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.

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.