Dying Light 2 Stay Human - zombie survival with choice & consequence

[Ryzer]

 

[Ivan]

Rosario Dawson

 

[Alphons]

Dead Islands and Dying Light were so generic they transcended into cheese territory.

Generic bad guy: You'll never be a real man, generic protagonist! I could shoot you right now, but I already made this cool zombie arena!
Generic protagonist voiced by Troy Baker: SARCASM

 

[Salvo]

7 from IGN, it's over

 

[1451]

7 from IGN

 

[d1r]

7 from IGN, it's over

That's a pretty good sign.

 

[Lord_Potato]

Rosario Dawson

I also like her a lot... since her full frontal nude scene in Trance

 

[Alphons]

Looks like a worthy sequel

 

[Salvo]

Rosario Dawson

I also like her a lot... since her full frontal nude scene in Trance

That's Dawson? Mocap was a mistake

 

[Justicar]

7 from IGN, it's over

Same ign that gave niggerloop 10/10?

https://www.ign.com/games/deathloop

You truly are retarted niggerloop 800 players peak today released a couple of months ago 10/10

https://steamcharts.com/app/1252330

Dying light 1 released 6 years ago 21k players today 8/10 by ign.

https://steamcharts.com/app/239140

 

[Salvo]

7 from IGN, it's over

Same ign that gave niggerloop 10/10?

https://www.ign.com/games/deathloop


That's... that's the point

 

[Justicar]

7 from IGN, it's over

Same ign that gave niggerloop 10/10?

https://www.ign.com/games/deathloop


That's... that's the point

Check the player numbers for dying light 2 after a few months nigger this is the only way to tell if a game is really good or like niggerloop gets 10/10 from everyone but nobody really plays it

 

[T.Ashpool]

a pathetic 77% metacritic score. poland is officially done as the slav capital of videogames. it's over!

 

[Justicar]

a pathetic 77% metacritic score. poland is officially done as the slav capital of videogames. it's over!

Maybe read some of those reviews "There are dozens of cinematic scenes containing loss, grief and betrayal, but they don’t hit. Nothing hits. There is nothing like the devastating, destructive obsession between Ellie and Abby or the multilayered friendship of Max and Chloe."



Ergo not woke enough so no 10/10 should have made nigger main protagonist and set it in wakanda then you get 10/10 and masterpiece.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

avellone curse strikes again

 

[T.Ashpool]

a pathetic 77% metacritic score. poland is officially done as the slav capital of videogames. it's over!

Maybe read some of those reviews "There are dozens of cinematic scenes containing loss, grief and betrayal, but they don’t hit. Nothing hits. There is nothing like the devastating, destructive obsession between Ellie and Abby or the multilayered friendship of Max and Chloe."



Ergo not woke enough so no 10/10 should have made nigger main protagonist and set it in wakanda then you get 10/10 and masterpiece.

it's also supposed to be buggy as fuck and have tone of bloat and i hate that shit. i don't know why it's so hard for slavs to make their games not be buggy pieces of shit. how can this still happen after cyberbug? give your qa team more time retards.

why do slav open world games still have so much bloat with pointless fetch sidequests and pointless trash to collect? even the french fags at ubisoft are moving away from that stuff and they invented open world bloat. just like with cyberpunk slavs have some good artists and writers but they are a decade behind everyone else when it comes to game design.

why can't poles use a good engine and optimize their games well? i have a pc but ps5 fags are going to mad as fuck that the game only puts out 1080p on their brand new console no matter what picture mode you choose. why do slavs always try to pull some scummy shit at the last second, in this case with denuvo which they added 3 days before release and the very late review embargo. it's basically the same situation as with cyberpunk where they didn't want to give out console codes to reviewers because they knew how shit those versions were.

and the worst thing is why do you have to suck so much american cock? why do you keep adding american celebs into your games be it keanu or rosario dawson? it's only poles doing that shit because they desperatly want to be american themselves instead of being proud of who they are. why does it feel like slav devs spend 80% of a games budget on marketing and american celebs? it is pathetic. this is why the world looks down on you.

 

[Old Hans]

"There are dozens of cinematic scenes containing loss, grief and betrayal, but they don’t hit. Nothing hits

I can kind of see where they are coming from. Like in the first game when Raheem dies and the main character was all "NOO RAHEEM YOU WERE THE BEST FRIEND I EVER HAD"

 

[notpl]

a pathetic 77% metacritic score. poland is officially done as the slav capital of videogames. it's over!

