How To Play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: The Definitive Review

No, honestly, it’s really good and you should play it

Having finished a storyline in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and harbouring precisely zero desire to backtrack and blunder through any of the other faction endings, I nonetheless find myself drawn back to the Zone because I just can't get enough of exploring shit and having nasty, unfair firefights. This is really doing myself a great disservice, as there’s plenty of other games I should be getting on with. Like poor old Avowed, for example, and yet here I am, hiding in undergrowth and staring at a shed for ten minutes, over and over again, for hours. This is because the game is really fucking good, despite what you might read in threads bitter about the lack of side content in the second half, the wobbly implementation of A-life or how the story is so wildly inconsistent and contradictory to previous instalments that it ruins everything.¹ Now, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is an infamously cruel and unusual game, and as such probably isn’t the easiest to engage with for the uninitiated. Be thankful then, that I have compiled a small guide of sorts to assist you with ‘on-boarding’² this magnificent piece of work.

1: Get Your Ass To Zalissya

Because S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is trying very hard to be a modern AAA spectacular, it has a plodding and largely unnecessary intro that functions more like a linear FPS until you’re set free in the Lesser Zone region of the map. This slog is deliberately disorientating and unpleasant, and is likely the slipperiest part of the game for newcomers. You won’t have a fucking clue what’s going on, and then it’ll be really dark, raining, and people will be shooting at you and you’ll have fuck all equipment, be lugging some massive probe thing around and there’ll be monsters and it’ll feel like absolute misery. But that, my friends, is precisely the point. It’s this box-ticking hump that one must endure to be initiated into the GSC mode. This is a test of your character, not the game’s. It’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 assessing whether or not you deserve to play it properly and the 400 blows you sustain along the way will likely be the hardest and most unbalanced you’ll experience in the entire game. The fact that it does this in canned missions that introduce the major players for the first half of the game in soporific fashion is a cunning feint, as only by persisting through AAA-baiting gibberish does one earn the wings to truly fly in the Zone.

At some point you’ll end up free to wander in the open world, and thus you should set your sights immediately on Zalissya.³ I would head there at breakneck speed, not even stopping off for minor looting opportunities along the way. Zalissya is the first hub in the game, and hence the greatest starting point for that delicious meat of going on forays and coming home with profitable loot. In Zalissya, you’ll find a stash for dumping shit and bed for resting, all neatly based inside Hamster’s shop, where he can furnish you with early-game weapons, ammo and equipment. There’ll also be side missions aplenty to pick up, with procgen quests available from Warlock at the Zalissya Bar.⁴ You’ll also be able to meet Lens, the first technician, who will be able to repair and upgrade your equipment. Do all their side-missions first, as these will be the spokes upon which you build a decent loadout. And if enjoying S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 relies on anything, it’s the quality of your stuff.

2: Get Your Loadout Going

Speaking of Warlock, he will give you a mission to track down Valik Lummox, a debtor. This is a short jaunt to an abandoned farm, where you’ll find Lummox hiding while being harassed by bandits. Popping their clogs leads Lummox to revealing the location of a rather nifty scoped assault rifle that can put you in good stead for the Lesser Zone. But this is only part of the ideal loadout. Being a modded big-boy’s AKM, the ammo isn’t quite as plentiful in loot, so it’s best to focus on getting two other main weapons and cycling between them. Utterly essential is a shotgun. Either the Toz-34 or the Boomstick will be readily available in terrible condition ratings, so get at least two of whichever you pick. I ended up favouring the Toz as it had a quicker reload and in the early game, single-barrel shotgun damage does just fine compared to the more costly double-barrel sawnoff of the Boomstick. We’ll get on to combat tactics later, but rest assured the shotguns are pretty much the only choice for taking out Bloodsucker mutants, which you will definitely come across at some point in the Lesser Zone.⁵ For a gun to compliment the Lummox AKM, I would favour the Viper-5 smg as its ammo seemed more plentiful than the AKM-74U, because the Viper used 9mm pistol ammo as opposed to the AKM-74U’s 5.56 rounds. Given that you’ll be fighting a lot of grubby bandits with pistols and SMGs, it’s a pretty simple stat choice to plump for the 9mm as the ammo has a higher drop rate. For equipping a pistol, just stick with Skif’s Pistol, a default weapon that you cannot lose because it’s a quest item.⁶ In short, have three distinct main weapons (two equipped, one in inventory), make sure all three use different ammo, and make sure one’s a shotgun.

