Recent reviews by Bög Angel

Speaking as someone who played the original games 15 years ago and has been a huge fan of the series since, what could have been a fantastic game ended up being nothing more than a severe disappointment. Disregarding the performance being an absolute train wreck there's still several faults that need to be addressed.
In the interest of complete transparency (take note developers and politicians, honesty is a virtue) I did not even make it into the zone. With my medium range setup performance was so bad that out of my 115 minutes of game time I'd say roughly 15 were actually in game playing, after an hour of loading shaders and 40 minutes waiting for loading screens, cutscenes and fiddling with settings to attempt to make the game playable.

Some research online led me to conclude that the game is not worth the 60€ price at the moment, and honestly depending on the developers actions henceforth may never be, despite the fact that it might be playable on my better setup (very nice of steam to not allow me an hour or two more to see if it actually is).
No mans sky is perfect example of developers doing the right thing and amending their wrongs by completely fixing their game, for free, post release. I sincerely hope that GSC will follow that example.

Let's talk about the greater faults of the game, my main issue being the complete lack of an actual functioning A-life system. I keep seeing claims from developers and reddit users that the A-life system is in game but just not functioning as it should. I find this hard to believe. Based on everything I've seen A-life 2.0 seems to be reliant on spawning mutants and stalkers in your vicinity to create situations for you to react to. Calling this anything else than a massive downgrade is nothing more than an outright lie. In the original games, stalkers traveled the world regardless of you, same going for mutants. If you happened to be attacked or helped by stalkers, this was not a scripted spawn in event, but an entirely genuine random event, completely reliant on circumstance. In that sense you were truly inhabiting a living world, being able to scope out a pack of mutants or stalkers from across the map and planning your journey around that information was a huge part of the soul and spirit of the series for me. Or finding a dead stalker and seeing his inventory full of valuable items and gear, more than he'd ever need, showing that he had survived the zone for a long time, looting in abundance. Maybe you've even met him before, because you certainly could have. Things like these are not possible in a spawn in event based system.
I'd be glad to be proven wrong about their current A-life system as they continue to patch the game but currently A-life 0.2 seems a more appropriate term.

I keep coming up with more things to say, questions, critique, etc. But in the interest of not dragging on this review too much I'll just summarize with one example.

I keep hearing that repair costs are an issue, and that brought me to the question, why aren't there repair kits in the game?
Such an easy solution to such a stupid problem.
And I'd say that issue embodies the most disappointing aspect of this sequel. GSC has had an abundance of information regarding what the fans of the series want and enjoy. Modders of the original games have been working on the series independently and unpaid for more than ten years, and what they have accomplished apparently goes well beyond AAA developers capabilities. The question I feel is most import is what has this sequel actually introduced to the series?
It seems to me, that with an abundance of data, hundreds of examples of game mechanics introduced by modders and play tested by fans throughout the years, stalker 2 opted to not implement any interesting or even just bare bones basic QoL fixes (i.e a repair kit) introduced by modders. Instead the only contribution the devepment team has given us is the new open world map, and fancy graphics. And to be fair I'm not even sure how fancy the graphics actually are, I mean your flashlight doesn't produce dynamic shadows and this is something they had in the original game released nearly TWENTY years ago.

And that fellow stalkers, is the biggest insult of all.
With a much larger budget, much more time, and much better hardware and software, GSC gives us nothing more than a new map, and fails to deliver function game mechanics that are fundamental to the stalker experience, despite them being included in the original games, released almost TWENTY ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ years ago. Literally a lifetime.
With all this being said, I suppose it might not be completely unfair to call stalker 2 a downgrade with a new map.