Maybe read some of those reviews "There are dozens of cinematic scenes containing loss, grief and betrayal, but they don’t hit. Nothing hits. There is nothing like the devastating, destructive obsession between Ellie and Abby or the multilayered friendship of Max and Chloe."



Ergo not woke enough so no 10/10 should have made nigger main protagonist and set it in wakanda then you get 10/10 and masterpiece.

it's also supposed to be buggy as fuck and have tone of bloat and i hate that shit. i don't know why it's so hard for slavs to make their games not be buggy pieces of shit. how can this still happen after cyberbug? give your qa team more time retards.

why do slav open world games still have so much bloat with pointless fetch sidequests and pointless trash to collect? even the french fags at ubisoft are moving away from that stuff and they invented open world bloat. just like with cyberpunk slavs have some good artists and writers but they are a decade behind everyone else when it comes to game design.

why can't poles use a good engine and optimize their games well? i have a pc but ps5 fags are going to mad as fuck that the game only puts out 1080p on their brand new console no matter what picture mode you choose. why do slavs always try to pull some scummy shit at the last second, in this case with denuvo which they added 3 days before release and the very late review embargo. it's basically the same situation as with cyberpunk where they didn't want to give out console codes to reviewers because they knew how shit those versions were.

and the worst thing is why do you have to suck so much american cock? why do you keep adding american celebs into your games be it keanu or rosario dawson? it's only poles doing that shit because they desperatly want to be american themselves instead of being proud of who they are. why does it feel like slav devs spend 80% of a games budget on marketing and american celebs? it is pathetic. this is why the world looks down on you.

you are talking about literally two games

 

[T.Ashpool]

a pathetic 77% metacritic score. poland is officially done as the slav capital of videogames. it's over!

Maybe read some of those reviews "There are dozens of cinematic scenes containing loss, grief and betrayal, but they don’t hit. Nothing hits. There is nothing like the devastating, destructive obsession between Ellie and Abby or the multilayered friendship of Max and Chloe."



Ergo not woke enough so no 10/10 should have made nigger main protagonist and set it in wakanda then you get 10/10 and masterpiece.

it's also supposed to be buggy as fuck and have tone of bloat and i hate that shit. i don't know why it's so hard for slavs to make their games not be buggy pieces of shit. how can this still happen after cyberbug? give your qa team more time retards.

why do slav open world games still have so much bloat with pointless fetch sidequests and pointless trash to collect? even the french fags at ubisoft are moving away from that stuff and they invented open world bloat. just like with cyberpunk slavs have some good artists and writers but they are a decade behind everyone else when it comes to game design.

why can't poles use a good engine and optimize their games well? i have a pc but ps5 fags are going to mad as fuck that the game only puts out 1080p on their brand new console no matter what picture mode you choose. why do slavs always try to pull some scummy shit at the last second, in this case with denuvo which they added 3 days before release and the very late review embargo. it's basically the same situation as with cyberpunk where they didn't want to give out console codes to reviewers because they knew how shit those versions were.

and the worst thing is why do you have to suck so much american cock? why do you keep adding american celebs into your games be it keanu or rosario dawson? it's only poles doing that shit because they desperatly want to be american themselves instead of being proud of who they are. why does it feel like slav devs spend 80% of a games budget on marketing and american celebs? it is pathetic. this is why the world looks down on you.

you are talking about literally two games

what other polish AAA games are there? i admit there are some good polish indie devs making games like ruiner or ghostrunner. the polish AAA industry is trash though and needs to be nuked asap.

 

[notpl]

a pathetic 77% metacritic score. poland is officially done as the slav capital of videogames. it's over!

Maybe read some of those reviews "There are dozens of cinematic scenes containing loss, grief and betrayal, but they don’t hit. Nothing hits. There is nothing like the devastating, destructive obsession between Ellie and Abby or the multilayered friendship of Max and Chloe."



