I wish I could put an ambivalent or mixed review, I really do love the lengths the GSC team went to flesh out and expand the world created by the trilogy. I am enjoying the game despite its current flaws but I cannot recommend to anyone it in its current state; like the Ssethtzeentach review says for stalker, "Keep in mind that the base game took a billion patches to actually run stably half the time."

Biggest issues are the performance, mutant health, early game economy, softlocks, and AI.

Performance felt fine until I went into the town hubs, then my fps tanked to the single digits, I've installed a few mods from Nexusmods to help performance overall (went from 30 to 60-80fps stable. I have 32GB Ram, 5800X, and a 3070 Ti) but I don't know what causes the town hub FPS tanking issues.

Mutants feel weirdly imbalanced in the early game, we should be seeing snorks, fleshes, boars, blind dogs and psuedodogs in the early game area. It feels jarring fighting a bloodsucker in the game's tutorial section when a Snork or any other low level mutant probably would have had been more appropriate. Bloodsuckers, Poltergiests, Fleshes all feel too tanky when compared to the previous game, You can find several examples of people having to magdump their guns several times for a bloodsucker in a cave for a mandatory quest.

Early game Economy is terrible, you get around 300-1000 per quest typically but gear repairs cost so much, for example I've had an early game AR416 with terrible durability that cost 8k to repair. The durability of gears and weapon are low which causes gun jams at 80% durability.

I have encountered a few softlocks on side quests that required me to download the debug console and enable noclip to address. These were after a world event: Monolith active again after a main story quest. I couldn't enter Lodochka's bunker after grabbing the emitter and in Zalissya, all the NPCs (Monolith too) were stuck in one spot which led to a few quest glitches related to that and failing the defence of Zalissya.

AI is unfortunately a big issue, NPCs will spawn around you which makes the world feel inorganic and contradictory to the A-Life that made the series memorable. For comparison, You could go to a point of interest in Call of Pripyat and find NPCs doing their own things, hunting artefacts, fighting mutants or bandits or walking around and you will find them everywhere. It's the little things like that which help fleshes out the world. Unfortunately in Stalker 2 you will be in a barren world until you hit a point of interest, then NPCs may spawn, it's very rare to see NPCs out in the world walking around.

I wish I could put an ambivalent or mixed review, I really do love the lengths the GSC team went to flesh out and expand the world created by the trilogy. I am enjoying the game despite its current flaws but I cannot recommend to anyone it in its current state; like the Ssethtzeentach review says for stalker, "Keep in mind that the base game took a billion patches to actually run stably half the time." Biggest issues are the performance, mutant health, early game economy, softlocks, and AI. Performance felt fine until I went into the town hubs, then my fps tanked to the single digits, I've installed a few mods from Nexusmods to help performance overall (went from 30 to 60-80fps stable. I have 32GB Ram, 5800X, and a 3070 Ti) but I don't know what causes the town hub FPS tanking issues. Mutants feel weirdly imbalanced in the early game, we should be seeing snorks, fleshes, boars, blind dogs and psuedodogs in the early game area. It feels jarring fighting a bloodsucker in the game's tutorial section when a Snork or any other low level mutant probably would have had been more appropriate. Bloodsuckers, Poltergiests, Fleshes all feel too tanky when compared to the previous game, You can find several examples of people having to magdump their guns several times for a bloodsucker in a cave for a mandatory quest. Early game Economy is terrible, you get around 300-1000 per quest typically but gear repairs cost so much, for example I've had an early game AR416 with terrible durability that cost 8k to repair. The durability of gears and weapon are low which causes gun jams at 80% durability. I have encountered a few softlocks on side quests that required me to download the debug console and enable noclip to address. These were after a world event: [spoiler] Monolith active again after a main story quest. I couldn't enter Lodochka's bunker after grabbing the emitter and in Zalissya, all the NPCs (Monolith too) were stuck in one spot which led to a few quest glitches related to that and failing the defence of Zalissya.[/spoiler] AI is unfortunately a big issue, NPCs will spawn around you which makes the world feel inorganic and contradictory to the A-Life that made the series memorable. For comparison, You could go to a point of interest in Call of Pripyat and find NPCs doing their own things, hunting artefacts, fighting mutants or bandits or walking around and you will find them everywhere. It's the little things like that which help fleshes out the world. Unfortunately in Stalker 2 you will be in a barren world until you hit a point of interest, then NPCs may spawn, it's very rare to see NPCs out in the world walking around.