Friendlies in Chorno?



Like the technical fix-uppery of the 2.0 update it’s launching alongside, STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl’s Cost of Hope expansion arrives with a determinedly furrowed brow; that kind of enthusiastic, if just slightly contrite, look of someone hellbent on righting their own past wrongs.

Of course, most of the open-world shooter’s past crimes are long absolved, if not forgiven immediately on the grounds that they were committed amid an actual war. But Cost of Hope does serve as a second chance for this bleak, beautiful, tense, thrilling, imperfectly brilliant game to address certain omissions it made back in 2024 – even if some of these restorations gleam brighter than others.

It returns us, for instance, to the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (CNPP), the forbidden ground zero at the heart of STALKER’s mutant-infested, anomaly-ridden vision of Ukraine's Exclusion Zone. Well-trodden ground for the series’ prior instalments, yes, but also such a pivotal locale for this forsaken patch of roasted earth that it was always strange how the base game never ventured near it. Cost of Hope’s central story also revolves around the rivalry between Zone-hating militiamen Duty and pseudo-anarchists Freedom, another Zone staple that STALKER 2 sidelined in favour of its own younger, sexier factions.

Is this pandering? It doesn’t feel like it. Some returning characters may earn an excited finger-point from Call of Pripyat veterans but they’re typically introduced with a locally appropriate sternness, rather than the smug needle drop of a Marvel post-credits. And Cost of Hope’s added map regions, where you’ll be spending the bulk of its wandering and fighting, are all fine pieces of world design work, regardless of whether you already know what a Myklukha is.



The first of these, the Iron Forest, takes an isolated anomaly from a previous game and expands it into an unsettlingly hostile, sometimes downright ghostly tract of twisted metal and electrical deathtraps. Thick fog seems to choke this place more often than anywhere else in the Zone, while lingering radio signals carry the dead’s last words on the air. It’s awful here, and I love it.

The CNPP doesn’t disappoint either. While the story flow takes you on a grim sightseeing tour through the megalophobia-inducing sarcophagus and the gnarled remains of reactor number four, the whole area is worth exploring. It’s a solemn sprawl of towering industrial tombs - perhaps not as dangerous neighbouring Pripyat, but with longer stretches of silence to truly drink in the tragedy of it.

Best of all is the lost town of Lymansk, which without wanting to spoil too much, is essentially Ravenholm if Remedy Entertainment built it. Trading off the free-roamability of the other new locations for a more focused dive into survival horror, Lymansk has a disregard for the laws of physics that even the main Zone doesn’t muster. Cost of Hope then asks you to traverse its impossible suburbs in the dark, while striking all your light sources with electronic impotence. It’s unlike anything else in the game, let alone this expansion, and yet creeping through it with dwindling ammo and a broken torch feels like STALKER 2 at its weird, unforgiving best.

Part of that is also down to how the Lymansk section departs from the far, far more common mission loop of hoofing it to some crumbling Soviet facility, blasting all the men/mutants inside, and leaving. Cost of Hope trusts in the process too, and repeatedly. Although, it does at least throw in a few higher-concept shootouts: a battle around an out-of-control centrifuge, a tricky ascension up a silo while a mutant has a telekinetic tantrum in the middle of it, a counter-sniping duel in the shadow of a vast, brain-melting psychic tree.



Even if the quests don’t innovate, then, the DLC serves up plenty of memorable moments within then, and STALKER 2 has always been enough of a weighty, tightly constructed FPS that even the most straightforward bouts of ...Read more: Full article on www.rockpapershotgun.com

What do you think about this?