I bounced off Stalker 2 at launch because of bugs, but revisited earlier this year and had a ton of fun with the 90% of the game that is open world scavenging, stealth and combat. The only thing that sucks are some of the boss fights.

Nothing takes me out of being a sneaky, resourceful Stalker more than being forced to drop into an arena, or have a door magically lock behind me, and not being able to advance the story without either beating some bullet sponge or reloading a save from an hour before to change my load out/get more ammo etc and redo it.

I wish they would take more of a Deus Ex approach, where you can action hero your way through if you want, but with some clever/thorough playing you could significantly nerf the boss fights. The game even pretends to do this, but ultimately your choices have no bearing on the bosses.

I’m a huge stalker fan, probably have played the trilogy for around 5000 hours. That being said, I decided to not buy Stalker 2 due to bad launch, but I gotta say, they seem to be dead set on fixing this game, so who knows, I might still buy it.