STALKER 2 gets serious performance and visual upgrades with its 2.0 update, testing confirms, polishing up one of the biggest flawed gems in FPS games

I don’t begrudge anyone who’s waited to try STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl until it got its technical defects fixed. They’re still wrong, obviously - an absorbing and eerily atmospheric survival FPS is still an absorbing and eerily atmospheric survival FPS when it has the structural integrity of baked beans. But it was spectacularly broken at launch, and although nearly two years of patches have swatted countless bugs and beefed up the series’ signature A-Life NPC simulation, it’s remained a heavyweight GPU-puncher on general performance.

Thank the Zone, then, for the 2.0 update, which rolls out tomorrow in tandem with the also-good Cost of Hope expansion. It ambitiously migrates STALKER 2 to a newer, sleeker version of Unreal Engine 5, and makes sweeping (though handcrafted) changes to lighting and environmental deets. Based on what I’ve played, the result is both a better-looking game and a better-performing one. So get in here, stalker - there’s never been a better time to have your skeleton melted out by an anomalous soap bubble.

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