S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chornobyl - Enhanced Edition
Skip · Shooter · 2025
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
It scores 13, under the fair line, at $19.99.
- Length
- 15.1h 41.2h to 100%
- Value
- $1.32/hr
- Reviews
- 63% of 8,733 positive
Recent reviews trending up: 87% over the last 30 days against 63% all-time.
Watch this gameOne alert at a price you pick.
Buy now or wait
Discounted in each of its last 6 seasonal sales. Last cut ended 9 days ago.
- Next sale
- Winter Sale, Dec 17 to Jan 4
Sources: IsThereAnyDeal, Valve.
What drives the score
How to read this
Grades run S to D, read from the buyer's side. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. How the grades work
About the game
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chornobyl, the first chapter of the Legends of the Zone Trilogy, which started it all.
Minimum specs
Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce GTX960 4GB / AMD Radeon RX 560 4GB, 12 GB of storage. Windows only.
The value story
It has been discounted 11 times in the 17 months tracked here. The median cut across all of them is 33 percent, about 7 weeks apart. Today it is at full price, and its last discount ended 9 days ago.
It is pricier than 68 percent of its genre, and less well reviewed than 85 percent. Among the games that feel like it, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Prypiat - Enhanced Edition ($19.99, scores 14) beats it on value, while it beats S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky - Enhanced Edition ($19.99, scores 5).
More about S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chornobyl - Enhanced Edition
Steam's global achievement data puts about 16 percent of players at this game's ending achievement. On a 15.1-hour game, the hours short of it still count in its price per hour. Players rate it 63 percent positive over its lifetime, and the last 30 days run 87 percent. It is aging into a better game than its average suggests. Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 2 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written August 2025 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 41 percent of the 2,401 reviews written there were positive, against 63 percent overall, and those are 37 percent of everything written about it.
15.1 hours to finish it, 41 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 2.7 times the campaign.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, so it runs on the handheld without fiddling.
The drop-off
86% start to 16% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
What players say
Just finished the game in about 12 hours. It's a pretty good game. By far the best part are the environments and atmosphere, which I think would have been jaw dropping when this game released. There were multiple times where I was freaked out by random sounds while crawling through underground labs. I played on Veteran difficulty and had a pretty easy time most of the game, mostly because you end up with so many...
2 more reviews, 1 not recommended
Stalker SoC shortened, is an atmospheric 'fallout but slavic' action-shooter where you explore the mysterious Zone of Alienation; full of mysteries, mutants, artefacts and god knows what. To the average east european, it's another Tuesday. Right off the bat, the game is dated, janky and can crash. Quick-save often. Most of the time you'll be trying to get by and scrounging around like a rat, the next moment you're...
The game, for some reason, has even worse optimization than my old 1.0003 version. Whatever I try, the game keeps stuttering or freezing. Crashes are constant during loading screens, so launching the game is basically a matter of luck. For some reason, I keep experiencing this weird bug that occurs when the game plays a sound like the zone's ambience or duty propaganda radio, eventually the siren at the freedom...
Steam reviews, mixed to its ratio and rotated daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chornobyl - Enhanced Edition scores 13/100 on the BANG Score (a skip) as of Oct 19, 2026. The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/2427410/s-t-a-l-k-e-r-shadow-of-chornobyl-enhanced-editionReviews set the ceiling, and price against real length moves the BANG Score inside it. How it works, and where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 26, price as of Oct 18. A number here look wrong? Tell me and I will check the inputs.