A note on weapon quality:

In the early game, every weapon you loot will be absolute dogshit. Expect red condition firearms to be the norm. This means it’s wise to double-up on every weapon you intend to use frequently, because they will degrade and will start jamming at some point, prompting a forced reload to clear them. If you have a backup, you can at least swap over post-fight. You cannot sell red condition items at this point, so don’t carry any more than two of each as you’ll run out of carrying capacity somewhat quickly. Pay close attention to the weapon stats panel in the inventory, as this’ll show condition as a percentage so you can optimise. The one golden rule for any red weapon you see is this: ALWAYS UNLOAD THE AMMO. I cannot stress this enough - it should be a reflex. You’ll always need more ammo in the Lesser Zone for the guns you’re using, but always pick up ammo for guns you’re not - you can sell it. If you find a body and no gun, don’t give up. Always look for the gun. Ammo is money. With enough money, you can repair your chosen weapons up to perfect quality, which is probably the best investment you can make early on. Spaff the rest of your cash on ammo, seriously. If you see a yellow condition weapon of any type at all, pick it up. If you don’t wanna use it, you can sell it. BUT EMPTY IT FIRST.

A note on armour:

If you end up getting enough cash together, by all means blow it on armour if you must but it’s probably a waste of money in the early stages of play. Your default armour isn’t that much worse than the average in the area, and if you’re lucky enough to find a set in good or perfect condition, its monetary value will probably be far more helpful. As with the weapons, you can spend cash to repair your existing armour up to perfect quality. Note, in some story missions or significant side missions, armour can be a completion award though chances are you’ll have to look around for it! The game itself does chicken out, though, and dumps armour sets in your inventory after some key story missions, meaning you really have to work at being under-armoured for your current situation.

3: Looting Like A Pro

As I have repeatedly tried to hammer home, the real romance of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is in the loop of exploring, encountering, looting and going home. With this in mind, your looting technique will be critical to building up the loadout you need to keep the loop profitable. Firstly you’ll be looking for shit you can sell, so look everywhere. If you’ve just done some combat in a shed, search the entire shed. And the outbuildings. And the cars. Every nook and cranny, because everything matters in the early game. If you’re on your way back home and have weight to spare, look in every building you haven’t visited yet. Treat this as your mission more than anything formal you’ve been given and you’ll soon find yourself growing a nice little cache of useful, valuable things. In terms of the best weight-value ratio, this will be in ammo, medkits and bandages. Generally, one or more of these three will be in every lootable corpse, provided they haven’t already been looted by NPCs.⁷ It’s a wise rule to always take any ammo and any grenades, but to keep an eye on your carrying weight. Try to keep below 70kg if you can, as above that you’ll move significantly slower and expend stamina at an alarming rate whenever you need it most.

Medkits take top priority, as you should consider spamming these as a core part of combat. Bandages are a close second, although using them in the field has a much longer animation. However, when in the inventory screen during looting, you can long-press to use stuff, thereby dodging the anims. I would recommend only carrying one or two items of food, and try to make that the canned variety. Eat the bread and sausages in situ and collect the condensed milk purely for hoarding purposes. Generally, you can get by with avoiding hunger by eating whenever you find food on a corpse. Long-press and it’s done. Food is surprisingly heavy as you get into double figures and has a terrible resale value, so only rack up the canned goods if you have the capacity. Likewise energy drinks are almost counter-productive as they rapidly increase hunger with use. Water gives much the same benefit with none of the costs. Keep a bottle of vodka if you need to shrug off some radiation, but definitely hoard anti-rad syringes. Generally you’ll need 3-5 max for a foray into somewhere irradiated, so sell off any excess. For most of the game, I would run about with 20 medkits and 15 bandages, and would aim to strike out on forays at under 50kg, giving you a nice 20kg or so of loot capacity. For ammo, I found going out with 100+ rounds for your favoured weapons would generally cover any eventuality, even the long-slog story missions.⁸

A note on stashes:

You will accrue a shitload of map pointers for stashes across the map. These tend to be fairly mundane, with only the occasional one offering amazing shit like 15 bandages and an upgrade blueprint, or a fat wad of ammo for your best gun. In general, I would avoid hunting stashes unless you happen to be near one as part of some other activity. Some are hidden in stupid places as a kind of environmental puzzle, but they are well annoying to deal with.

