Stalker 2 Treats Us To Five Brand-New Gameplay Screenshots

Of all the games scheduled to release in 2022 that we're really looking forward to, the long-awaited sequel to 2007's Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl, Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl, is pretty high up on our list.

Originally announced all the way back in 2010, before being cancelled a year later and then re-emerging onto the world stage at E3 2021, this is a follow-up that we're absolutely itching to get our irradiated hands on next April.

In the meantime, a GSC Game World employee by the name of Kenny_Prophet has posted five stunning new screenshots on Reddit for us to pore over, giving us a little taster of what we can expect from the game's Unreal Engine 5-powered visuals.

You can also head over to Russian site Pikabu where the same screens have been posted alongside a bunch of concept art that was shared by the developer GSC Game World on their official Discord channel.

A recent article in the latest PC Gamer has also shed some light on a few tidbits relating to the gameplay we can look forward to when we finally get our hands on this one, with GSC Game World detailing significant survival elements that see your main protagonist need to sleep and eat to stave off tiredness, hunger and spooky hallucinations. There's also, according to the devs, gonna be various competing factions roaming the game's Exclusion Zone, and choosing to side with one of these will, apparently, be a major plot point.

GSC Game World also went on to mention how 30 designers were employed to work on the game's narrative elements and the current running time clocks in at over 100 hours of delicious non-linear gameplay. We cannot wait!

As you'll no doubt already be aware, Stalker 2 is a timed Xbox exclusive that'll be hitting Game Pass on launch day, 28th April 2022, which is really quite the coup for Microsoft. It's also been reported that those fancy new Unreal Engine 5 visuals will come at a bit of a cost, with the game set to take up a whopping 150gb of your internal storage — and up to 180gb with all the extra content. That's a lot of Exclusion Zone right there.

Looking forward to finally returning to the world of Stalker next April? Let us know in the comments.