It’s brilliant, bizarre, and a little busted, but I love Stalker 2. Which is lucky, since I’ve spent pretty much the entire past week doing almost nothing but play it. And now here I am, aglow with the wisdom of over two full days in Chornobyl’s exclusion zone, to give you my number one tip for playing. The one thing you should do before all else to make sure you have a good time.
For the love of god, switch the voiceover language to Ukrainian.
Stalker is a sombre, eerie series. It’s a world where cans rattle and glass breaks underfoot as you plumb the depths of once-great experiments that have fallen to rack and ruin. It is mournful and elegiac, and yet, in English, Skif sounds like Brock Hardcheese, Zone Cop: a parody of a parody of an action-hero.
Gone are the days of “good hunting, stalker” delivered in a husky Eastern European brogue. Stalker 2’s English VO is aggressively, well, English. Or anglophone, anyway: it’s Americans and Brits as far as the ear can hear, and it’s not great.
If you’ve an abiding love for cheesy line delivery, maybe it’ll work for you, but if not, the Ukrainian acting is universally better and universally more suited to the vibes of the game itself. Skif comes across more as a world-weary, disaffected stalker, the loners that populate the villages aren’t inexplicably British, and Scar is… well, Scar’s voice actor really goes for it, I’ll tell you that much.
So even if you’re strictly dubs-only, I beg you to pop open the settings and switch the VO language. Don’t worry, you can keep the subtitles in English, I’m not asking you to learn Ukrainian, although that would be impressive. Just give it a go. For me. I promise you’ll thank me later.
