Looks like Stalker 2 is a borderline Early Access-quality release

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I'm not big enough to get our channel & review up there in the pinned post but have been playing it during the review process so happy to answer any questions.

The game has a lot of bugs. Some will dismiss it as Eurojank, or "Yeah that's STALKER bay bee!" And they're right, those little fun bugs are there, corpses flying in to the sky, or legs sticking out the ground, standing in chairs, or disabled NPCs standing and walking normally. Those aren't breaking anything. There are some larger ones involving quests becoming hardlocked, or progress hitting a wall, and those are more problematic as they can cause you frustration beyond fun. I had to restart 3 times, and was unable to score the game because of it.

BUT, I mention this because I wanted to just say, GSC Game World patched the game 5 times during the review period that I was aware of, 2 of them big patches. One so large I had to check if it was the Day 0 and was told no which was insane. They are working at such a pace to fix these issues, and outside of a few choices all of the main bugs are fixable, they're not intrinsic to the design of the game, which is a great thing for the future.

I'm a big fan of the game so I had to control my bias. When it breaks it's frustrating, when it works, it's stunning. Without the bugs I would say this was my game of the year. There wasn't any choices gameplay wise I hated outside of a few AI ones, and even then, those might be bugs, I don't know.

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in brief: we need a little more time with this one, for two main reasons. The first is that Stalker 2 is a pretty sizable game and we've not had all that long with it, so we're giving ourselves some extra breathing room to ensure we've been able to make significant enough progress for a full review.

The second reason, though, is both more pertinent, and more troubling. At time of writing, the early review build of Stalker 2 that was sent to us by developer GSC Game World has several, quite major technical issues. We've been assured that a Day One patch will be launched alongside the game's general release today, and so we want to make sure our appraisal is reflective of the version of the game you'll be playing yourself.

As such, we're currently aiming to publish our review on Friday November 22nd, so you'll be able to read our full thoughts on Stalker 2 then.

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Sadly, Stalker 2 is, by far, the most unstable game we have reviewed in a long time

A repeated bug saw the screen cut to black roughly every 90 seconds. We had to reinstall 150 GB of the game several times, and that’s not including the 160 GB patch that dropped less than 48 hours before the embargo. Lighting elements are broken in some scenarios, there’s a host of audio bugs and we also faced an issue where not one single input would work on the game, including keyboard and mouse or controller, until we forced our computer to turn off.

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Story is disjointed and doesn't develop until very late game
Encumbrance is extremely annoying and the weight limit is too low. There's a quest item that immediately puts you over and he found that very dumb.
Enemy AI is hit/miss. The mutant enemy variety is poor and they simply run at you and do chip damage.
Stealth is completely busted. Enemies have weird vision cones, can see you through walls and get alerted despite executing stealth takedowns.
Survival systems seem kind of half baked. The hunger system affects your aim but is easily overcome by how much food they give you.
The quests and dialog seems to want to play out in very specific ways and punishes you if you do anything that doesn't follow the script like quest givers that freak out if you go out of an invisible zone.
Buggy as shite. Performance is crap even on a 4090
Hopeful that stuff will be fixed but will take time. Possibly months. But loves the vibe and the weapons feel great.

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