[STEAM] STALKER 2 review: A challenging open-world playground

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Hearing a ballet of bullets dancing around me as I hide behind cardboard held up by reinforced cement happens far more often than I’d like in STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl. It’s an unforgiving wasteland filled with mutants, bandits, and carefully constructed choices that can provide an easier—or more complicated—life than you already have to deal with.

Still, the difficulty doesn’t keep me from playing. On the contrary, it encourages me to consider every time the footsteps or the idle chatter of bandits are nearby. Every engagement becomes a difficult challenge, with no way to improve with a specific skill tree, similar to many extraction shooters. Instead,

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motivates me to improve myself by relying on risking it all to get new gear and using the experience I’ve built up along the way.

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