As Skif's journey through the Zone continues, he gets word that the checkpoint to the Iron Forest region is now open, and the people there are asking for help. Skif's answer leads him into an uneasy alliance with both the Duty and Freedom factions as they face down a mutual threat, which will eventually lead them to the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant itself, and a fateful decision.
STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl launched in late 2024 and was an instant commercial success, selling millions of copies. The game was also critically well-received, but some criticisms were made of the game not living up to its predecessors' impressive "living world" AI and featuring some janky bugs. The Cost of Hope expansion, launching alongside the v2.0 patch, is designed to not just add huge amounts of new content to the game, but also help boost the mother game's reputation and get more eyes on what is an impressive and atmospheric game. It's designed to be the Phantom Liberty to the original game's Cyberpunk 2077, in terms of revitalising the entire game, and it is certainly a partial success.
Launching the expansion can be a bit of a fiddle though. It takes place during the original game's story so you need to either launch a save file from before the point-of-no-return or have the game generate one for you from your end-of-game status. To be honest, it feels like it makes more sense to play this earlier in the game's timeline. Combined with all the 2.0 improvements to the game, it might even be worthwhile considering a total new playthrough. However, Cost of Hope adds at least 30 hours of new gameplay to the title, taking a 60-ish-hour game to closer to 90 hours, which is a fairly hefty time investment.
The expansion is broken into several sections. The first is set in the Iron Forest, so-called because it's a large region covered in electrical substations and pylons, with electricity anomalies running rampant. This area is interesting, not too big with several buildings to explore and a friendly camp to hang out at (as well as an eccentric single prepper), but it's no big shakes. I completed everything in this sector pretty quickly.
The storyline then takes you back into the main Zone and you end up revisiting several key locations, where things quickly take on a much more epic feel. The original STALKER trilogy (Shadow of Chornobyl, Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat) focused heavily on the opposing ideologies of Duty, who want to protect the rest of the world from the Zone and destroy it if at all possible, and Freedom, who want to exploit the unusual nature of the Zone to improve all mankind. These two factions took a back seat in STALKER 2 itself, where all the factions in the Zone are abiding (more or less) by a shaky treaty. Cost of Hope brings the two factions back to the fore in a strong way, with not just the tension between them explored but also the tensions inside each faction as different people have different idea on how to proceed. During the game you'll align more with one faction over the other, and have to deal with both a civil war within that faction (which can turn a previously peaceful and reliable base into a combat zone hellhole) as well as managing the tension between both factions when their ideologies eventually clash in a way that cannot be managed diplomatically.
This unfolds between the major NPCs representing each faction and, it has to be said, these are pretty good. One is a returning character from the original trilogy whilst the other is a major NPC from the Arena side-missions in STALKER 2, so you're already somewhat invested in their storylines from the start. Having to side with one over the other is sometimes quite painful, and, impressively, the game has the two NPCs as being allies with a lot of respect for one another who genuinely don't want to have to kill the other either, resulting in some anguished choices and moments (fortunately the game doesn't over-egg this too much).
Another sequence takes the STALKER franchise where it's never been before by converting it into a Resident Evil-style environmental puzzle game, playing out in a time-displaced town apparently designed by M.C. Escher having spent way too much time playing the Ravenholm level of Half-Life 2. Possibly the expansion's finest hour, the weird dreamscape feel and under-emphasising of combat in favour of exploration make this a very successful experiment in a different style of gameplay.
It takes about 20 hours for the expansion to even start herding you back to the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant itself and it pretty much lives up to its reputation of being dark and haunted. Delving deep into the bowels of the facility is foreboding, and it's a tribute to both the game designers and the team at HBO when you find yourself in locations that you recognise straight out of the TV series Chernobyl. Navigation can be a little bit of a pain - indestructible chainlink fences divide the NPP up into districts and sometimes going round them can take a major diversion - and the area is further complicated by the Flare, an absolutely massive anomaly that can give you terminal migraines very quickly and requires you to constantly break line-of-sight with it, which is hard when it's towering above the centre of the complex. Removing the Flare is, surprisingly, not a goal of the main storyline, with instead an entire side-chain of missions dedicated to getting rid of it, after which moseying around the ruined power station becomes a lot more fun.
