Dying Light 2 review: Outstanding gameplay props up an incomplete story

Halfway to Keep Humanity Alive by Dying Light, I took a side mission that, in hindsight, neatly summarized the strange pacing and unmet ambitions of its larger story — a story that often struggles to match the compelling gameplay and richly detailed world that developer Techland has created.

This is a typical fetch mission. You’re a stranger in a strange land, searching for a lost loved one and finding yourself pivotal to a dying city’s fight for survival. A friend is in serious condition and urgently needs medical attention. But seeing as how this version of the zombie apocalypse has — quite convincingly — turned the fictional European city of Villedor into a Middle Age society, the only remedy is folk medicine from a blind witch. Aiden (the player character) is given specific instructions by her on how to collect it and when to do so. She also explains what parts are to be administered to dying men.

While I was grabbing the item from the zombies, they were only minorly annoying. As I was parkouring back to the sick bay, the game gave me a strange update: “Choose which medicine to give him.” Wait, why wouldn’t I give him the correct dose?It was only then that I realized the blind witch could have been lying and intended to poison him in retribution for his actions.

Within a matter of seconds, I was able to move from being a side-questress to making an important decision. I was already guilty of some seriously offensive betrayals for taking everyone at face value during this game. And here I was. Dying Light 2, putting in a lot of extra work — against a timer, no less — to care about characters and situations that aren’t central to the story.

This kind of frustrating indecision, if used correctly, could lead to greater success Dying Light 2’s color-by-numbers narrative into something with a bigger emotional payoff. At least, it might have if the game’s ambiguity felt more intentional. Instead, Dying Light 2’s story feels more like a rough draft that the player must finish with a lot of side activities.

Grid View

Fans of the original welcome to come along Living in the LightWith its fast-paced melee combat, and agile free-running, the profusions of missions can feel like an unnecessary obligation. In fact, the extra side quests and in-world events deliver a lot of the loot and XP that helps your character’s progression keep within hollering distance of the story. The second half of the story is slower than the first. Dying Light 2’s central story branch, the unlocking of new combat tactics or parkour techniques unfolds even more slowly unless you’re also constantly looting zombie hives in the unstructured nighttime gameplay loop.

Still, Dying Light 2 expects a lot of its players’ time, and that investment is too often repaid in scenes that are resolved with expository dialogue that stands preceding developments on their head. Choices do matter in Dying Light 2There are some that may be more aesthetic, others less so. But all of the fights, the fighting, and the puzzle-solving become irrelevant when your fearsome enemy decides not to bother him anymore and offers his help.

If that’s how Dying Light 2’s story is going to roll, then at least all the fighting and jumping and climbing is fun for its own sake. It is intensely satisfying to engage in melee combat using improvised blades. The fatigue meter regulates movement and attacks with a well-balanced system. Dying Light 2This forces me to consider and employ all of the strategies available, especially when it comes to bosses and sub-boss battles. Spamming strikes, or simply laying back in order to counterattack all will at most, turn a small-sized scrum into an escape plan. Usually, you’ll end up dead, with a lot of your health consumables and other buffs wasted.

But it didn’t take much for me to develop a workable two- or three-move melee pattern and then add more tactics, and tactical devices, as I got more confident, both with my surroundings and with my adversaries. Dying Light 2’s combat and traversal are supplemented by two perk trees with choices that really extended my capabilities. In order to block the standard strikes of an opponent, your first fight will allow you to do so with perfect timing. Then, naturally, you run into heavies who have strikes that can’t be blocked. You can stagger your foe with perfect timing by adding a perk to your combat tree. Although I was grateful for my counterattack focus, it wasn’t until someone pushed me to a completely different mentality.

Parkour is Dying Light 2 It is more confident and fluid than its predecessor in 2015. Some of its flashier executions depend on being very familiar with your surrounding environment, but Aiden’s leaping, grappling, and running have a lot more range than the first-person view conveys. And if you do overestimate his ability to make a jump, there’s an active-landing perk that takes a lot of the sting out of even the biggest falls. Aiden can make jumping puzzles more challenging than your abilities to perform moves. Once you see the path (usually helpfully marked in green), it’s no problem to traverse. Suffice it to say, with Assassin’s Creed effectively abandoning its verticality, Dying Light 2’s first-person system is the new standard in parkour platforming.

The combined strength of the combat and parkour means that most players can probably handle a higher difficulty than they think, especially if they’re willing to think tactically with their approach to fighting. In the medium setting I managed to complete my 20-hour first round with just one death. However, I was so weak from some of the dumb fights that I had to quit and restart.

You will be required to put in extra effort. Dying Light 2, the lack of urgency in mission givers’ pleas did little to encourage me to deviate from the main story path. It was easy to simply continue with the core mission, and then move on to the next chapter. I didn’t have the time or motivation for helping this civilian or clearing the infected resource. Unfortunately, this left me with a rather incomplete feeling — my progression came so slowly that I thought I was going to be underleveled by the time I hit endgame content. Enemy strength matches Aiden’s current level, which is fine, but you’ll need more of his combat unlocks when taking on larger numbers of level 3 thugs and zombies.

It can lead to a moderate difficulty increase that will require a lengthy grind. Weapons and gear, while plentiful, are also limited to Aiden’s current level, and all of them need at least one offensive mod if you’re going to get any value out of them before they break. You can buy weapon mod blueprints from vendors but the ingredients must first be found. After charging up the weapon with some hits, the better mods allow the player to key in special blast attacks. The weaker mods trigger random critical hits and special attacks. You can guess which mod contains components that are more difficult to locate. Nearly all levels 3 and 4, (I reached level 5), were spent with a recipe to create an electric charged attack. However, I never managed to find a single battery for it. I likely would have found these parts if I wasn’t devoting all my time to story missions. That brings us back again to our looming grind obligations.

Slowly paced and for so long can lead to frustration. Dying Light 2’s narrative developments and inversions seem head-spinning, even if the plot is arriving at a reasonable story point. It’s good that Dying Light 2’s choices have consequences, and it’s great that the writers often show the confidence to present those outcomes long after the decision has been made. That said, many of the consequences don’t have much beyond cosmetic weight: Getting a windmill or power substation back online is really just a question of which flag you want to see flying over that site.

Then, after a long middle stretch of making these seemingly arbitrary choices, Aiden is suddenly playing for keeps with people’s lives. Dying Light 2 Aiden has also the courage to give the player several, non-good-choice options in order to complete the entire adventure. The story, as it accelerates into these dilemmas, really takes a lot of the shine off of Aiden’s exceptionalism, and that’s a welcome, sophisticated touch. However, the majority of this story has a nihilism. Dying Light 2It doesn’t matter how honest or realistic your opinion may seem, it makes the least selfish and most satisfying choice the right one. It was the most reasonable one for me, anyway, as someone who tried to role-play the game’s decisions as much as its perk trees and gear loadouts.

Dying Light 2’s Appeal The end result is more of a game than a story. Perhaps Techland’s developers were presented with their own vexing, profoundly consequential choice, where they had to choose to save one structural component or the other. They made the right choice if so. The video game is not a real life. A well-balanced combat system combined with exhilarating Parkour and effortless contextual moves can save the most weakest stories. Vice versa seems impossible.

Keep Humanity Alive by Dying Light launches Feb. 4 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox OneAnd Xbox Series X. Techland gave a downloaded code to the PS5 game. Vox Media is an affiliate partner. Although these partnerships do not impact editorial content, Vox Media could earn commissions on products sold via affiliate links. Find out more. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.