Final update for this attempt: At 24 hours of gameplay (28 includes the hours spent paused while trying to fix many problems) I'm done - the game is simply too buggy, and too uncomfortable.
I could just about tolerate the wild variations in performance, the stutters that completely locked the game up for five second periods at random, and finally fixed the horrendous distance blur and smeared movement by forcibly disabling TAA in the .ini file, but after losing my first sub-machine gun to 'crunch noise/ceases to exist'... and then my second weapon, a Mosin I'd assembled from the spare parts of scavenged remains, turned into an anomaly that eats ammunition but cannot fire it, eternally empty every time you holster it after reloading, leaving me with only a scavenged handgun and a rusty sawn-off to approach a major progression mission...
Why continue playing, honestly? You can't look forward to finding or purchasing new equipment and improving your means when every gun you work for is subject to randomly vanishing (widely reported) or becoming impossible to reload or fire. And all of that while suffering myriad more minor bugs, an entirely broken tutorial, awful graphical glitches and generally buggy and ugly visuals despite extreme performance problems regardless of settings customisation.
Into The Radius 2 has a lot of potential but [b]it is still an early-access product pretending to be finished[/b], and while I sympathise with the developers I think this is too dishonest. And even by early-access standards, these bugs are gamebreaking, they can get you killed, waste all of your money and leave you helpless, delete hours of progress.
Play the original, it's great.
Update: Not ready to change this to a positive, but fifteen hours later the jank and performance issues remain, but the combat feel and atmosphere, despite jumbled graphics and twitchy LODs, broken inventory management due to head/body alignment constantly convulsing, and a variety of general ergonomics frustrations, is just so good I can't stop playing D:
This is a very enjoyable game marred by a lack of polish and a lot of *mostly* minor ergonomics and usability issues, and rough optimisation for mid-spec machines (just under the recommended in some respects, surpassing them in others), and I am increasingly confident this game will be optimised to be one of the best experiences in VR given maybe just a few more months, hopefully.
Original: As someone who adored ItR1, I hope I'll be changing this review to a positive one day.
For now this feels like early-early access, not a post-1.0 release. I waited until mid-June 2026 to buy the game, but even the tutorial had so many bugs I almost couldn't finish it, and moment-to-moment interactions within the Pechorsk zone are constantly and needlessly frustrating in ways that ItR1 managed just fine.
While I've heard there are a lot of enhancements with weapons interactions, and the inventory and gear rig customisations are clearly pretty deep, at the moment there are so many ways for these things to break even within the first 15 minutes of gameplay it seems like a serious misjudgement to focus development on these things without getting the basics working reliably.
Index controllers struggle a lot with the grip systems, even after adjusting the threshold setting.
The visualised physical body is even jankier than in ItR one, and is so often offset to either side of your real head position that your muscle-memory for default or customised holster and pouch positions is meaningless. Your body will almost always extend sideways from your freakishly broken neck by 6-18 inches or so, either left or right depending upon where you stopped moving, so you always have to visually check where your body has wandered off to before you can reliably take the right item from any slot.
The knife holstering on the arm aims the blade of the knife at your bicep, so any bend of your arm visibly stabs the blade several inches deep into your flesh.
Opening the settings menu at any time can cause your head to mash into the floor when you close it again. Opening that menu has its own problems with the Index controller, even breathing on the touchpad sections can cause it to open, pausing gameplay and crushing your face into the ground again.
I realise this is just a list of bugs rather than a review, but that's the point I want to make about a first-impression of ItR2 1.0. It's not pretty. I don't want to imagine how much more jank I'd be suffering if I'd been doing my first run in co-op. It also has severe performance issues on my machine despite running at low to medium settings, on an i9-9900k and an admittedly old 2080 Super. Oddly, the movement of inventory items and my hands remains smooth, but the world itself and my camera movement within it suffers very variable stutter that doesn't seem to correlate with any particular activity or content.
... ItR1 earned my faith in these developers, but the sequel mostly seems like an unfinished misstep so far. I really hope they can make good on it.
