S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl Review (Valmirius)
Update: Refunded it
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Needs frame generation to run above 100fps on a 4080, 12core 24thread, 64gb ram machine at 1440p.
Don't think you're getting that 100fps all the time though - get to the first town - expect 40. Frame generation is being used as a walking stick for developers and our machines. It's a cope technology to reach benchmarks so the developers can say it performs on certain hardware rather than something that is the icing on the cake. It shouldn't just be used to make a game semi playable in the worst case framerates like a city. I love Unreal Engine 5 as someone who uses it, but we should be making things that run on it and if that means cutting the fat, so be it.
I'm not sure what is behind the performance issues, but if it's because of the photogrammetry, I would go without it if the framerate was doubled in the towns.
Root motion animations on ladders that lock your movement and getting on/off makes you feel like a geriatric old man.
The cutscenes take you out of the action and take over your controls. You can tell because they change your fov.
Opening your map or changing items lags your game or takes forever to do
The controls feel vastly inferior to their older games. The q hotbar shortcut is a nightmare of accidental item uses.
EDIT a friend has informed me about using z and c for leaning which is considerably better - the game didn't clarify this anywhere for me personally during the prologue:
The auto lean system replacing q and e is a liability ). I would rather rather do this manually rather than letting the animation system expose me by accident.
I would take the original slav jank which feels much more seamless over this clearly westernised game with horrible sluggish inertia to the animations. Every action and movement feels like a chore. I don't know if this solely down to the animations or the insane micro stutter. I think it's both.
As for the pros:
The gunplay is decent and the game looks good
Future content:
Hopefully they'll improve things
Their plans for multiplayer are hopelessly out of touch, no-one gives a fuck about tdm or capture the flag. We wanted co-op, hence the ray of hope mod that was in development hell.