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Dying Light 2: Stay Human review: polished sequel lacks biteYawn of the dead
Yawn of the dead
No,Dying Light 2doesn’t take500 hours to complete. Call it closer to 30 and change, although my map still swarms with chores and requests to deal with post-campaign. Plenty of words have been written about Techland’s backfiring boast of a three week runtime, so no need to relitigate that here. Going in, the only time value I was interested in was how long - if ever - the game takes to sink its teeth into you.
You see, the originalDying Lightwas slow to the boil, the fun of its survival loop not fully emerging until you’d escaped the initial narrative funnelling and levelled up your arms to the point that parkour could get more expressive and the zombie-braining more excessive. Once you had a foothold in Harran, you could enjoy the game for what it was: an open world adventure about coming to terms with an unabating zombie threat. No easy fixes. No streets cleaned out or regions conquered; just the endless undead and a constant throb of danger to whatever task you set yourself that day. It felt pleasingly freeform and organic at a time when Ubisoft’s mania for stymying map icons was spreading like, well, a zombie plague.
Dying Light 2 Stay Human - The Reason - Official Gameplay TrailerWatch on YouTube
Dying Light 2 Stay Human - The Reason - Official Gameplay Trailer
Dying Light 2 is quicker to get moving. A prologue set outside the city - a linear mountain region reminiscent of the first game’s The Following expansion - establishes new hero Aiden as a more competent survivor, well versed in clambering and evasion before he sets foot in the streets of Villedor. First-person parkour feels lighter from the off, letting you cross larger gaps and throw Aiden around with some confidence. And where low-level combat in the original was mostly about stamina management as you breathlessly donked lead pipes off zombie skulls, the sequel mixes in parries, split-second dodges (complete withBayonettawitch time, with the right upgrade) and the ability to vault over winded foes into a flying kick. These are showy flourishes of a power fantasy, rather than the panicked scrabble of the first game.
On one hand it readies you for a quest that is immediately gripping and able to throw daunting set pieces at you. Your arrival in Villedor, where proof of health hinges on a wrist-mounted biomarker that you don’t currently possess, drops you into a thrilling dash through the night and a den of hospital-dwelling infected that feels as high stakes and disorientating as Dying Light 1 at its best. But I definitely miss the sensation of a fighter slowly emerging from a jumble of awkward limbs that gave the original its power curve, and the first act feels one note as a result. For all the big talk of how outsiders aren’t ready for city life, Aiden takes it in his roof-hopping stride. The church spire no local dare climb? Up there in seconds. That wind turbine base that has everyone spooked? Nothing a few drop kicks can’t fix. It has weirdly low stakes for what the devs have talked up as a brutal ‘modern dark ages’.
This isn’t to say that Dying Light 2 is a massive bust - ironically, I think the general ease of day-to-day life will probably resonate with plenty of people who just want to clear aFar Cry-style map without meeting anything scary. Certainly, the sequel is neater in this sense, with more icons to tick off than the first game. There are mini bosses to hunt, special upgrade containers to sniff out, windmills that act like Far Cry radio towers and actual radio towers that are Far Cry radio towers. In Dying Light 1 you climbed up to high places because it made sense as the best way to survey the city and plan your time. Here it’s decreed.
I wish you could dial down the pointers and hand holding. You can turn off enemy health bars, which adds a frisson of unknowability. But it could offer more. Take, for example, how the map says whether you have the right stamina level to climb a tower. Why? Let me try and screw up for myself. Let me struggle to scale it - or better yet, find an alternate solution the designer didn’t predict - and claim the eventual victory more organically. And why flag every resource-rich interior on the map, when in the original game I was quite capable of sniffing out doors for myself. Let us put one and one together and work out that a pharmacy might be worth scoping out at night, rather than dotting it on the map - and worse, with an icon that can never be removed because the locations eventually restock. Yes; it’s a map icon game where you can’t clear the map icons! What fresh hell is this?
I realise I’m veering into reviewing what I want it to be, rather than what Dying Light 2 is. And to be fair, around its low pressure centre lurk some entertaining distractions. Drop kicking bandits off 30-storey buildings tickles the same ‘physics thug’ part of the brain left untouched since Dark Messiah. Modding a katana so it belches flames adds insult to injury. And the decision to hold back the new paraglider and returning grappling hook until the second act is exactly the kind of delayed gratification I loved the first time round. Arriving just as you’re feeling comfortable with parkour, the glider basically rules out dealing with the streets ever again: terrible news for the already weedy zombie threat, but a fantastic way to take in the skyscrapers of Villedor’s financial district.
Though even this pocket of delirium is eventually nuked, with a baffling story decision that floods the prettiest view of the city with a dense fog. I think it’s meant to demonstrate the game’s commitment to world-altering choice and consequence, but defacing the best-looking area of Villedor seems like vandalism. More successful is a late game choice that potentially adds an entire region to the map - I know that guides wizard Olly didn’t see it in his playthrough, and the autosaving means you can’t save scum to a happier outcome. It also makes it hard to test far reaching consequences without a total replay, though talking with other reviewers it sounds like choices are honoured throughout, even if the Aiden’s bland story is largely immutable. He’s heading in one direction whether you like it or not, so the real treasure is the NPCs that got bludgeoned along the way.
I’m glad it wasn’t 500 hours long. As a freelancer that would work out at about 30p an hour, but, more pertinent to you, there’s just not enough character to Dying Light 2 to hold your attention beyond a fleet-footed 30. Techland’s taken something quite distinct and sanded down the edges. Some will find it agreeably smooth, I’m sure, but you can only sand so much off of chaos before it becomes ordinary. Come the real zombie apocalypse we should all be so lucky to face a world this trudgingly well behaved.
