The next time I hear that we should just live with the cordyceps fungus rotting people’s brains and turning them into the encephalitic roaming dead, I’m going to make that person chew on a brick. Anyway, Dying Light 2: Stay Human is the sequel to the 2015 game, Dying Light. Props for naming things better than Bethesda did the second Prey game. Usually, with a sequel, you’d be talking about how it is all the same as it was before but a bit shinier. However, that’s not the case, according to the pre-game indent that reminds you every time.

After Haran, the semi-Middle Eastern city of fiction that was more diverse than the newest iteration of Cheaper By The Dozen, there was a vaccine rollout that clearly went about as well as another pre-game message attempts to reiterate. “This game is totally a work of fiction, and any and all events that are shown are entirely by coincidence, honest. Now escape the two years of pandemic times with a tale of a failed vaccine roll-out.” Ok, the message doesn’t say it directly, but you can read between the lines that some poor intern had to make sound believable enough. It may sound like I actively hate Dying Light 2, and that’s not the case at all. In fact, I quite like it.

However, it was one of the most hyped-up games of the previous several months, until the 25th, when Elden Ring bends us all over the table and has its way with us. To say the launch of Dying Light 2 was troubled would be an understatement, as the game got 1000 hotfixes in the day-1 patch. In fact, those with leaked copies were asked to politely postpone playing and wait for the said patch. I myself experienced a crash, a bug or two, and some UI glitches, which I was expecting after the 500-hours to complete comment on Twitter. You don’t make a game that extensive and release without irregular problems cropping up.

You are no longer in the far east of Europe/the edge of the Middle East (I always assumed around Turkey) and you will now jump, climb and fall, becoming floor mince in western Europe. This time I am thinking of the Netherlands and France, but that’s only because we’re shown a map zooming in on Amsterdam-ish in the pre-game video, and something is called New Paris. Don’t worry, there is still enough diversity to go around, providing you speak English with some form of accent. I even heard an overbearing Scottish accent threatening someone, it was just like Scotland but cleaner.

All that being said, the tutorial was far from what I think most would expect after seeing all the rooftop and high-rise high-jinx. It also goes on for a little too long for its own good, an issue I have with a large portion of Dying Light 2. You’ll re-learn and tool yourself up in a rustic area that is about as free and open as all the hospitals I tried to sneak through getting upgrades: Another thing that is significantly slower this time around. Maybe it is because I was recently playing Dying Light with several upgrades, or it is genuinely slower, but I didn’t feel as experienced as the game tells me.

Gone is Blandius Mc’Merican, sent by the CIA or some other Alphabetti Spaghetti agency with their orders. This time you play as Aiden, another bland American that sounded too much like Kyle from the last game that I had to check, and no, it’s not the same voice actor. This time he has his own plot device driving him into the center of Old Villador and that other place you’ve seen in all the trailers, and it is still a bit crap. After the last time, I wasn’t expecting Techland to nail the story with pitch-perfect accuracy, but I don’t like the story. It feels lethargic and bloated throughout, and slightly more efficient dialogue wouldn’t have gone amiss.

I think a large portion of the problem is the fact we’re stopping for 5-10 minutes to build the world through dialogue alone. Don’t get me wrong, world-building is great, it creates a deeper world for you to explore, but it could just as easily be done elsewhere. The superficial Orcs from Shadow of War with their problems and expositing all their woes created a greater and more resonant world while playing, but here I am left bored by Rosario Dawson and everyone else lacking name value as they prance about the screen telling me the world screwed. I can see that!

Furthermore, the story doesn’t engage with me as much as it thinks it does, believing itself to be charming enough to force annoying characters into my goal. “Aidenbabaiden!” will go down like “I lost-ah my balloon.” Hopefully with less frequency to be meme-d (in the classic sense), or I will dropkick my own face out of the tallest skyscraper in the land. Overall, there is nothing new or interesting being done, just with a different 15-year-old weathered zombie skin drooping lazily to the side. If you’ve played any apocalypse game, you’ve played a similar story.

Again you are playing fascists vs nutters vs more extreme nutters that Hiroshima’d the surrounding areas. The thing is, the fascism is actually played up to be nice, as they are the ones offering a crossbow. Or you have dirty people complaining about water, with the third group being Raiders, Scavengers, or whatever you want to call the people that bombed the city with Oobleck. Was that a Fallout 4 and Dr Seuss reference in one sentence? Yes, as the sludgy green liquid coating the floor acts as chemical lava to avoid in specific areas.

