sounds of mutants, artifacts, anomalies, and NPCs) and you can really feel absorbed in the Zone. Gameplay wise, it's a bit of a throwback with some modern touches. Players shouldn't try to push the game into something it's not. Skif is meant to represent a 'regular' human (as regular as people who can survive in the Zone are lol), not some souped-up video game avatar. Your gear has wear and a limited lifespan, and the Zone is not there for you. Your health and stamina are limited and the carry weight includes equipped gear. That said, the weights for things are pretty generous and you can carry 8 guns or more in your pack which IRL would be... very difficult! Everything takes time. Need to heal? Medpacks or bandages take 1-2 seconds to apply and you can't run, jump, or reload while doing that. Reloading partial magazines doesn't fill your pack with partials but the reload does take time - and how much time depends on the gun, what upgrades are installed, and magazine size. I see a lot of comments about how stamina is too low, keeping you from sprinting everywhere while chugging energy drinks is awkward. If that's you, here's what you've missed: this isn't that kind of game. Travel the Zone at a walk. Soak it in. The more you know about how the Zone operates the better you can stay alive. Save energy drinks for when you really need them (like when you're 300m from a shelter when an Emission hits, or fighting Bayun). With enough experience you can tell which weather pattern is coming next, and the difference between a red dawn during a wind storm and a red sky from an impending Emission. The guns feel AMAZING. Ammo is scarce but this is nothing like Fallout 2 where if you use a gun at all during early game you will always run out of ammo. There are lots of guns I dislike but they all feel like real guns with individual personalities. I know other Stalkers will love guns that I find underwhelming, simply because they vibe with how the gun works and feels. Weapon wear is based on each round fired so remember that when using a high fire rate gun! Anomalies are real ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. You really, REALLY get the feeling of how anti-human the Zone is when you move out of the Lesser Zone and discover the clouds of glass shards that don't trigger your detector. There are some weird design decisions and the jumping puzzles often make me rage. My gamer genes do not include the ability to platform so a significant portion of my deaths are because of falling in puzzles/mazes. Additionally, English localization is THE WORST. None of the English voices match the character personalities of the Slavic people in this game. I only play in Ukrainian with subtitles (although the subs are a little buggy at times) and the experience is much more solid and gratifying. Learn to match the pace of the Zone and the game will reward you with a thoughtful, meditative action game populated by interesting and memorable characters. I recommend playing on Stalker skill level but there's no shame in choosing Easy to get used to the Zone! I'm currently 60+ hours into a fresh game on Veteran and it's quite a bit more challenging.
Overall... Dissapointing. Very bad gunplay, story is okay, but most of the time you don't even know what you're doing, full of bugs and the biggest minus - awful optimization. World is great but I just don't know. Spoiler alert: Endings are black and white, there is nothing that can truly express what you want to do, you either side with this guy and kill everyone else or this guy and kill everyone and you can't just be like "i dont care, ♥♥♥♥ all of you". I guess that's life sometimes but personally, I don't buy it. 5/10
This is my first negative review. I really want to like this game, started it a few times, stuck until going out of the lesser zone, but man 2 years in development and still has a lot of bugs, performance issues, the AI sucks, objects going trough walls, lifeless NPCs. Can’t recommend this. Edit: played a few more hours and even if I try my best, game keeps crashing, lagging. Why do you need to do shaders every time your game loads? Why cant you have automatic detection for audio output (if you connect your earphones after you launched the game, it doesnt recognize them and you have to relaunch and wait the shaders again). Not playing anymore and will try to get back in a few months or years.
У ВАС БЫЛО 1.5 ГОДА ЧТОБЫ ЕЕ ДОПИЛИТЬ ПОЧЕМУ ОНА НАСТОЛЬКО ХУЕВАЯ МЕНЯ ТОШНИТ ОТ ЭТИХ ПЕРЕСТРЕЛОК, ОТ МЕСТНОСТИ КОТОРАЯ ТЕБЯ УБИВАЕТ, А УБИВАЕТ ОНА ТЕБЯ ПОТОМУЧТО ТЫ ♥♥♥♥♥ НЕ ВИДИШЬ , ПОЧЕМУ Я ДОХНУ ПАДАЯ ♥♥♥♥ С 3ЕХ МЕТРОВ, ПОЧЕМУ ЦЕЛИТЬСЯ НАСТОЛЬКО ПРОТИВНО
Horrible performance for 20% of content compared to older games
Just another case of an old classic with a completely transformed dev team that didn't understand the originals. Time is not the issue, they had a delay. Money is not the issue, they have Microsoft now. The war in Ukraine isn't the issue because the direction of the game completely misses the mark. This isn't a case of a lack of resources, time or safety as shills will likely tell you, it's new blood shipped in by Microsoft fresh from University who have never played the originals and only know how to make games in Unreal's poorly optimised sloptech. There is nothing in this game you can't find elsewhere. STALKER 2 is a victim of the modern games industry and it's version of Hollywood's mid 2000s reboot culture. It has no soul, it's just another first person shooter action adventure.