Ergo not woke enough so no 10/10 should have made nigger main protagonist and set it in wakanda then you get 10/10 and masterpiece.

it's also supposed to be buggy as fuck and have tone of bloat and i hate that shit. i don't know why it's so hard for slavs to make their games not be buggy pieces of shit. how can this still happen after cyberbug? give your qa team more time retards.

why do slav open world games still have so much bloat with pointless fetch sidequests and pointless trash to collect? even the french fags at ubisoft are moving away from that stuff and they invented open world bloat. just like with cyberpunk slavs have some good artists and writers but they are a decade behind everyone else when it comes to game design.

why can't poles use a good engine and optimize their games well? i have a pc but ps5 fags are going to mad as fuck that the game only puts out 1080p on their brand new console no matter what picture mode you choose. why do slavs always try to pull some scummy shit at the last second, in this case with denuvo which they added 3 days before release and the very late review embargo. it's basically the same situation as with cyberpunk where they didn't want to give out console codes to reviewers because they knew how shit those versions were.

and the worst thing is why do you have to suck so much american cock? why do you keep adding american celebs into your games be it keanu or rosario dawson? it's only poles doing that shit because they desperatly want to be american themselves instead of being proud of who they are. why does it feel like slav devs spend 80% of a games budget on marketing and american celebs? it is pathetic. this is why the world looks down on you.

you are talking about literally two games

what other polish AAA games are there? i admit there are some good polish indie devs making games like ruiner or ghostrunner. the polish AAA industry is trash though and needs to be nuked asap.

you said "slavic," not "polish." maybe you have heard of a little game called Kingdom Come: Deliverance, my friend. is very good open-world RPG, yes? no american celebrities, no.

 

[notpl]

honestly though I had no idea the dying light devs were polish, I assumed they were some american AAA-subsidiary based on the first game

 

[T.Ashpool]

a pathetic 77% metacritic score. poland is officially done as the slav capital of videogames. it's over!

Maybe read some of those reviews "There are dozens of cinematic scenes containing loss, grief and betrayal, but they don’t hit. Nothing hits. There is nothing like the devastating, destructive obsession between Ellie and Abby or the multilayered friendship of Max and Chloe."



Ergo not woke enough so no 10/10 should have made nigger main protagonist and set it in wakanda then you get 10/10 and masterpiece.

it's also supposed to be buggy as fuck and have tone of bloat and i hate that shit. i don't know why it's so hard for slavs to make their games not be buggy pieces of shit. how can this still happen after cyberbug? give your qa team more time retards.

why do slav open world games still have so much bloat with pointless fetch sidequests and pointless trash to collect? even the french fags at ubisoft are moving away from that stuff and they invented open world bloat. just like with cyberpunk slavs have some good artists and writers but they are a decade behind everyone else when it comes to game design.

why can't poles use a good engine and optimize their games well? i have a pc but ps5 fags are going to mad as fuck that the game only puts out 1080p on their brand new console no matter what picture mode you choose. why do slavs always try to pull some scummy shit at the last second, in this case with denuvo which they added 3 days before release and the very late review embargo. it's basically the same situation as with cyberpunk where they didn't want to give out console codes to reviewers because they knew how shit those versions were.

and the worst thing is why do you have to suck so much american cock? why do you keep adding american celebs into your games be it keanu or rosario dawson? it's only poles doing that shit because they desperatly want to be american themselves instead of being proud of who they are. why does it feel like slav devs spend 80% of a games budget on marketing and american celebs? it is pathetic. this is why the world looks down on you.

you are talking about literally two games

what other polish AAA games are there? i admit there are some good polish indie devs making games like ruiner or ghostrunner. the polish AAA industry is trash though and needs to be nuked asap.

you said "slavic," not "polish." maybe you have heard of a little game called Kingdom Come: Deliverance, my friend. is very good open-world RPG, yes? no american celebrities, no.

yeah i meant poles, the czech are still okay though i don't know what else they make other than serious sam and kingdom come

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2022-02-02-dying-light-2-review

Dying Light 2 review - brutal blockbuster that's inelegant but hugely entertaining
Pipe dreams.

Techland's vast blockbuster buckles under its own ambition and lacks in innovation, but makes up for it with outstanding parkour and combat.

Dying Light 2 is an ugly game. Taking place some 15 years after Techland's parkour-fuelled 2015 open world original, it's set against a world completely ravaged by the viral outbreak that began back in Harran, where disputes are solved with a rusty iron pipe to the head and the people holed up in the small number of mediaeval settlements barricaded against the breakout are well beyond hope (this is a grimly prescient thing in more ways than one).

With its streets lined by crumbled concrete, patrolled by renegades in hockey masks and spiked leather jackets and where the surly survivor's wardrobes seems to come entirely from Wickes, Dying Light 2 has an aesthetic that's straight out of a second tier Xbox 360 game. It's light on innovation but Dying Light 2 has the scope and breadth of your modern triple-A, rippling with systems and overwhelming in size. It looks and feels like the most ambitious Xbox 360 game ever made, and I'm fairly certain I mean that as high praise.