As well as the very chunky main storyline, the expansion adds several significant side-quests. Removing the Flare is one, and another is a faction war storyline where your actions make it safer and easier to get to the facility, resulting in a free-for-all. Your aligned faction has to fend off an invading one in an absolutely massive battle sequence raging across most of the power plant and it has to be said this is satisfyingly epic. You lead a strike team in attacking enemy positions and driving them back until you can hold key points until reinforcements arrive. STALKER 2's combat versus human opponents has always been its strongest point, as the human enemy AI is reasonably clever. Enemies use squad tactics to try to flush you from cover, circling around to flank and use grenades. Enemies are also susceptible to grenades and headshots. If you're playing this expansion late in STALKER 2's run-through, you should also have the more formidable armour, damage-reducing anomalies and higher-calibre guns that should make the battle winnable, but it can be a hard grind to push the enemy lines back to their base and eliminate them (also refreshingly, once they've suffered catastrophic losses, the enemy does retreat rather than forcing you to kill every one of them).
The game also adds a multitude of new quests, some in the new locations (I enjoyed working with a high-powered sniper in one) but many in existing locations. Revisiting previously-visited bases will usually reveal new questlines in that region. As a result, Cost of Hope not only adds two new regions to the map but a substantial amount of content to existing ones. There is also new equipment, with binoculars (standard and night-vision, the latter capable of some stunning photo-realistic moments) being a particularly welcome addition to your toolset.
The v2.0 expansion itself increases the game's stability and drops system requirements, but this does come at the cost of slightly less-impressive visuals. In particular, lighting takes a bit of a hit and can be quite flat in some areas where it was previously dynamic. This seems to have been done to improve the game's performance on console, which is fine, but downgrading the game for PC players who previously had zero problems with how the game ran previously is weird. A big positive shift is foliage, with the new version of Unreal Engine the game is using being able to render much denser forests much more efficiently, which can make some of the more threadbare areas of the Zone suddenly much more realistic.
Whilst stability in the existing areas seems to have improved, the two new areas are less-blessed, and in the power plant itself I had multiple crashes to desktop and even one total-reset crash, which I did not appreciate. To be fair, GSC Game World has been pushing an aggressive patching schedule (the game has had multiple patches in just the week-and-a-half the expansion has been out) so a lot of these problems should vanish soon, but keep an eye on the discussion forums to see what areas remain problematic.
In terms of gameplay, the expansion does make a couple of dubious choices. STALKER 2 was already a bit irritating for having some major game moments play out in cutscenes rather than interactive gameplay, and Cost of Hope probably has one or two too many similar moments. Situations that you'd normally avoid by sneaking through the area stealthily and using a silenced pistol become heavy action sequences based on narrative fiat. A couple of boss fights feature tedious enemy mechanics. One boss fight involving two extremely tough creatures was so annoying it seems to have been nerfed in patches already (a door opens after a few minutes allowing you to simply leave the area). The expansion has several moments relying heavily on parkour, and given that Skif has less stamina than an arthritic 94-year-old nun midway through an asthma attack, these sections can be monumentally frustrating to get through. Fortunately they are brief.
STALKER 2: Cost of Hope (****) is a flawed but enjoyable experience. It adds new equipment, areas, enemies and weapons to an already-chunky game, and its main storyline is compelling. Side-quests are also very accomplished, and the faction war sequence (possibly a test-run for ideas for the upcoming multiplayer mode) is genuinely epic. Fiddly map design, an overreliance on clunky mechanics (especially jumping) and the ongoing issue with bullet-spongey enemies.
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