S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl
Fair · Shooter · 2024
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $59.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 36.1h
- Value
- $1.66/hr
- Reviews
- 80% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 16 GB of memory, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB / AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB / Intel Arc A750, 160 GB of storage. Windows only.
Enter the Chornobyl Anomalous Zone — a vast open world where anomalies, mutants, and rivals stand in your way. Explore, scavenge, and try to survive in this brutal and dangerous land. Evolving with every update, now overhauled and crowned with UPDATE 2.0.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
December 2025 is where it bottomed out, at $35.99. Its cuts run 30 percent off as a rule. There have been 14 in the 5 years tracked, about 7 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 5 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 7 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 36 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 98 percent of its genre. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl ($19.99, scores 58) outscores it, and so does S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky ($19.99, scores 61). Both sit among its closest neighbours.
Steam's global achievement data says about 2 percent of players ever finish it. On a 36.1-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 8 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written August 2026 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 61 percent of the 7,326 reviews written there were positive, against 80 percent overall, and those are 7 percent of everything written about it.
36.1 hours to finish it, 131 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 3.6 times the campaign.
140,288 people have reviewed it, which is a big enough crowd to settle the number.
The drop-off
86% start to 2% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 36.1-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
2,403 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I'm over 70 years of age and I've played many games both on Steam & Ubsoft platforms over the years. Game technology come along in leaps & bounds, S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2: Heart of Chornobyl, with the new v2.0 update has the best graphics I've ever seen, in any game. This game gives users options, which changes your path through the game. I've restarted the games twice while learning the newonces, It's a war game, without...
If you like the METRO series, this is also very good - a little more strategy, but equally as immersive. The new major update is a huge improvement.
Overall, the game is good. The graphics are nice, there is a decent variety of weapons, although I really dislike the fact that damage seems to depend more on the weapon itself rather than the actual caliber. The biggest problem, however, is the NPC AI. It is absolutely terrible. Probably the worst AI in the entire S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, and honestly one of the worst examples of NPC behavior I have seen in any game...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl scores 50/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1643320/s-t-a-l-k-e-r-2-heart-of-chornobylThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 12, price as of Sep 23.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.