The game is just not finished. It is not optimized, over bloated in file size, eats up a massive amount of resources and overall just feels like something that needed another year or two in development. Not at all what was advertised. It may be a Stalker game, but I've played stalker mods on Arma that run smoother than this game. Not worth it unless you have a monster PC.
Stay as far away from this game that you can, it has the worst AI that i have seen in a shooter, if you want to get lasered from max range or have boring ass AI stare at you not move and hit ever single shot then go for it and im tired of everyone glazing this game saying its good
Я прошел все сталкеры вдоль и поперек. Я играл в моды и сборки от васянов. Я затер метро до дыр. Выживал на кастомных серверах Дейза. Но я никогда еще не видел на столько тупого и недоразвитого проекта как Сталкер 2. Первые несколько часов были забавными, но меня не покидало ощущение, что я уже где-то это видел. Очень скоро я понял, что это рескин Зова Припяти, только в худшем его проявлении, отчего ощущение новизны в игре улетучилось практически мгновенно. Я как-будто вернулся в 2009-й, но в плохом смысле. Абсолютно унылая боевая составляющая, где НПС ведут себя еще хуже чем в оригинальной трилогии. Спавнящиеся не пойми откуда боты, которые стреляют через ВХ сквозь стены, отсутствующий стелс и аимбот врагов, где no scope 360 зажимом в голову за 100 метров это нормальная практика. Большая часть ботов беззвучна, ни звука шагов, ни каких-то фраз по мере приближения, ни звука перезарядки, они просто есть и ты просто уже труп. Зачистка локаций бессмысленна, ведь в следующем цикле там снова будут враги. Это не Чистое Небо, сынок. Абсолютная мешанина группировок. В одной деревне могут заспавниться бандиты, долговцы, вартовцы и нейтралы. Угадай кто из них шмальнет в тебя первым. Карта огромная, где большая часть точек интереса не имеют никакого смысла, кроме как попросту cпiздiть твое время. Большая часть тайников располагается где-нибудь в пiздe на гвозде, а в качестве награды бутылка чтобы сесть на нее и палка колбасы из дикой собаки. Как говориться на какой стул сам сядешь... Мастер мод сделан кривозубой прoститyткoй, которая никогда не играла в игры. Сохранения только в лагере. В игре, где тебе могут заспавнить в 50 метрах стайку бандитов с аимботом, это и вправду чувствуется как хардкор. Надеюсь зарплату ей так же спавнили внезапно и желательно на лицо. Так же в игре присутствуют квесты в стиле "принеси-подай, иди нaxyй не мешай". Прямиком из 2008-го года как часть интеллектуального наследия Украины. Ну и сюжет. А что сюжет? Да нормальный такой сюжет. Ну подумаешь герой оказался серийным убийцей с птср, которому вальнуть сотню-другую на второй день пребывания в Зоне что в магазин за водкой сходить. Прошло 48 часов как пм оттягивает тебе пояс, а калашей с трупов главный герой принес больше, чем Сидорович за год продает. Отсутствие А-Лайфа привело к тому, что кривая роста персонажа сломана. Это не линейное развитие героя как это было в Чистом Небе, где Шрам рос от локации к локации, от стычки к стычке; где война группировок из маленькой спец. операции по захвату помойки на болотах перешла в полноценную войну за контроль основных территорий; а простое и бессмысленное месиво, где все сделано для того, чтобы игрок не заскучал. И в то время как ванила продолжает поражать воображение, игра с модами действительно становится лучше, но, к сожалению, это не спасает игру от ее фундаментальных проблем. Отчего и без того васянская игра становится еще более васянской. Как итог, троекратно переваренный кaл. В прямом и переносном смысле. Идейно ничего нового, геймплейно тоже. Потеряли ощущение фракций из ЧН, потеряли войну группировок, исчезла атмосфера лагерей, баз, вылазок из ЗП. Это буквально Фар Край только под другим скином, где вместо вышек косые избы с такими же сундуками и желтой краской. Выпускать такое в 2024-м, когда есть Тарков с его кастомизацией оружия, когда есть протоптанная тропинка Метро, когда есть Киберпанк... Понятно что старались, понятно что хотели как лучше, но получилось как всегда. Увы. Игра для тех, кто не ждет ничего нового; рекомендую исключительно фанатам распродаж с хорошим резистом к огненным аномалиям и пси-защитой.