Coming seven years after the original game and now armed with a new and often outrageous scope, it's a modern blockbuster in more ways than one, complete with a bulging grab bag of systems lifted from triple-A successes of recent years and like too many other modern blockbusters it comes with a turbulent development mired by high profile departures and reports of dire management. This is a broad, brutal thing, occasionally rough-edged, yet for all its stumbles it is massively entertaining.

Put a lot of that down to the fundamentals of the original, which provide the foundation and are here newly finessed. Underpinning Dying Light 2 is the same heavily pronounced day/night cycle: under sunlight the streets are speckled with the stumbling infected, while building interiors are awash with them; by night they come out and those streets are more ferocious still, and mere survival until sunrise becomes your priority, with safe houses and spots doused in UV light acting as respite.

These mad dashes to safety in the midnight hours are where Dying Light 2's systems come into focus, and indeed where Dying Light 2 is at its best. The first-person parkour is simply brilliant, its integration into a vast, dense open world simply astonishing, and the act of getting from A to B is an absolute thrill.

As in the original, the parkour moveset is slow to build momentum with the bulk of abilities unlocked via a skill tree - it took about 20 hours for me to unlock the simple slide that allowed me to scoot through small spaces, and another dozen or so to have the full suite of wall-running skills - but by the end you're pouncing from wall to wall like a panther, tying together dazzling runs from rooftop to rooftop. It's sublime.

This is a stubbly Mirror's Edge with knuckledusters on, and it's to Techland's credit that they've managed to serve that moveset so well with its open world - something DICE sadly stumbled at itself with Catalyst. Get stuck in the quagmire of the streets and you might trigger off a chase that escalates in stages, GTA-style, where you'll bound from car bonnet to a fire escape before scuttling away to the rooftops in one swift succession. The amount of traversal options available to you at any one time is simply staggering, and that it holds together at all feels like an outstanding achievement in itself.

Spoiler

Catch it at the right moment and Dying Light 2 can look incredible - at other moments, however, it can look mediocre. The experience seems to lean towards high-end PCs rather than new-gen consoles, and while there's a decent number of options on the Xbox Series X version we tested such as a locked 1080p60fps mode as well as a 4K30fps one - plus the ability to play with RT shadows enabled at a lower resolution - it never really pops.

As a first-person platformer, it's hard to think of anything that can match what Dying Light 2 achieves (though there'll always be a place in my heart for the OG, the PlayStation's dear Jumping Flash). At various points in the campaign there might be windmills to climb to unlock new safe zones, or TV towers to ascend, and they provide platform challenges that unfold gratifyingly. Yes, someone's been kind enough to paint every ledge you might be able to latch onto in bright yellow, yet there's still some thought that needs to be put into planning the path upwards, the best challenges and parkour runs putting to mind the fleet-footed Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.

It's not flawless, with a persistent stickiness to ziplines and fuzziness to movements that can sap some of that momentum. There's the sense, too, that the ambition isn't always matched by the execution - there's a light Metroidvania touch in Dying Light 2, amongst its myriad other influences, as you collect Inhibitors ferreted around the map to unlock more health or stamina so that you can perform greater feats of athleticism and scale buildings that bit easier, but it's something only ever gestured towards rather than fully realised.

The deftness of traversal is in bold contrast to the clumsy ferocity - intentional, that is - of Dying Light 2's combat. This is a game pointedly without guns, excused in the narrative by a world that's lost the expertise to craft weapons, which means to get things done in Dying Light 2 you'll have to get your hands dirty. Which is just as satisfying, in its own way, as the parkour; there's a cathartic crunch to melee battle, given a fierce edge by the weapons which can be modded out via blueprints. Because in this game there are hatchets, and then there are hatchets with fizzing shock mods in the shaft and spitting flames at the edges.

Special mention must be made of Olivier Deriviere's soundtrack - elegant, uplifting and mournful all at once, it ties together Dying Light 2 just as well as the parkour does.
Combat is served by its own skill tree, with the same slow trickle of new movesets unlocked by the combination of specific XP and how much health you've available. There are deliberate choices to be made in how you build your own character, pushing them towards either athleticism or bare-knuckled brutishness, and it's a choice that even extends to the open world itself. Within Dying Light 2 there are factions you can ally yourself with, the city changing in tune to those choices. Pick one side and they might strengthen up the defences on the infected-infested lower levels; pick another and you'll unlock more options up on the rooftops, with parkour equipment being put in place or putting big yellow trampolines on the streets that propel you skywards (why you wouldn't opt for the trampolines is beyond me).

