I’m also hooked on Stalker 2 right now. About 30 hours into it as well and I’m probably only about a third way into the main story. Loving the exploration, side missions, and even the main story is actually kind of interesting so far, which is much better compared to original series, if I remember correctly. I thought by now I’ll get tired of the gameplay loop, but it’s still keeping me interested so far. I do hope to see some new enemies or anomalies soon, because some things are starting to get a bit repetitive, but that’s partly because I’ve been running around the same area lately. One thing I do appreciate is the difficulty of the combat. At first I thought enemies took too much to take down, but once you get better gear the fights feel a lot more fair and balanced. If you keep looting everything as you move along, you’ll have just enough gear and ammo to keep you hanging in there. The weight limit is also a curse and a blessing. If you could carry all of your weapons with you at all times, game probably would be too easy, but sometimes it does get in the way of the fun. Finding artifacts that increase your carry limit is highly recommended.
Visually, it looks great a lot of the time, especially when the weather picks up and storms roll in. It runs mostly at 60fps at 1440p with DLSS Quality using my 4060, which is good enough for me. It does drop into the mid 40s in the villages, but maybe they will address it with future patches.
Game’s also not as buggy as some reviewers may make it seem, but maybe that’s due to the day 0 patch. I’ve had very few issues so far, most notably a couple of crashes and some small bugs here and there with sound cutting out. I’m just getting to the part of the story where a lot of people say they had some bug that blocks the progression, so we’ll see what happens. The devs did promise another patch this week, so hopefully they will address at least the most critical issues such as mission blockers. I’ve had way more issues with Cyberpunk when that game launched, and I still was able to get through the game and enjoy it. Stalker, so far, is in a much better state.