Why? It will murder you rapidly. The only good bit of the story is that this time you are infected and this limits you in some abilities such as running about at night for long. The zombies have advanced quite a ways from Haran, though some have become more sensitive to UV light. Being infected yourself, you are also affected by UV light. You spend half your time huffing as many questionable substances in dark areas full of sleeping proto-humans, it may give someone flashbacks to college. In the early game it makes getting through several sections troublesome, but after a bit of freedom to explore, you gain more time.

You are injecting more questionable substances from large boxes into yourself in the name of science. GRE crates offer upgrades, not only to how long you’ll survive without UV light but also combat or parkour. This is where I say everything feels slowed down. Finding these inhibitors to slow the rate of infection can be difficult, and once you find some you’ll want to avoid some of them. Held behind locked doors guarded by special night roaming monsters or in very dangerous and quarantined hospitals, the only way you are getting through those in the early game is with a propensity to enjoy Dark Souls or general mental illness.

Not that these inhibitors provide the points needed to obtain specific upgrades, like running, they just enhance your overall stamina or health. All of which locks off those precise upgrades. Instead, you need to amble about or get in combat to receive enough XP in each respective category to get simple things, like running. Again, the tutorial possibly felt sluggish for just how stripped away my abilities were, to begin with, especially for a character that is distinguished as a survivor that travels far distances in this zombie outbreak. In other words, let me run about like Peter Capaldi in Doctor Who.

For all these complaints, it might sound as if I have a substantial disliking towards Dying Light 2, and I don’t. What Dying Light does best is the free-running and exploration in a harsh environment. This sequel not only takes that but runs with it across rooftops and lets you paraglide from air vent to air vent. There are grappling hooks, paragliders, and a whole lot of natural toys to play with in the world, and the freedom of movement is fun, energetic, and tense. Leaping from Parisian ledges to other rooftops gives the same knot in my stomach as the feeling of dropkicking a man out of a building and paragliding away like a Batman villain, cackling into the night as a man becomes floor lasagna.

With that in mind, the map is kind of separated into two sections. There is the old city, filled with low Parisian apartments, and the new one, engulfed in high-rises that dwarf your best abilities to scale the old city with ease. The former of the two is a great size, easy enough to cross but also filled with enough extracurricular activities to make an early Assassin’s Creed look tame. However, the second portion of the city is so enormous that it is easy to get lost and still not have seen half of it. Overall, it is failing my standard test for a good size. Without fast travel, can you cross it within 10-20 minutes?

I’d argue that would be impossible, as you get caught up in random events and attacks that pull you away. I know many don’t like it, but I’d put it beside Fallout 4, not just in the density of things happening but also the point of Aiden. You are once again the lone wanderer saving and housing the people of the Oobleck/zombie-based apocalypse, all while horrifically murdering people to do it. While the combat is visually visceral and gory to the hilt of whatever you are using, something about it lacks a bit of punch. Maybe I want a touch more vibration in the controller as I stove a man’s head in with a brick strapped to a wrench.

Hacking limbs and decapitating people is all fun, but doesn’t have as much innate feedback as the parkour does. As I said, the knots I get while taking leaps of faith, hoping not to smash my face into brickwork because the field of view is so restrictive I feel like I am playing darts while blindfolded and standing on a motorized lazy susan, that’s visceral. Clocking someone over the back of the head with a mangled frying pan is just as visceral when Dying Light slowed down, letting you appreciate the seven bells being rung in a bloke’s head as he loses his childhood memories. Here, there is something lacking.

Though, if we’re going to talk about something lacking from Dying Light 2, it is the number of YouTube ads for those torches brighter than the sun during a supernova. Yes, I have also played Doom 3, but you know what I didn’t want to see a return to my life? A torch so ineffective I could illuminate the entire room with my own radioactive urine better than that bloody thing. It is all fine clambering my way through vents like Adam Jensen, but when you are trying to sneak your way through a room filled with dozing theoretical physics students it’s best not to wake them or you’ll be attacked with algebra.

While I am on my complaint train, let’s list off another couple of things. The fake mouse thing in menus for a game dominated by a controller, is an idea about as useful to console gaming as Stephen Hawking now is to the Rugby World Cup. It is a ridiculous idea that is much slower and less useful than just clicking up and down in pause menus, or even other menus such as quests or the skill-tree. However, there is another UX decision to make everything sluggish, or very nearly every single thing: a press and hold to confirm made a large number of things annoying. The very least of which was crafting.