Choice is something paramount to the story, with main character Aiden Caldwell's underlying quest to find his sister Mia providing the main thread, out of which Dying Light 2 spins so much. It's a story told predominantly in shades of grey, presumably to give space for your own input, though sadly the results tend towards incoherence more than moral ambiguity. Caldwell himself is a non-entity - again, presumably by design - though that's more on the writers than voice actor Jonah Scott.

There's too much grit and never enough character for Dying Light 2's story moments - of which there are many - to land, but what's there does at least give the sprawl of Dying Light 2 a human heart, kept pumping along by standout turns from Jonathan Forbes' Hakon and Rosario Dawson's Lawan. There are big story choices that have big consequences - with branching dialogue moments upon which your own plot line will pivot even if it still feels like it funnels towards the same endpoint. It's bluntly done but impactful nevertheless, the overall effect like a Fallout-lite.

Away from the main quest line, there's plenty to do. I guess the measure of an open world is how easy it is to get distracted within it, and Dying Light 2 excels here. Some of the best evenings I've had with it have been idly running through the city at night, rescuing stragglers and raiding night stores while occasionally picking up a side story thread to pick at, or simply ticking off the numerous parkour challenges.

The paraglider is one of many gadgets you pick up along the way. It's a bit fiddly at first, however, and takes a few upgrades to have any semblance of grace while in the air

Here's a blockbuster, also, that only blossoms if you persevere. The prologue is a little overlong, the first area that houses the first dozen hours or so is a little dreary, but push through some leaden pacing and Dying Light 2 brightens at its core. In the vaster map around The City's centre there's variety and colour in abundance. It's a post-apocalypse that's told in the same lushness of The Last of Us, and can even be a quite pretty thing.

There are stumbles here and there - including infrequent technical issues, which again seem synonymous with the territory of a game of this scope, with models infrequently popping awkwardly into each other or levitating a few feet from the ground - but they're infrequent enough to be overpowered by the ambition of everything else that's in play. Dying Light 2 is not exactly an innovative game, but it's one that throws so much together with an enthusiasm that is, if you'll pardon the pun, infectious. Even more commendably, for the most part it sticks.

I can't pretend to be an expert in big blockbuster games - the bloat and overstated breadth isn't exactly to my taste - but Dying Light 2, with its varied systems lifted wholesale from elsewhere, is a welcome reminder of how hugely entertaining they can be. There's a brutality to its breadth, to the vastness of its world - this is the triple-A experience served up with the subtlety and grace of a modified hammer to the head. It's rarely elegant, but it is most definitely enjoyable.

 

[Lord_Potato]

a pathetic 77% metacritic score. poland is officially done as the slav capital of videogames. it's over!

Maybe read some of those reviews "There are dozens of cinematic scenes containing loss, grief and betrayal, but they don’t hit. Nothing hits. There is nothing like the devastating, destructive obsession between Ellie and Abby or the multilayered friendship of Max and Chloe."



Ergo not woke enough so no 10/10 should have made nigger main protagonist and set it in wakanda then you get 10/10 and masterpiece.

it's also supposed to be buggy as fuck and have tone of bloat and i hate that shit. i don't know why it's so hard for slavs to make their games not be buggy pieces of shit. how can this still happen after cyberbug? give your qa team more time retards.

why do slav open world games still have so much bloat with pointless fetch sidequests and pointless trash to collect? even the french fags at ubisoft are moving away from that stuff and they invented open world bloat. just like with cyberpunk slavs have some good artists and writers but they are a decade behind everyone else when it comes to game design.

why can't poles use a good engine and optimize their games well? i have a pc but ps5 fags are going to mad as fuck that the game only puts out 1080p on their brand new console no matter what picture mode you choose. why do slavs always try to pull some scummy shit at the last second, in this case with denuvo which they added 3 days before release and the very late review embargo. it's basically the same situation as with cyberpunk where they didn't want to give out console codes to reviewers because they knew how shit those versions were.

and the worst thing is why do you have to suck so much american cock? why do you keep adding american celebs into your games be it keanu or rosario dawson? it's only poles doing that shit because they desperatly want to be american themselves instead of being proud of who they are. why does it feel like slav devs spend 80% of a games budget on marketing and american celebs? it is pathetic. this is why the world looks down on you.

you are talking about literally two games

what other polish AAA games are there? i admit there are some good polish indie devs making games like ruiner or ghostrunner. the polish AAA industry is trash though and needs to be nuked asap.

you said "slavic," not "polish." maybe you have heard of a little game called Kingdom Come: Deliverance, my friend. is very good open-world RPG, yes? no american celebrities, no.

