STALKER 2’s solid gunplay picks up a lot of the slack in its combat’s faults. Whipping around a decked-out assault rifle with a nice red dot sight to make headshots easy, or pumping shells into a mutant from a fully modded shotgun and slowing its charge with their impact had me looking forward to those high-stakes, kill-or-be-killed situations.

If you’re hesitant about spending $59.99 on Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, you’ll be pleased to know that the game is included with both Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass. This means you can play it without paying the full price, aside from the cost of your subscription.

You don't need to have played past Stalker games to dive into Heart of Chornobyl, but newcomers to The Zone – an irradiated land of impossibilities in Ukraine – will find themselves tested by its brutality. That goes double for protagonist Skif, whose first foray into The Zone results in him being ambushed and left for dead.