Dying Light 2 Stay Human proves parkour isn’t enough to save a broken world

Though zombies come in many shapes and sizes, I tend to dissever them into two types. First, at that place'due south the shambling, decaying undead that represents the classic zombie. Then, y'all accept the sprinting zombies seen in movies similar 28 Days Afterward. Those zombies may withal have flesh slowly falling off of them, but they move at an almost superhuman speed in their quest to devour brains.

Dying Light 2 Stay Human is an unholy hybrid between those 2 types. On the one paw, its bloating gut is constantly on the verge of exploding from all of the game'south bugs. On the other, dashing through the rooftops of the City is exhilarating, as you constantly have to arrange and readjust your route to stay away from the zombie hordes.

A broken world

At its core, Dying Light 2 wants to deliver a large open world for players to explore, full of fun activities and great parkour-based movement. Unfortunately, the only thing the developers really nail virtually that core conceit is moving around that globe. It does this with breakneck speed, as you run by zombie hordes and human bandits, trying to arrive to your next destination without finding yourself in a brawl. Yous have all kinds of parkour-inspired moves at your disposal. That movement puzzle is where the game shines. While running, yous're constantly making little calculations to decide the best path: "Practice I climb that wall to go higher and use my paraglider to windsurf to the next edifice? Or should I grab that zipline and utilize the bounce pad to get effectually that group of zombies?"

Dying Low-cal 2 does that role of the equation incredibly well. If all I had to exercise in this game was run from cutscene to cutscene, I might've liked it better. Heck, the sections of the game where you're being chased past zombies (whether as part of the open-globe or the story) are easily some of the biggest highlights. However, everything too the parkour — story, combat, issue the technical side of Dying Light — quickly comes crashing down.

That'south not unexpected given that this is a relatively large open up-globe. Often, these kinds of games ship with several bugs that crop upwards and disrupt play. However, in my experience, Dying Light 2 had several bugs that either soft-locked the game and forced me to reset progress or destroyed whatsoever momentum the story had. For example, later on the first few quests, the dialog in cutscenes bugged out and the characters wouldn't talk. The game likewise skipped all of the subtitles, so I couldn't tell what was happening.

Game-breaking bugs continued to pop up in means both large and small. Characters would phase through each other in cutscenes. The collision detection would go all wonky, leading me to just vibrate in mid-air instead of grabbing the ledge of a building. Fifty-fifty in the last dominate fight, the antagonist glitched into the surround, rendering him unkillable. These errors happen likewise much and too oftentimes to write it off.

The faults don't stop with game performance and polish. The combat breaks down into either dodging or parrying and and then attacking. Over the grade of the game, the developers don't give you many more meaningful tools. Fifty-fifty if they did, it wouldn't really matter. On normal difficulty, combat is so easy information technology quickly becomes a bore, something you lot only do considering you want to upgrade your boodle. Even then, I apace stopped caring well-nigh getting new loot because you don't need to worry about amend gear. If you just pick up random weapons, yous'll be fine. The game has an entire crafting organisation that lets you mod your weapons that I never used because at that place'southward no betoken. That extra damage might terminate fights quicker, but information technology won't brand them more fun. Yous're amend off running from well-nigh encounters to save yourself the hassle.

So, in that location'southward the story that tries and fails to take interesting twists, the open world total of meaningless side quests, and the choice-based gameplay that turns out to barely change the globe. I'm not ane to hate on the illusion of a decision in games, as information technology often works well for developers trying to emulate the Telltale formula, but it should be noted given how much the marketing touted information technology alee of launch.

The beacon of promise

With all of that said, Dying Calorie-free ii feels like the kind of game that volition go better with time. The developers have already committed to v years of mail-launch content and I believe they'll stick by it. They did the same for the original Dying Light and it became much meliorate for it. The skeleton of a great game is undoubtedly in Dying Light 2, particularly with how keen information technology feels to run around the earth.

To some degree, this feels like an early access game in everything but the release schedule and pricing. It has its core down. It knows exactly what information technology wants to be. However, everything around that needs more smoothen earlier information technology's ready for primetime. So, even though I didn't really like my fourth dimension with the game, I guess I believe in Dying Calorie-free 2? I truly call up I'll await dorsum in a year or two — when memories have faded — and think past me was dead incorrect for giving it such a low score.

The verdict

Dying Calorie-free 2 is a buggy mess of an open-earth title. Information technology is the definition of a game I would tell y'all to "expect to buy." In that location's a good game here, simply waiting to burst out of this one'south bloated corpse. With time, the studio merely might go at that place — it certainly has a rails record of doing then. That said, with how cleaved the game was for me, it's difficult to recommend. All in all, Dying Light 2 Stay Human being is a disappointing launch for the follow-up to one of the better zombie games of the final decade.

+	Moving around the globe is legitimately one of the most fun open up-world traversal experiences in the genre
+	A few set pieces feel similar they're straight out of a best-selling summer blockbuster
–	A buggy, sometimes broken world
–	Lack of meaningful side content, leading to the whole product feeling needlessly padded
–	Gainsay that never meaningfully engages or evolves