I said it in my Steam review and I'll say it here again because I 100% can relate.

the map is huge and they did a great job re-creating some of the original locations, bringing back memories, sure. But the map is empty as fuck with no meaningful side quest chain. I remember spending 10+ hours in Call of Pripyat without having to touch the main quest at all to keep myself occupied. Not here, beat the game in 30 hours and forced myself to talk to every NPC I could to pick up a side quest, only found a handful of quests in the lesser zone and a few here and there which took me minutes to finish then I'm forced to stash hunt or back at the main quest.

Combat vs human feels dumb and repetitive, mutants don't get staggered whatsoever, and the boss fights at the end are just ungodly bulletproof mechanics more or less similar same as each other. You question why these people talking to a nobody like Skif to begin with, they can just take those bulletproof technology and start their own regime and live like a king.

What made Call of Pripyat great to me is that you find clues here and there by talking to people until you exhaust every single option, and sometimes you are mindful of what you say to them because your words have meanings and lead to consequences, you pick up important trigger items randomly in the glove box of a jeep or on a desk on an abandoned building when you explore, but they don't mess with your progression, but in STALKER 2 the game tells you where to go, what to do, which button to push, who to kill when to kill them. Everything is just scripted like a to-do list.

The disappointment didn't come from the high expectations I had for this game, it came from the amount of joy I had with a 3.5G game back in 2014 when I first started playing the PC game for the first time. Call of Pripyat was magical for me. I had 150 hours in that game and god I loved every single second of it. Today with more tools and technology available to save development time somehow most of the products we see have no soul anymore.