My experience with Chernobylite 2: Exclusion Zone was interesting. Though I found myself mostly having criticisms of the game, I felt as though I really wanted to like it. There are clearly passionate developers working on this title, and while I think the game has a long way to go before I would openly recommend it, it’s a good thing that it’s releasing in early access, giving the developers a chance to hopefully absorb some feedback from players and improve the title before its full launch. While the game is, again, not in a state I would recommend at the moment, I did walk away confident that all of the issues present could easily be fixed before the game releases, at which point I would like to take a second look at it.
Before I continue, it’s worth pointing out that the version of Chernobylite 2: Exclusion Zone I played is not actually the version of the game releasing soon in early access. In kind of a first in my career of game reviews, the developers of Chernobylite 2: Exclusion Zone didn’t send me a key for the game as it will be released, allowing me to take an early look at the game as it will be released on March 6. Instead, they sent me a key for the game’s demo, the same one you can go and download now. As such, this review could be totally incompatible with the version of the game you play. It’s something I felt deserved to be pointed out before would-be players read too far into this review.
The first thing you are going to notice about the Chernobylite 2: Exclusion Zone demo is the absolutely massive file size. The second thing you’re going to notice is the Unreal Engine logo as you launch the game.
There is an unfortunately common occurrence of ambitious, unoptimized Unreal Engine games hitting the market. Chernobylite 2: Exclusion Zone is unfortunately one of these. Though I well exceeded the game’s recommended hardware requirements, the performance of the game gradually became worse and worse as I played, leading to a steady 30 fps in the open-world environment, even lower in the game’s poorly designed, crowded interior segments, and at its very worst, leading to a full system lockup while loading into one of the game’s levels.
It’s pretty confusing to me how Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, a game I criticized for being pretty heavy on its graphical requirements, can run about a hundred times smoother than this AA passion project.
To the game’s credit, Chernobylite 2: Exclusion Zone has some of the most gorgeous and creatively designed environments I have ever seen in a game. The thing about Chernobylite 2: Exclusion Zone, at least from the demo, is that it feels as though it was too ambitious with its graphical design. So much love and effort was put into how the game looks that everything else feels like something of an afterthought. Even ignoring how the game performs, the level design often seems so focused on looking pretty that the thought of player progression and navigation seems unaccounted for. This is especially true in the incredibly cluttered interior settings where I often found myself lost, and the paths forward were creative, at best, and hard to notice.
Combining the game’s gorgeous-to-a-fault environments and lighting with the stiff animation, underwhelming voice acting and dialogue, and boring character designs, you end up with something that is kind of jarring to look at. To the game’s credit, though, monsters often were far more visually interesting than any of the human or human-adjacent cast.
I also found myself fairly unsatisfied with Chernobylite 2: Exclusion Zone’s story and pacing. The game features a few false starts, setting up like the story is about to begin only to time-and-space-skip to a new narrative focal point, using what could have been several viable jumping-off points as simple exposition, rushing us through a ton of past events only held together by reference to you being there moments ago. Exposition is heavily featured in the game’s writing, which feels the need to explain most situations at face value even as they are happening. The pacing of these events feels too fast, almost as if the story, as it exists now in the demo, is a very cut-up version of a greater narrative they had to strip down for time.
The setting itself also felt a little strange to me. While I was interested in a lot of the science fiction concepts, even as they were quickly explained at a break-neck pace, I found the overarching connection to the Chernobyl disaster to be unnecessary and hollow. The story, as presented in the demo, seems to be stuck between the idea of being a world-traveling planeswalker, as they describe in the game’s prolonged and exposition-filled introduction, while also wanting the story to exclusively take place in the 19-mile-long Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
It’s clear that the developers took inspiration from the mysticism in the real-life disaster zone, as well as games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. that also explore this area. However, if you ask me, it feels as though a lot of their writing and world-building expanded beyond the scope of their original interest, becoming a bit too bloated in scale. It simply felt to me at several points that a character with the powers that he had, working for the people he works for, shouldn’t have been stranded as he was in an area you can drive through in half an hour. The game, at least as it was presented in the demo, would have been a lot more engaging story-wise with a protagonist who was a little closer to the ground, especially one without the ability to “walk between worlds.”
Pros:
- Incredible visuals
- Interesting sci-fi concepts
- Expansive mechanics, including base building and sci-fi-magic-fighting, though ones I would have liked to see expanded more on in the demo
Cons:
- Serious performance issues/optimization problems
- Distractingly poor animations
- Not the best story, with poor pacing and a lot of exposition.
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