S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2's Swamp: The Definitive Review
Always. Be. Bandaging.
If you’re surprised that it’s February 2025 and I’ve only just crossed S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s (alleged) halfway point, let me assure you that I have had a wonderful time getting there. I’d seen rumblings across social media about the perils of the swamp section, though by rapidly flicking away I’d managed to avoid any spoilers. I can’t say they would have ruined much, as the section turned out to be a superb re-balancing of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2 meta, namely in taking the player down a peg or two after a prolonged period of relative comfort. There’s a certain old-school, patrician slap around the ears for the overconfident when wading deep into this boggy terrain. Luckily, on my first visit I was assaulted by an alarmingly high number of hostile mutant animals and by the time I’d cleared one of the three objectives in the area, had exhausted a bucketload of expensive ammo for my VS Vintar1 and degraded all of my gear to below 50%. Cautiously crawling back to the safety of the Sultan’s home base, I spent my entire stockpile of cash on repairs and restocking. I laughed at how stupid I was to go running in there, thinking I’d clear the three objectives in one run. Now I knew it would be slow, bitterly-fought and I really should factor in a return to base after each objective. It was fantastic - a moment of real humiliation and humbling, of the Zone showing you who’s boss. That it came after a plateau in challenge difficulty, where everything felt manageable, was a masterstroke.2 I don’t think I can recall another game that reasserted itself with such force, because it wasn’t a mere difficulty spike; it was a lesson to be learned.3
Having fully regrouped, I thought very sensibly about my loadout and given the loot on many of the human corpses, opted to run with the Saiga automatic shotgun and the ‘Lummox’4 AKM 74s assault rifle. My VS Vintar stayed in the backpack, because it’s awesome, and because it’s sensible to have three main weapons that have three different ammo types - if you need to swap, you’ll at least be able to shoot. I also had to remind myself of the old S.T.A.L.K.E.R. method for dealing with packs of mutant dogs: swap to knife and keep spamming bandages in between wildly stabbing whatever you can. I think by the time I’d cleared the second objective, I’d got through twenty bandages or so, but had come away with a bit of a surplus for the AKM thanks to its scope granting relatively straightforward single-round headshot kills for zombies. I also emptied about twenty shotgun shells into a Controller, but that’s a different pitch altogether.
I said in my earlier review that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was a game about learning to cope, be that with the environment, the challenges therein or your shortfalls in equipment and experience. The swamp section exemplified that beautifully. The game then takes a confident hand by living up to the old Russian saying of “...and then it got worse” by forcing an Emission5 on you as you’re told to dash for an old bunker, principally for a massive slab of story exposition. There's a certain naturalistic quality to the panicked dash across the swamp to get to safety, and finding quite a few ruined outbuildings that look like shelter, but absolutely are not. The way S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 handles wading is quite smart; there’s a small slowdown for the first range of depth, then a massive, syrupy trudge when it feels waist-height. Beyond that, you’re blocked from progressing. It’s a bit too easy to lazily keep up the trudge at a snail’s pace in normal conditions, but with the Emission on the way, entering the trudge zone is potentially fatal. That’s not to say that the timing for traversal to the story-approved safe spot is incredibly finely balanced - it’s relatively lax if you sagely, or luckily, find the fastest route, but it’ll shit you up more than enough to keep you hugging the thin arcs of dry land that allow normal sprinting. You will also drink everything you can drink in this process, in order to bolster your stamina and keep up the maximal pace. The flat wetlands of the swamp has a superb maze-like function, as the terrain is so distinct from the grasslands and thin woods I’d been traversing since leaving the starting area. It’s deliberately featureless in its own way. Sure, there are trees and minor copses here and there, but nothing that works well as a landmark to orient yourself, so you’re running by your PDA map as much as following the navigation markers. Those markers are almost redundant as pathfinders in the swamp, as they ignore the wading depths and hence, making a beeline for them inevitably leads to being both a) really quite lost and b) stuck in wading waters, trying to find a way back to dry land. In the end, the circular nature of the wading zones meant finding some oddly arcing curve to get to where you need to be, and when you finally emerge from the reeds onto an expanse of solid land, the relief is in your bones. An instinctive sense of the geography changing from horrible to reliable pervades.
Considering the swamp marks nearly the halfway point of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s grand yomp, it was bewildering to me how much richness and detail there was in the environment. The main story’s trek through the map’s south-eastern regions covered so many ruined farms and factories and installations that the Zone felt like it had a believable density, and that I was covering a believable distance. The sanctuaries along the way all shared the same sense of the repurposed ruin, but across a fantastic range of ideas. 70s décor holiday villages, brutalist government refuge bunkers, land-stranded ships. It illustrates a love of the abandoned space like no other. In a sense, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s primary romance is with the ruin, with the love of the reclaimed shelter. There are so many locations, and despite the shared aesthetics, they rarely feel assembled from pre-fabs or lazily placed. They feel largely natural. There are so many individual buildings that it must be the greatest collection of fucked architecture ever seen in a videogame. The UrbEx potential is absolutely vast, too. The underground tunnels and bunkers and labs all carry distinct senses of place and sometimes distinct moods, and as with the overland buildings, there’s so many of them. It’s a crying shame the game doesn’t offer its own photomode, for the quality of the bunkerage is absolutely top-notch. This shouldn’t surprise anyone - the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was a clear leader in the art of abandoned cold-war infrastructure, yet to see such a profusion of ruined spaces, all without any sense of lazy repetition, is simply wonderful. It puts so many other games to shame. But then, it’s a game that seems incredibly invested in its own geography as a naturalistic place, rather than a backdrop for focus-grouped tiers of friction-balanced objectives to fulfil narcissistic power fantasies.
