When Developer Farm 51 released their second game Chernobylite into Early Access on Steam back in 2019 I picked it up on a whim, mostly because I love survival horror RPGs, especially ones that are based around the Chernobyl disaster. It quickly became a favourite of mine, and I revisited the game several times through its development period checking out the improvements and updates that Farm 51 had made to the game. I saved my first full playthrough for when the game came out of Early Access in 2021 and I was really impressed with the games dark themes, mechanics and the way that your choices whether it be in dialogue or during gameplay actually had an impact in the game world, so when Chernobylite 2 was announced I was chomping at the bit to find out when I could get my hands on the game and step back into its world. Well, that day is finally here as Chernobylite 2: Exclusion Zone is finally available in Early Access on Steam, let’s brave the radiation sickness and dive right in.

In Chernobylite 2 you play as Cole Grey, I don’t know what it is with this name, but every time I hear it my eye starts to twitch. Grey is what is known as a ‘Planewalker’, Planewalkers exist to travel to alternate dimensions to harvest a mysterious substance known as Chernobylite that humans harness as a power source. The opening part of the game serves both as a vessel for character building and a tutorial of sorts that introduces you to three different main forms of combat in the game. You travel to a training facility in preparation for your upcoming mission into an alternate dimension and are presented with an opportunity to acquaint yourself with the melee, magic and gunfighting mechanics. Your next task is to pick a class based on which type of fighting style best suits the type of gameplay that you enjoy the most. There are six classes in the game and all have various different stats based on whether they are melee, ranged or essence based, or a hybrid of these. I really enjoyed the way that these combat tutorials were weaved in with the storytelling aspects of the game.

Once the tutorials are out of the way the game begins and you depart on your mission to obtain Chernobylite from an alternate dimension, only for things to go spectacularly wrong ending up with you waking up 9 months later trapped in an alternate dimension. With no resources, friends, or weapons to defend yourself, you are going to need to make new friends quick and harvest resources and scavenge for weapons in order to get back home to your family.

The story itself I found to be pretty interesting, if a little overused in sci-fi games, however the main character Cole Grey is totally unlikeable and utterly insufferable and my interest in the story waned quite a lot throughout my playtime in the game simply because I really didn’t care if Cole lived or died. This is a major problem when he is the main protagonist in a game and you are the one actually controlling him. The ability to choose different dialogue responses in video games is nothing new, as is the fact that a lot of games allow you to have a choice in your responses to other character but frustratingly your choices don’t seem to have any effect on the games world or its characters. The original Chernobylite and its sequel should be applauded for the fact that some dialogue choices do have minor and major effects on the world you are playing in, what should not be applauded though is the voice acting. Every piece of voice acting in this game is utterly terrible and that is not even the worst part, not all the voice lines have been recorded as you kind of get this weird and immersion breaking situation where one voice line is recorded by an actor then suddenly their next voice line is delivered using AI. It just sounds terrible when in the space of one conversation you have several voice acted lines and then several AI delivered lines, in my opinion it would’ve been better to just leave these portions silent until all of the voice lines could be recorded.

As you travel through this mysterious alternate dimension you have been trapped in, you start to meet people, all of them quite ready to exploit you for their own personal gain. Of course, you also gain things by helping them, such as XP to help level your character up and gain new skills, you can also recruit some of these NPCs to come back and inhabit the base that you are given in the early stages of the game. As with the original game Chernobylite 2 contains base building mechanics and they have been expanded on from the original game. Basically you have a home base and can craft and upgrade the layout of this through the use of materials, you can also furnish the base with an array of workbenches to help upgrade things such as your weapons or to replenish your medical supplies. Each workbench can be assigned characters you have recruited to work at them, bearing in mind that each character you recruit has their own set of skills, so assigning them to the correct workbenches is important to your overall success in repairing weapons or producing supplies. I am glad this mechanic has returned as it is one of the better and more interesting mechanics from the first game and it is implemented even better in the sequel.

The basic gameplay loop sees you wandering around the exclusion zone, killing mutants and creatures, completing tasks for the various NPCs and scavenging resources. All that allows for you to upgrade your character through XP, recruit new allies for your base and to manufacture new weapons. There is nothing wrong with the gameplay loop and it works well but as mentioned before the story and character design just feels so uninspired and uninteresting that if often makes the gameplay feel like a chore. If they were more interesting, then exploring would be more entertaining and thus would keep you interested and ideally, wanting to explore the world even more and unravelling its mysteries. Combat is also a big of a mixed bag, while the ranged gun combat feels great, both the melee and magic combat feel extremely cumbersome and clunky and don’t feel fun to play at all.

Graphically the game world looks great but it doesn’t feel alive at all, it feels like the designers just decided to plunk an enemy here, an abandoned building over there, an NPC over in another spot and leave it at that, the world does not feel alive at all. Perhaps this can be put down to the games early access state but unlike the first game I did not feel inspired to explore the world at all. The characters and animations in the game are a different story though, the characters themselves give off strong uncanny valley vibes and don’t look like they fit into the graphical style of the game world at all, some of their animations during cutscenes made me laugh out loud several times, not in a good way, and the animations in combat, especially when using melee just don’t work well at all.

I was really hoping to like Chernobylite 2 but it really needed a lot more time to cook in the oven before even being released into Early Access especially as the developers are asking $52.65 AUD for it (and that is with the current 10% discount included), this game feels more like an alpha than early access game and the price is currently just too steep to justify a purchase given the current state of the game. I am going to put the game on the backburner for the next 6 months and come back and revisit it then unfortunately though I don’t really hold out much hope for this one given that the main issues I have with the game is the uninspired story and unlikeable main character.

The game is currently available in early access on Steam, with the first game being available on all platforms.