Biggest celebrity starring in KCD is Dan Vavra himself, in all his fat glory!

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/dying-light-2-stay-human-review/

DYING LIGHT 2: STAY HUMAN REVIEW
Techland's open world zombie parkour sequel is bigger and better than the original.

I land a flying two-footed kick into a bandit and send him screaming off the edge of a roof and onto the zombie-filled streets below. Over the past 50 hours of Dying Light 2, this has become my singular goal: kick dudes off roofs. The city is in peril from far more than just zombies, I have a half-dozen unfinished side-quests in my journal, and my map is littered with icons imploring me to scavenge resources, discover new locations, and undertake parkour challenges.

Sorry. Can't do any of that right now. Somewhere in the city another bandit is standing too close to the edge of another rooftop.

And reaching that rooftop is just as much fun as kicking someone off it. To get there I slide down ziplines and bounce off jump-pads, swing like Spider-Man from the rope of my grappling hook, sail through the air with my fold-up paraglider—or I just climb, clamber, wall-run, and ledge-grab my way there. Dying Light 2 is a huge and exhilarating playground for crunchy, kinetic, two-footed combat and satisfying first-person parkour. It doesn't start out like that—there's a few long hours before the game really opens up and gets fun, and there's a lot of not-so-great storytelling along the way. But it's worth it.

Pilgrimage
Welcome to the European city of Villedor, a sprawling mess of decaying and crumbling buildings with scores of zombies shambling through the streets and pockets of survivors camped out in barricaded safe zones. As Aiden, a travelling do-gooder (called a pilgrim), I've arrived in search of my long-lost sister, Mia, following several convenient flashbacks that show we were the victims of medical experiments as children before being separated. After discovering a vaccine for the original zombie virus, scientists continued messing around until they goofed big-time and unleashed an even deadlier version of the disease upon the world. One particularly evil scientist, a man named Waltz, may hold the key to finding my long-lost sister and my long-delayed revenge.

To find Waltz, I need to ingratiate myself with the locals, who are distrustful of outsiders and only give out information in exchange for favors, though thankfully those favors often involve kicking jerks off rooftops. There are two main factions in Villedor—the Survivors, a grubby yet hearty clan who build little farms and safe zones on the rooftops, and the Peacekeepers, who dress in blue combat gear and act like the cops of the apocalypse. When Aiden arrives the two groups are at odds owing to the recent unsolved murder of a Peacekeeper commander, and it's not long before Aiden's eager-to-help attitude gets him wrapped up in the drama between the factions.

I'm not yet a dynamo of flying kicks and fluid parkour when I arrive in Villedor. I'm a complete klutz, a disgrace to the art of climbing walls and running on rooftops. The first few hours of Dying Light 2's feel shaky, slow, and clumsy—I miss my jumps frequently, hesitate at the ledge of every building before leaping, frequently run out of stamina while climbing, and hammer away at zombies with ineffectual weapons like table legs and baseball bats. Progression is slow: every enemy I kill and wall I climb sends a trickle of combat and parkour XP into my bank, and only once I've leveled up those talents am I given a single point to unlock a new move from the two skill trees.

Whereas a game like Far Cry 6 would have thrown loads of exciting weapons and skills at me immediately, in my first 10 hours of Dying Light 2 I'd only added a couple of extra moves to my arsenal. But I'm kind of into that. It makes progress feel earned, something I really have to struggle to accomplish, and it makes deliberating over which skill to pick feel important. Each time I had a point to spend, I really had to consider what would have helped the most while I was getting my ass kicked for the past few hours. And most skills are distinct and useful enough to change the way I approach both fights and parkour.

Spoiler

Feet first
Along with my beloved flying two-footed kick, there's more fun foot-related skills: a vault kick, which lets me use a stunned foe as a springboard to launch myself, boots-first, into his comrade (and if my kick stuns him I can simply turn around and springboard back to deliver another kick to the first guy). An air kick lets me target a foe from above, leap down, and drive my foot into his face in glorious slow motion. There's a satisfying headstomp for mashing a fallen enemy's brains into goo, and even a move that lets me run right into a dude, knock him off a roof, and ride his body all the way to the ground, smashing his skull into the pavement. I know, it's not a kick, but it's still an awesome (and hilarious) finisher and a stylish way to get down to street level.

