Dying Light’s zombies tumbled from rooftops like Lemmings, their heads popping on the pavement below as if they were water balloons filled with entrails. In a game about fighting the undead and performing parkour, it made those dizzy rooftop heights feel dangerous – seeing a reanimated cadaver splatter on the pavement was almost enough to give you vertigo. Sometimes it wasn’t even your doing. They’d just slip and fall before plummeting to their second deaths. It might sound a little deranged, but it’s a feature I miss in Dying Light 2.
Kick a zombie off a roof here and they’ll often fall feet-first, rather than going limp and floppy as soon as they lose balance, and you never see them taking a tumble by accident outside of one scripted sequence near the start of the game. Remember how you’d boot zombies’ heads through car windows? That’s gone, too. There is, however, an ability you can unlock to lunge into enemies, pushing them from a height before riding their body down and cushioning your landing with their soft bits. Rather than exploding on impact, they take minor health damage and stand right back up as if they didn’t just fall 350 feet with 200 lbs of man on top of them. It’s so close to being cool, but fumbles and falls at the last hurdle. That’s a good way to sum up the game.
Compared to the original Dying Light, there are also fewer zombies and enemies out in the world (likely a consequence of higher graphical fidelity), which means even the streets don’t feel particularly perilous. The hordes in some areas of the first game were huge – dozens of zombies grouped up, forcing you to hop between abandoned vehicles to avoid being overwhelmed. You’ll struggle to see more than a dozen in the same place in Dying Light 2. When the night falls, you have to be much more careful because of more aggressive enemies who smash their way out of skyscraper windows and chase you across rooftops, but that’s the closest you come to feeling threatened.
Outside of the zombies, this sequel at least has a far better world to explore, particularly once you reach the second map and unlock the paraglider and grappling hook. As with the first game, you spend most of your time jumping and sprinting over rooftops, taking advantage of the over-and-under level design of this parkour sandbox, balancing precariously over dangling scaffold beams, sliding under obstacles, hopping from chimney to chimney, clambering across handholds, swinging, wall-running, and cutting through zombie-infested building interiors. It feels fantastic – especially when the music swells and the tempo increases to signify that you’ve reached maximum velocity in one smooth, unbroken run. If I had hair, I’d swear I could feel the wind in it.
You intuitively know where and when to jump thanks to yellow tarps and paint, almost crying out to you in the same way Mirror’s Edge highlighted routes in red. Add in a stamina gauge that forces you to think on the fly about whether or not you’ll make that next climb, and it all adds up to make simply getting from Point A to Point B feel thrilling, even without the zombies. It looks gorgeous, too – from the billowing quarantine covers rippling in the wind to the leaves and dust raining down over the city. In the second map, buildings stretch right up into the sky, looming over you. It begs you to leap in.
Good movement can elevate a game. It’s the foundation that Super Mario was built upon, and smooth traversal is what made Marvel’s Spider-Man memorable, despite the fact its missions were mostly forgettable. Dying Light 2 manages to coast on its traversal, too, but you can see the scars of a troubled development if you stop running for a minute to take things in.
Video games change during the course of development – that’s an inescapable fact. Some features are ramped down because they were too ambitious or didn’t work as well as the developer hoped, stories are iterated upon and rewritten. It’s just part of the process. However, the 2019 gameplay demonstration of Dying Light 2 is pure fantasy in retrospect.
The level shown in that demo sees the protagonist trying to get the city access to a water tower. They chase down a van, fall into a nest of infected, escape, and catch up with the vehicle before forcing the driver to ferry them to a compound. Once there, they infiltrate the base and fight armed guards. There are also multiple dialogue choices with seemingly big consequences. In reality, the van is parked when you find it and you never see it driving around the city outside of a cutscene, you don’t fall through floors and land in nests of infected. None of the choices present in the demo exist in the final version.
When you liberate water towers in the real game, you can choose to give them to the Peacekeepers or the Survivors, and each option offers a different gameplay benefit – do you want more anti-zombie defenses around the city, or would you rather have extra traversal options? The city does change based on these choices, but only in a shallow way – this windmill is blue now, you see! And because those choices are also tied to gameplay benefits, you often find yourself thinking practically about which upgrade you want next, rather than the plight of the city’s residents.
The first Dying Light was a decent game, and this sequel has its moments, too. It’s just a shame that many of the improvements promised aren’t quite there, and some of the features that made the first game good have been scooped out. The choice and consequence system that developer Techland shouted about in the lead-up to release feels wildly underbaked, with very few of the choices having any real impact on what happens during the story – you get the odd different mission here and there based on your choices, but you rarely feel like you’re impacting the world in a meaningful way. And while the writing is an improvement, it’s also inconsistent. One scene where you chance upon the remnants of The Last Party, a suicide pact gathering that’s now just skeletons and dust, is the kind of thing I’d like to see more of, but a lot of the sidequests undermine the odd flash of brilliance in the main campaign.
