S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl — Brutal Bugs of the New Zone
The Zone in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is stunning we have desolate villages, ruined factories, irradiated wastelands, every corner of the map feels like it has a story to tell. Landscapes are beautifully bleak, weather and environment effects (fog, rain, anomalies) make exploration tense and unpredictable. These moments when the game works perfectly walking through a ruined village at dusk, listening to distant gunshots, feeling the weight of isolation that’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R. at its best.
Survival + Horror + Shooter Hybrid
The mix of survival horror sensibilities and first-person shooter mechanics works. When enemies feel like real threats, resource scarcity matters, and every step might trigger an anomaly, it creates genuine dread and stakes. This blend of genres that will be familiar to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. veterans, remains one of the game’s strongest draws.
Developer Effort Patches and Fixes Are Real
The team behind the game has shown commitment. Multiple post-launch patches, including the 1.0.1, 1.1, 1.1.1 updates, have addressed many major issues: quest blockers, crashes, shader problems, save-loss bugs, UI and animation glitches.
That willingness to fix the game fast gives hope this Zone might stabilize with time.
What’s Going Wrong, Bugs, AI Nightmares & Performance Hell
Many players have reported enemies freezing mid-shootout, teleporting through terrain, clipping through walls, or spawning beneath the ground. NPC behaviour becomes erratic and sometimes accurate and scary, sometimes laughably broken.
Gun audio frequently cuts out completely, footsteps vanish, gunfire sounds glitch or disappear, which destroys tension and makes combat feel hollow, like a great world, broken reality.
AI / A-Life System Missing or Broken for Many
A core promise, a living world with dynamic NPC and creature behaviour. For many players though, it’s dead on arrival. I found empty zones, no patrols, NPCs respawning near the player unpredictably, and named locations that feel barren; it was as if the ALife system was never turned on.”
At one point after many hours of play I realised entire regions, supposed to be lore-rich, were effectively hollow windows, reused assets, no loot, no meaningful interaction.
Performance Issues & Crashes Still Lurking
Even on high-end rigs the game struggles. Frame drops, shader compilation bugs, memory-leak driven crashes, and freezes during cutscenes.
For me the PC/Xbox load times and frequent crashes are so bad they break the immersion permanently.
Vast Map, Thin Content, Repetition Over Exploration
The map is huge, but many locations feel underused. Side-quests are often shallow or repetitive. Exploration, which should feel rewarding and tense, sometimes ends up as a long walk through empty, lifeless regions. That sense of a living world? Frequently missing.
For clear and up-to-date information on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, including patch notes, developer updates, and new trailers, you can visit the official GSC Game World website
So, how melty is it?
Early Zone Awe — 7.5/10
Your first steps into the Zone hit like a punch. The mood, the fog, the distant howls—this is S.T.A.L.K.E.R. at its absolute best. For a minute, you think the hype was justified.
Systems Cracking Under Pressure — 8.5/10
Then the audio bugs start. Footsteps vanish, gunfire cuts out, enemies teleport. Sudden crashes yank you out of immersive firefights. The cracks spread… fast.
AI Meltdown — 9/10
One minute mutants are terrifying. The next minute they spin in circles or phase into the floor. Bandits get stuck on geometry. “Dynamic world” becomes “chaotic guessing game.”
Exploration Fatigue — 9.5/10
The map is huge, but half the world feels empty. Long stretches of nothing, repeated assets, lifeless sectors that should feel dangerous but instead feel abandoned in the wrong way.
Patch Whiplash — 10/10
Patches fix big issues but introduce new ones. Players swing wildly between hope and frustration. Everyone wants to love the game, it just doesn’t always love us back.
Total Melt Score: 8.8/10
Beautiful, atmospheric, ambitious… and absolutely capable of breaking you.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2: Heart of Chornobyl remains, in my mind, one of the most compelling attempts at open-world survival horror in 2025. When the atmosphere clicks, when weather, lighting, and muted horror align, the Zone still terrifies, mesmerises, and hooks you deep.
But as of now, it’s also painfully unfinished. Bugs, AI shortcomings, janky physics. they constantly threaten immersion.
If you’re into games that throw you into high-pressure chaos and force you to make rapid-fire decisions with real consequences, check out Battlefield 6 Review – A Bold New Direction for Warfare. The intensity, unpredictability, and “adapt-or-die” mindset overlap surprisingly well with the tension of surviving the Zone in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2.