You don't have to kick everyone to death: there's a steady supply of sharp, rusty, and spiky melee weapons to collect along with bows and throwing knives for ranged attacks, and explosives like mines and grenades. I grew pretty attached to my gleaming two-handed axe called the Heavy Duty, not just because it could hew off arms, legs, and heads while providing me with a stamina regeneration bonus and a damage bonus when I was at low health, but because it had three sockets I filled with craftable weapon mods that did electrical and toxic damage, turning critical hits into gloriously gory and effective strikes. I liked it so much I installed a third mod that increased its durability.

You can't repair weapons in Dying Light 2, but I never had one break—by the time my favorite weapons were degrading from use there were newer, deadlier ones to buy or find. I replaced the Heavy Duty in favor of the Bad Gal, a katana that did bonus damage at night and even more bonus damage during the day. I crafted another mod that meant crits would set an enemy on fire, which could spread to an entire mob. Kicking bandits off a roof is even more fun when they're bleeding and on fire.

There are also great single-use "opportunity weapons" scattered around enemy encounters, like spears that can be snatched from corpses and quickly flung into an enemy for a one-hit kill, or bottles and bricks that can be grabbed and thrown to stun or stagger someone, giving big brawls a fun, improvised feel. And weirdly, my favorite weapon turned out to be the only gun in the game, called the Boomstick. It's only useful for a single shot and costs so much scrap metal to craft that I didn't fire it for hours—until a ridiculous bandit boss wearing a bird costume sucker punched me. It barely hurt him, but after hours spent hitting people with clubs and hatchets it felt great to blast him right in the beak.

Parkour progression doesn't feel quite as great as adding new combat skills or weapons—at first. It focuses on more practical needs like being able to roll after hitting the ground, or popping back up immediately after landing, or skills that let you leap a bit further or climb a bit quicker. But those skills add up and eventually make movement much more fluid, which gives me plenty of confidence. Being able to slide through a low gap instead of ducking and walking under it never saved my life, but it sure as hell feels good. The city eventually begins to feel less like a bunch of obstacles and more like a jungle gym, and a slick, unbroken run across a district's rooftops makes me feel almost superhuman.

There are more tools to navigate the city that only arrive about halfway through the main story quests, like the paraglider I can use to sail over rooftops, steering into updrafts from air vents to extend my flight and open up an exciting new avenue of travel. It's also the perfect way to escape clawing zombie mobs. Eventually I get a grappling hook, too, not a Just Cause-type for yanking myself through the air but one I can sink into an object above me and swing across gaps with like Indiana Jones. With all of these tools in play Villedor becomes a brilliant playground, a massive, zombie-filled puzzle I can solve by climbing, leaping, gliding, and swinging, whether I'm on a quest or just exploring.

Club zed
I haven't really mentioned the zombies much because, well, they're a bit boring and fighting them isn't nearly as much fun as mixing it up with living humans. Some zombies shamble slowly, some swarm quickly, and there are zombie specials, like howlers who attract mobs, spitters who pelt with ranged attacks, lurching blobby ones who explode, and enormous, slow-moving tanks that ground-pound and windmill with giant fists. In the daytime they rarely feel like much of a threat once I've gotten good at parkour, but as in the original Dying Light, nighttime changes everything.

When night falls traversing the city becomes incredibly dangerous as all the zombies who avoid daylight head out onto the streets, much meaner and faster than their daytime counterparts. But night also means the interiors of buildings are easier to navigate since most of the hordes are outside. Nighttime activities reward you with more loot and increased XP, so it's a real risk-vs-reward prospect. It's also a fantastic way to add tension. Creeping past slumbering zombies who might wake up at any moment or scuttling across rooftops hoping I don't do anything to make noise and alert the mob always has me holding my breath. And finishing up a long mission and realizing night has nearly fallen is a real oh-shit moment, followed by a mad dash to a safe zone as warning bells sound across the city and the howls of the undead begin rising in my ears. Parkour while panicking is the true test of your skills.