Even the parkour challenges dotted around the city are contextualized in weird story guff – “deliver sausages before they go out of date and make people poop like a turd geyser!” OK, Dying Light 2, you do you. In another series of sidequests, you deliver letters to the city’s residents. During one delivery, a man threatens to beat up his wife, and it’s suggested this isn’t the first time. Your character doesn’t even comment on it and you simply go to deliver another letter, which turns out to be a doll for a woman who lost her child. Most of the women in this world are victims. It’s a game about men doing man stuff, to the point where even Rosario Dawson’s character is motivated by the actions of dudes. Tonally, the game has no idea what it wants to be, and it definitely doesn’t know what it wants to say.
Even the main missions feel like multiple stories that got chopped up and Frankensteined together in an attempt to make something cohesive. In one, a claustrophobic woman has a breakdown in an elevator because she’s scared of feeling confined. Later, she says she felt panicked so she headed for the elevators (the ones she just had an anxiety attack in and are only reachable through a series of ventilation ducts).
The way the story plays out feels stilted, too. Conversations don’t feel dynamic and most chats are simply talking heads. When conversations end, the camera pulls away and the NPCs often vanish once out of view, teleporting away like Batman ending a chat with Commissioner Gordon. Everyone always shuts doors behind them immediately to mask that they’re teleporting on the other side, even if you’re following them. In one chase sequence, you’re running away from a creature with Dawson’s character, Lawan, just ahead of you. Every time she goes through a door, she shuts it behind her, forcing you to stop running when you reach it and pivot your camera to trigger the interaction prompt – you can’t even bash through, so it takes away any momentum and excitement you felt just seconds before. If there’s a word I’d used to describe its technical chops, it’d be “functional” – at least when dialogue isn’t skipping itself, NPC aren’t repeating voice lines, turning invisible, or frozen in place when they’re meant to be clicking the keys on a computer terminal, or when the music turns into the kind of white noise hell you’d use to interrogate and break an SAS commando.
You play a man called Aiden, who has the personality and flavor of a stick of celery. He’s a Pilgrim – a group of elite loners who dare to brave the outside world beyond the last bastions of civilization. He’s in the city to find his sister, Mia, after they were separated as children while being experimented on by government types. Once in the city, he gets caught up in a conflict between the Peacekeepers and the Survivors, two factions with opposing viewpoints on how to govern the new world – order versus equality. You take on missions for each of the factions and occasionally choose who to side with at pivotal moments in the story.
As I said before, some of the main missions are great – long, engaging quests full of exciting moments. Parkour is fantastic. Combat feels crunchy and responsive, with enemies reacting well to every swing of your machete or uppercut from your knuckle dusters. A well-timed block triggers a counter, stunning enemies so you can leap over their heads and dropkick their friends, and perfect dodges trigger a moment of time slowdown, allowing you to counter with a flurry of strikes. Limbs and heads fly off and blood spatter paints the environment around you. It’s not quite as joyous as the parkour, but it does the job. Just don’t look too closely at those detached limbs. It seems that these work by spawning in a new, detached limb and deleting the existing one from the character model – sometimes the game fails to delete the original limb, resulting in intact enemies surrounded by extra legs. Don’t worry about it.
There’s often a real sense of urgency to the action, too. Aiden is infected and has to avoid staying in the dark too long or he might turn – hence the “Stay Human” part of the game’s title. On one hand, I love this mechanic because it adds tension to some missions; on the other, it also means the developer uses Aiden collapsing on the floor as a narrative tool far too often to not be annoying. Honestly, it’s like playing as an action hero who suffers from narcolepsy.
You can increase the amount of time you can spend in the dark by collecting Inhibitors, which are mostly tucked away inside nighttime side missions called Dark Zones. Most of these look the same, but they’re essentially mini dungeons where you scour for loot. Outside of the Inhibitors – which also increase your health or stamina – there are various hats, tops, trousers, and gloves to find. It’s your usual light RPG stuff and I never felt like the statistics impacted gameplay in a significant way, unless I was way under-leveled for a mission, which is rare.
Sometimes you come across loot you can’t take because your inventory is full. And despite the game featuring crafting, you can’t break stuff down into components, which means you have to leave the loot behind until you make it to a shop or stash, by which point it will have despawned. You can drop weapons on the floor, but you can’t drop clothing, for some reason, so there’s no way to free up space for that in the field.
I enjoyed the majority of my time in Dying Light 2, but it’s stuffed with strange design decisions like this that could have been smoothed over if it’d been pushed back a little longer. It’s a game that’s made of detached limbs – bloodied legs and arms that have been stitched onto something resembling a body. You can even see the remnants of older versions of the game in some of the level design, with air duct sneaking routes that allow you to hide in an empty room or entire wings of buildings that no longer serve a purpose. If you’re lucky, you might even find the empty pit I fell into that didn’t have a place where I could climb back out.
Dying Light 2 is a good game with too many issues to fully recommend. When you’re sprinting across rooftops, leaping over zombies, and launching yourself forward off waist-heigh objects only to catch the next building’s ledge with the tips of your fingers, you can see its potential. But, much like Aiden’s limited endurance, it can only keep its grip on you for so long.
Written by Kirk McKeand on behalf of GLHF.