A note on crates:

You might spot boxes that are labelled for medical use and boxes that look like they carry ammo. Guess what? They do! But you have to melee them first. Always crack these open, especially the medical ones.

4: Hoarding

The player stash is bottomless, so you can hoard as much as you like. Being an arch collector, I dumped every PDA I found into the stash, but I’d also use it as a savings account of sorts. Every five runs or so, dump your valuable loot into the stash instead of selling it. This means you’ll eventually build up very nice stockpiles of ammo and consumables that you can either draw on in lean periods, or sell when you reach a spangly new shop with shiny guns or armour you can nearly afford to buy. Also hoard condensed milk because you know that shit is d e l i c i o u s. I also keep a perfect example of every firearm and have picked up 90% of the unique named weapons, with the same for armour sets. Because the game cannot be fucked to join the 21st century and offer you a customisable home, all this shit stays in the stash forever.

5: Combat

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s combat is fast, confusing and really quite unfair. An all-too-common complaint is the NPC AI x-rays you immediately on gaining line-of-sight and spams the air with ordnance in your direction before you’ve even managed to pick out a 20-pixel silhouette in the distance. In some ways this is ridiculous in the context of a modern AAA videogame, but in another it’s relentlessly brutal in a manner that absolutely fits the vibe of the Zone. The upshot here is that combat is a matter of balancing shooting with healing and reloading in a merry dance. Get used to spamming medkits, as applying a bandage mid-combat takes longer than anyone should feel comfortable with. Not to mention that the very next hit could put you in bleed status again, which is alarmingly common when fighting mutants. Medkits just fill you back up, nice and quick. When it’s hectic, be prepared to use sacrificial medkits just to reload both main guns. But this all really applies when caught in the open. If you don’t have decent cover to bolt to, it’s going to be messy by default. A better bet than fighting at distance is to switch to shotgun and get into point-blank range, once again spamming medkits as necessary. Shotguns from midgame onwards get progressively more amazing as meatgrinder death machines, so always have the Doom Guy strat in your mind whenever you get a red fuzz on the compass indicator. As the line-of-sight thing is so unfair, have absolutely zero qualms about knocking the difficulty down to Easy. Just do it, don’t be a coward, you’ll have so much more fun. I think it gives you more loot per corpse, too.

A note about the use of cover:

If you’re outdoors, aim to get indoors if you can. This tips the odds much more in your favour, especially when outnumbered. The AI will classically stack in single file, so crouch-hiding in an office, say, offers you a massive tactical advantage providing there’s only one entrance from the outdoors. This is particularly useful against zombies and Bloodsuckers, plus the close range means you’ll be nailing a shitload of one-shot kills with shotguns aimed at faces. Most buildings will offer that kind of sanctuary, and even the big warehouses and sheds will have objects of various sizes that’ll work as solid cover, at the very least. It’s generally not worth trying to hide behind trees and such, as the game doesn’t tend to view them as any kind of cover at all.

A note about fighting mutants:

In general, think of mutants as pointless resource sponges. Mutant loot is apparently coming in a patch, but for my entire run mutants were ostensibly a waste of time, bullets and medkits to fight. If you can avoid or run away, do so. In the early game, their ability to rob you of all your ammo is a very real possibility so for common encounters like packs of dogs or rats, switch to the knife and once again, spam those medkits. It’ll also help to hop onto some scenery, as getting yourself off the floor will drastically reduce damage from rats. Fighting Bloodsuckers is sometimes unavoidable as they will chase you relentlessly. Once again, try to get indoors and into a room with a single entrance. You’ll then know what direction the Bloodsucker will come from and can even spot them when cloaked. Again, the close range is absolutely the shotgun’s friend and you should be bumping off duos or even trios of Bloodsuckers without too much distress. Out in the open, you’re much more likely to waste shots. In the Lesser Zone, you’ll mostly be up against dogs and Bloodsuckers. If you get attacked by boars, they can knock you to the ground but generally go down after a couple of shotgun blasts. They’re pretty big, so much easier to hit than the fucking dogs. For ultimate lols and if you have plenty of medkits and water bottles, try running back to Zalissya and getting the guards to bump off the tailing mutants for you.

