Stalker 2 is out, and while I'm not exactly a big Stalker-head like our own Joshua Wolens, who gave it a 83 in his Stalker 2 review, I do know one thing about it through sheer cultural osmosis. The Stalker games are kind of jank, sometimes—and it's a part of their character, like how a whiskey takes on the flavour of the barrel. Except in this case, the barrel is glitched halfway through the floor.
One of the things its predecessor was lauded for, aside from a charmingly janky personality, was its A-Life system. This is a fancy term which, boiled down, essentially means that developers GSC nailed a sense of cause and effect with its NPC AI—something our Josh praises in his review when a pack of wild dogs run headfirst into an objective, and the game permits them to simply solve the military checkpoint for him.