After our holiday in the swamp, the story takes you to a place set in an abrupt and stark contrast to the Zone you’ve seen so far. A gleaming technopolis, sheltered from the world with a glass dome. I felt an immediate correlation to arriving at the ecologists’ mobile lab in the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and its sense of clean, modern sanctuary amongst the ravages of the Zone. It ratified that sense of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 being the fulfilment of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s original promise. A grand expansion and extrapolation of vestigial prototypes hampered by resources and machine specs. And yet, despite those clear signifiers I still can’t escape the sense of loss and division that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s Zone seeps from every pore. There is a real atmosphere of the decay of something, of some profoundly traumatic experience that colours the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. universe. Back in the 2000s, it perhaps echoed phantoms of the Cold War, of the shock of Chernobyl ‘86. Or maybe it was tugging on the two Chechen wars, the second of which was still ongoing when S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was released. The hostility, the sense of needing to survive a space where laws have no domain, other than those that were red in tooth and claw. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 feels so much more resonant, as if it was a template pre-set for some inevitable catastrophe that has now come to bear. The Russian invasion’s perverted sense of its own manifest destiny tears its own scars into the Ukrainian countryside in much the same way anomalies and mutants pockmark the Zone. It was very much the vibe of the early game, and now I’m well deep and feel almost fully versed with the game’s pitch and timbre, the colouring of the mood is inescapable. That tension between the partisan Duty, Stalker and Bandit factions against the stark, overwhelming militarisation of the Ward carries a political weight that few other AAA-grade games can call upon, let alone display. Unspoken, of course, yet indelibly present. I’m always reminded of real battlefield imagery from Ukraine after finding a bunch of uniformed corpses, for there’s something in the way the ragdolls collapse that echoes the horrifyingly unnatural positions of those killed in actual warfare. It was hard to escape those images on social media such as pre-Musk Twitter, and it’s hard to not draw the reflexive comparison of uniformed young men lying dead in the greenery of the European countryside. Much of the game’s sense of its earthy emotional core springs from this, I think. And perhaps it casts a new light on the Roadside Picnic of the Strugatsky brothers. The inspirational source of this all, its idea of some petty alien dalliance bringing profound consequences to the region is perhaps less a flight of fancy than it may appear. And I certainly feel that emotional weight, combined with its exceptional environment, is what carries S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 to a height that trad AAA can never attain. Its narrative hookum is perhaps best thought of as a distraction from the horrors it barely masks, from the bitter truths and personal experiences that lurk behind its Sci-Fi smoke and mirrors. For the ordinary human, the vicissitudes that spring from the self-interest of autocratic dictators are every bit as victimising as some thoughtlessly casual alien intervention was in Roadside Picnic. For us, those acts are beyond comprehension with regards to their lack of regard for humanity and the humane, perhaps to the extent that we feel utterly powerless in the face of them. Much like the Zone, our true main mission is to cope and persist. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s factional power-plays perhaps offer us some hope of meaningful change, between notions of a new utopia or a rebalance of the factional quagmire. However, after seeing the endings of the original, I know precisely what I’m expecting - and then, of course, I'm absolutely expecting to say “and then it got worse”.
[21]
A rebrand of the real-world VSS Vintorez, a particularly nifty sniper rifle/SMG/assault rifle hybrid with an emphasis on stealth.
The groove you settle into is really quite nice - after leaving the starting area, you steadily amass decent equipment and plenty of places to visit for supplies and upgrades, and with those hubs being reasonably close to each other, you’re never too far from home. I had a fun time when a patch turned off the A-Life simulation that powers random encounters, where for a couple of weeks the Zone was far quieter and the walks much more leisurely. In tandem with the comfort from having decent equipment and plenty of resources, the game’s character certainly seemed to soften. Of course, when A-Life was turned back on, we were back in the Zone as it really should be.
Don’t just take my word for it. This thread on Reddit is full of spoilers, but also amazing testimony. For example, Iv4ldir had a whale of a time. Quoting verbatim:
“i come here for the quest, UNder prepared. 1mag for the Fora. 2mag for the AK named with scope. 2mag for the pistol. 3 medkit 5 aidband, and some food/vodka. the was the longuest and stressfull expedition i ever made. running from mutant, hidind, scavanging for some ammo, and reliying of broken weapon who jam every 2shot.. this was i nightmare... And i fking loved it… after 40hour to walkiing in the zone (almost) without fear and real opposition. this time i was the prey, and it was really cool.”
A scoped assault rifle that can be found in the opening section of the game, which uses a very commonly-lootable ammo.
When an Emission happens, the sky goes red and at some point, you'll automatically die, unless sheltering somewhere sufficient. There are no countdowns, no visual aids to show where's safe. It fits the the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mode with absolute perfection.