Thoughts on STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl after 4 hours in the game.
It's oddly similar to the original game, with a similar introduction and route to the first safe town/hub, skirting anomalies. The graphics are obviously vastly superior and this game is much more forgiving, although this is only relative to the first (insanely harsh) game. The first zone mutant you meet is an invisible bullet sponge guy that will likely kill you a few times before you get its attack pattern sussed. However, ammo is easier to come by, weapon degradation is not as ludicrous and virtually all human enemies will go down with a single shot to the head. Less than 4 hours in, I stormed a heavily-guarded paramilitary outpost (the game is vague on whether these are Russian or Ukrainian government troops, or some kind of rogue militia) and killed a couple of dozen guys inside through stealth and the use of a silenced pistol. It was still considerably harder than most modern FPS games, but satisfying. Because the game is systemic rather than proscripted, you can also cheese it a little in places, but not too much.
One complaint is that there's a few pretty cool action setpieces that happen in cutscenes when they would have made for good gameplay sequences. For a game as open-world as this one, that was an odd choice.
The English language VO is utter drivel. Play in Ukrainian with subtitles of your choice.
The game mostly feels like a cross between Far Cry 2 without the annoying regenerating enemies b~!+~%@! and Fallout: New Vegas in survival mode with the difficulty ramped up to Hard even when you're playing on Normal. A more punishing, less whimsical Fallout is probably the closest touchstone, which will likely irritate STALKER fans as the first STALKER predated all of the modern Bethesda Fallous, but still. So far, so outstanding.
Bugs were not too bad. One CTD, one wounded guy in a bed I was talking to decided to levitate up to around 3 feet above the bed to continue the conversation (alas, he did not say, "There is no Dana, there is only Zuul"), and one guy took shelter from an Emission Storm next to a tree rather than the town's hardened shelter, which resulted in his very rapid death. Not sure if that was a bug or the game saying, "some people are just really stupid, right?"