STALKER 2

Make the hostile Zone a little more friendly with mods.

- Christopher Livingston

It's been a 15 year wait, but STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl finally arrived, and it's brought with it many mutants and monsters, artefacts and anomalies, and plenty of jank, glitches and bugs. In other words, in all the best and worst ways, STALKER 2 (which is actually the fourth STALKER game) is just as glorious and frustrating a STALKER experience as it ever was.

And if you know anything about the STALKER series, it's got a devoted and dedicated modding community. Mods for STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl and STALKER: Call of Pripyat are still being worked on and released, and those games are from 2007 and 2010, respectively. I think every STALKER fan would agree that playing the original games without mods is a fool's errand: that's just how important mods are to the STALKER series. So the release of STALKER 2 is doubly exciting: not only is there a whole new STALKER game to play, there are already mods for it, and there's sure to be more mods to come for the next decade, at least.

ZONED IN

STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is a survival FPS, and it's meant to be brutally hard, painfully unforgiving, and callously indifferent to your struggles. But you bought the game, so it's your right to tone things down if the difficulty is getting in the way of you having a good time. Heck, the first patch for STALKER 2 made some tweaks in that direction already, like making Bloodsuckers a little less bullet-spongy and weapon repair costs a tad more affordable. See, even the devs think their game is a little too hard, so there’s no reason to be shy about making things a little easier.