Pressing and holding on quests or other non-onetime affairs like crafting or skills isn’t useful. In fact, it makes doing some things a crawl. Picking up items or opening GRE doors shouldn’t have required a button hold, it is a game that is being gamified in many other regards, let me skip gayly across the rooftops picking up items as I go. I’ll admit, searching bodies or beehives could be a press and hold, but a large number of things don’t need it. I’m only hoping that both this fake mouse and holding so much can be patched into being optional instead of the only option.

Furthermore, the use of the “here the player gets knocked-out now” trope is something that has begun to get on my nerves. You’d think after four or five times Aiden’s face would have been calloused enough to be semi-resistant to being blatted in the face regularly, but nope, everyone loves punching him in the face. I can’t blame them, he is little more than a vessel for us to run, jump and dropkick zombies from great heights. It is something the reeks of someone saying “we’re already in first person, no one will like Aiden normally, so let’s just make every punch him for sympathy!”

Now, the final thing that gets on my nerves a little bit too much is the lack of ability to repair weapons, since the durability makes a grubby katana about soluble as a damp chocolate digestive. Yes, it does mean the player is constantly changing up their instruments of death. However, more often than not, I’m picking up weapons to later sell on, unless they have a higher damage number. It is the typical RPG problem: You find special undercrackers with a Skid McMarx sticker on the front and you suddenly have to swap out for that. This also meant that I found the idea of modding weapons, which was the perceivable way to slightly repair them, utterly useless.

Universally, since the release of every Ubisoft game following Far Cry 3, the tower climbing puzzle has been criticized, and for good reason. Dying Light 2 does incorporate them, but I think there is something more about them here than, say, Watch_Dogs or something else. With limited stamina, it closes off some of those towers that are meant to be locked off until later in the game, unless you are in the city where you can paraglide yourself to the top of some. Though it was confusing to unlock a tower in a Peacekeepers’ area and for many of those within the new camp calling Aiden by name, all before I’d even interacted with their missions or people.

While there are literal Far Cry 3 towers, they aren’t the only tower-ish puzzle, as you unlock regions of the map for specific groups with resources such as water or power. I might be the only one, but I do enjoy the lite puzzles of the power stations such as finding and connecting power cables. It is dumb and very gamified but it makes it more interesting than finding one magic button at the top. With limited cable and platforming, it is assembling a moderately more difficult challenge than other “puzzles” I could name from other games.

That I think is what Dying Light 2: Stay Human is best exemplified by, an idea expanding on what came before, but not significantly shifting the momentum of gaming to what it is. If I was going to say anything about Dying Light 2 that is sweeping and negative, other than the narrative, it would be that it is not revolutionary or innovating anything in particular. It is, however, doing everything within the gameplay well enough to, maybe not ignore, but acknowledge major flaws and bugs are surrounding it. Nonetheless, they don’t completely detract from the game itself. As proven by the last 2000-words.

Ultimately, Dying Light 2: Stay Human isn’t yelling “game of the year!” as the hype encompassing it would have made you believe at some point. It is a flawed game with the same general gameplay you’ll find anywhere else. From what I’ve seen, it definitely requires a few patches on PC. I’ve been flung across the map while squeezing up against something stupid and died, UI stopped showing up with the faux-mouse in some menus, and I’ve had a handful of hard crashes to Xbox desktop. It isn’t unplayable (Cyberpunk 2077), though it is understandably frustrating at times, much like the first Dying Light‘s concept to take XP from you upon every death.

Personally, I’ve loved a considerable portion of Dying Light 2, not because it is entirely new in every respect, but it is predominantly done well. Fun, energetic gameplay makes losing yourself for hours exploring and face mangling something that is as satisfying as the first game. With more tools to maneuver about, you’ll always find new ways to get about the same areas. While the story might not be the greatest it could have been, it functions to get us in a few interesting places but ultimately lands like a renegade I’ve just dropkicked from the VNC building.

An Xbox One copy of Dying Light 2: Stay Human was provided by Techland for the purposes of this review.

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Dying Light 2: Stay Human (XBO) - Review

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Free-running fun.
• A world worth exploring.
• Fallout 4-style wanderer helping people.
• Dropkicking.
• Nighttime limits due to infection.

Cons

• Dull story.
• Faux mouse and so much holding; Slows UX.
• Ridiculously large map.
• A face as soft as mushy pees.
• Bug heavy at launch and a little beyond.