6: Planning A Foray

Yes, planning! It’s actually quite sensible to look at the map and plot out a route. For example, if a side mission is a 700-metre trip past a load of unmarked buildings, plan to go direct to the mission and then check out the buildings on the way back. Getting stuck into deep exploration on the way there may leave you weighed down or resource-depleted for the mission, innit. Large structures in unexplored areas may already have question mark icons, in which case they probably hold some reasonable quantities of loot. It’s also worthwhile just going out on scouting romps without a set mission as uncovering the territory and discovering locations will be a big help should you end up with a mission in that locale. In terms of navigating on the ground, going as the crow flies may seem the fastest route but often this is pockmarked with anomalies, boggy marshes, assholes etc. It’s often less fuss to stick to a road and just follow it in the general direction of where you want to go. Should you be unlucky enough to have an Emission trigger, a quest marker will appear to direct you to the nearest shelter. Follow it. Don’t fuck about.

A note about saving:

An absolutely key aspect of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is quicksaving. A lot. Being a veteran of the save-scummy original, quicksaving in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 should be an instinctual twitch. And you should quicksave more often than you think - the game can crash at any point, after all! But really, it’s more to do with countering the unexpected. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 has a good habit of throwing A-life encounters at you when you least expect it and if caught a bit short, the last quicksave may be the last thing that saves your progress. Out in the wild, I tend to quicksave at changes in tempo. If I reach a building, if the compass glows red, after a battle and so on. I’ll even double quicksave after a nasty fight, one immediately when the last enemy is dead and again after all the lootin’ and healin’. You should also make proper, manual saves at big points of progress or when the story seems to have shifted chapter. You know, just because. On the Xbox, quicksave is super-quick. You open the options menu, press Y, close the menu. Do it. A lot.

7: Chasing the Arc

Stay in the Lesser Zone for as long as you can. As you chip off story objectives, the bridge will open so you can join the mainland. From there you can get really stuck into the main story arc and its superb tour of the Zone, with the next major settlement being Slag Heap in the Garbage region. But that is quite a distance and the foes will be stepped up, so best to make sure you’re optimally prepared before striding off into the distance. For many players, the Lesser Zone is one of the best laid-out areas in the game - it strikes a great balance between wilderness and building density, with plenty to explore and some great riches to be found. A word of warning through - if you reach the edge of a cliff, don’t jump off. It’ll take you ages to work your way back, and that will cost you dearly - one way or another. I only recently heard that you can make it to the Rookie Village on foot from the Lesser Zone, although it’s quite a bold gamble to take with Lesser Zone-derived loadouts. It’s probably wiser to wait until the story takes you there, or get the next tier of kit from the Garbage region. But that said, the true Stalker spirit lies in undertaking stupidly long marches with no promise of success or reward, so why not give it a go? “Get into here, Stalker!”

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1. It’s a fairly safe rule to follow that if people are that bothered about something as silly as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s story, then they should be completely ignored.

2. Shouldn't that be 'boarding-on'? Or 'getting started'? Honestly, I'm really happy I've reached the time in life where I can just complain constantly, mostly about words.

3. This is towards the end of the mission A Tough Awakening.

4. Procgen, Radiant, whatever - these are the constantly cycling generated sidequests that certain shopkeepers in settlements will give you, normally every 48 hours of in-game time. There will often be one that involves going to a place and shooting humans, so that's the one to take for max loot opportunities. There are ones obviously about collecting artifacts, which are generally a complete pain in the assssssss.

5. A great source of delight in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 video content is watching peoples’ first encounters with Bloodsuckers. Initially terrifying and panic-inducing, there is a technique for dealing with these bellends that reduces them to a petty annoyance.

6. I believe Skif's Pistol is marked as a quest item purely because it appears in cutscenes as the only weapon the player has, so the game has to make sure the player is always carrying it. I am not bullshitting you.

7. This was recently patched in, and is actually quite annoying as friendly NPCs can steal your loot if they turn up after a massive firefight. I had an amazing fight around the buildings in the lower part of Duga, leaving a trail of Monolith and Ward corpses laden with delicious high-level loot, only for a bunch of friendly Stalkers to wander through and hoover it all up!

8. Apart from the swamp. You’ll never be ready for the swamp. That’s the best thing about it.