Control Points
Along with the tools to navigate the city, there's a system to change it as well. Throughout Villedor's many districts are buildings to conquer like water towers and electrical substations. These buildings form excellent parkour puzzles, especially in the electrical buildings, where you have to connect cables between a series of transformers. The cables have a fixed length, so simply winding them through corridors and up ladders won't reach. Instead, you have to find the most efficient parkour route from the cable's source to its correct transformer. Some of these puzzles are pretty intricate, and after vaulting and climbing and swinging around it's a great feeling to finally plug in that final cable and complete the puzzle.

Then you'll have to decide if you want to give control of the building to the Peacekeepers or the Survivors. Each building you turn over to the Peacekeepers will add something to turn the city streets into a playground of traps—car bombs you can detonate, turrets that fling sawblades, exploding lanterns, electrical and pendulum traps—all great if you love dramatically wiping out mobs of zombies on street level. If you're more into parkouring far above the zeds, giving control to the Survivors means there will be more ziplines, jump pads you can bounce up to the roofs with, airbags you can grab and ride to the ground, extra air vents for your glider, and other parkour-related features which make navigating the city quicker and easier. This system completely undercuts any character drama you've been involved in—if you hate the Peacekeepers it may feel strange to hand over control of a building to them. But these choices are about getting to shape the city into the type of playground you want, and that's honestly more important (at least to me) than which side you align with.

Speaking of character drama, there's a boatload of it. The story quests will take you back and forth through the city, bookended by lengthy cutscenes as you help out the Survivors and Peacekeepers and occasionally choose which side to favor. The writing isn't the worst I've seen by a long shot, but it's not particularly good, either. It's about the quality of a typical zombie film, really, so maybe that's fitting. On the plus side, Dying Light 2 is refreshingly okay with killing off its characters, even many of the main ones. There was a guy who was constantly an utter dick to me and I fully expected to have to win him over at some point, just because he was part of the faction I was helping. Nope! I got to kill him myself. Avoiding a redemptive story arc for this creep was an absolute treat.

There are a handful of characters I enjoyed. I met a big, bearded, hulking peacekeeper who looked like he'd be a mindless brute but was actually quite thoughtful and clever. There's a lieutenant who seems like he'd be a real hardass but eventually shows a bit of humor and fondness for his troops. Rosario Dawson stands out as the character of Lawan, basically the Alyx Vance of Villedor in that she seems oddly untouched by the apocalypse, upbeat and charming, a nice change from the overly gruff soldiers and gloomy survivors. And there are a few surprises I didn't see coming, both in side-quests and the main story.

Tech specs
I got a strong performance with my RTX 2080 and 16GB RAM, running Dying Light 2 with a solid 80-90 fps all over the city on high settings. Unfortunately I wasn't playing the final version of the game: the build was patched twice during the week I played and I expect there will be a Day One patch as well. One story quest in particular was bugged for me: a character needed to complete an optional task was stuck in the wrong location and non-responsive, which meant having to advance a side-quest before he'd return to his correct position for the main quest. Instead of pop-in, I weirdly had some pop-out: sometimes zombies would simply disappear from exterior locations. At times icons for locations I'd discovered on the map would vanish, and one utility building I'd cleared wouldn't register as completed, but overall there was little in the way of bugs that really disrupted my experience.

A few other issues: UI like menus and inventory are clearly built with consoles in mind and are weirdly laid out, and while many controls are remappable on the keyboard, a few important ones are not—I can middle-mouse to use my grappling hook, but it's also bound to Alt which there's no option to change.

Before launch developer Techland said Dying Light 2 would take players 500 hours to fully complete, not just the main story quests but sidequests, challenges, activities, secrets, etc. After playing I almost believe it. Dying Light 2 is a big game, y'all. The city is simply massive, filled with activities and random encounters and rooftop skirmishes, and even with a glider and other parkour toys just crossing a single district takes a good long time. Villedor is even bigger than a cursory glance of the map suggests because there are regions that sprawl well outside the borders. After finishing the story I ran along the edge of a district and discovered there's a whole underwater portion of the city I didn't even know existed. This game is huge.

After the 50 hours it took me to complete the main quest, about a dozen sidequests, and a bunch of other activities, I still have plenty to do in Dying Light 2, and I'm keen to keep playing. Hell, even after wrapping up the story there are still a bunch of skills I haven't unlocked, quests I haven't begun, and large sections of the city I've barely set foot in—not to mention plenty of bandits I've yet to set foot on.

THE VERDICT
84

DYING LIGHT 2
A underwhelming story but a massive, exciting sandbox of parkour and kinetic combat.