Staying human takes a lot longer than I thought

I was and still am a champion for Dead Island. I absolutely loved that game. So much so that it was my game of the year over Skyrim that year. Dying Light was a step in a different direction from Dead Island, but a step in a great direction. There were some great things going for that game. So, when Techland started up rumors of a Dying Light 2 in the works, I was excited. Cut to nearly four years later, we finally get Dying Light 2. While ambitious, I feel like Techland tried to throw everything and the kitchen sink into this title and ended up with a rather padded endeavor.

Taking place around 20 years after the events of the first game, and about 15 years after the fall of human civilization as we know it, players take on the role of Aiden. Aiden is a person known in this world as a Pilgrim who is a nomad runner that takes on jobs and deliveries for survivor colonies and communities. Aiden arrives in Villedor which seems to be one of the last remaining safe havens for humanity. He’s looking for his sister who he has been separated from since they were childern. He hopes to find answers not only for her, but for his own past in the center of this bastion known only as “The City.”

Platforms: PS, Xbox, PC
MSRP: $59.99
Price I’d pay: $40

Taking steps from the first game, Aiden is a parkour runner. He can scale structures and buildings, jump gaps, and utilizes his parkour abilities in combat to take on multiple enemies alive or undead with relative ease. That’s the main crux of Dying Light 2. The movement and traversal take precedence over a lot here. There’s a full skill tree for both combat and parkour. I constantly found myself siding with the parkour upgrades over the combat ones. There’s a major reason why.

The game mechanics really push the fact that time is of the essence. Mainly from two threat levels. The first one, players of the first game will remember. At night, the once shambling zombies of the city will become more aggressive to the point that they will climb rooftops and chase Aiden once spotted by an alert zombie. This will begin a chase that gains levels the more time spent in an active chase. Think of it like a wanted level from GTA. The higher the level, the worse the undead chase the player. The second threat is the new addition to the game. Aiden is infected. To keep the infection from spreading and eventually killing him, he needs to stay in UV light. This means, staying in sunlight or artificial UV light that are placed in safe areas. So, any time Aiden is out of the light either because it is nighttime or because he is in a dark building or underground, he will slowly begin to turn into a zombie. Let that countdown reach zero, Aiden is dead. So not only do I have to worry about the hoard of zombies coming for me, I also have to worry about turning into one. This makes night travel very dangerous to the point of becoming a bit of a chore.

Much like the first game, Aiden can equip different weapons which can be modded with status effect abilities like shock and burn. He can also equip armor that gives better stats depending on the style it falls under. All this loot is colored based on rarity and has different stats that can change up the style of gameplay. Ranger gear offers bonuses to ranged weapons and parkour while Tank armor favors two handed weapons and defense.

The game really wants players to explore. The map is littered with all kinds of things to do, many of which players can only do at night. I would constantly run into a new night event that I would say “I’ll come back to do this later” only to realize that I would have to travel back to this building at night, hope I have enough light sources to make it there or items to keep my infection down, and hope I don’t have a conga line of biters behind me. So, I ended up just not doing many of them.

I mentioned padding at the beginning of this review and honestly, even without going into the copious amounts of side quests and events to take on, the leveling and upgrade system is what really holds the experience back. The game runs on a proficiency system. The more I jump and climb, the more parkour experience I gain. Same with combat. More skulls I crack, the more my combat experience goes up, and just like the first game, I gain more of these XPs if I do them at night. There’s two ways to upgrade in the game. Gaining skill points by leveling up my combat and parkour then unlocking new skills by finding inhibitors in areas. Inhibitors are these special shots Aiden can give himself that when gaining three of them, will allow him to upgrade either his max health or max stamina. Increasing his max health will unlock more skills in the combat tree, while increasing stamina will unlock skills in the parkour tree. Now, I said “unlock” which means, I don’t get a new skill by doing this. I still must level up the combat or parkour by doing said actions to gain a point I can then put into the skill tree. Gaining more inhibitors just means I can eventually put a point into a new skill. Moreover, just actually leveling up a stat in game takes a long time to do. I got maybe a skill point to use every couple of hours. While that may not be a big issue, it becomes one when a lot of the good abilities are locked far down the skill tree. Like sliding. Why would it take me 10 hours of gameplay just to unlock the ability to slide? That’s usually there in any FPS game from the beginning.

That’s the biggest issue I had with Dying Light 2 – it takes a long time for anything to happen. Gaining skill points to make the parkour feel great, gaining enough stamina to be able to climb what I wanted to, or to handle a combat encounter with the flow of the parkour. I was a third of the way through the main story before I was feeling confident enough to take on certain things in the story.

This also comes in with the story. The first few hours of the game felt like a slog not only with the upgrades, but also with getting the story to go anywhere. I get Aiden is the new guy in town, but when I must get almost halfway through the campaign to get the ball rolling on the story, I was starting to worry that it wasn’t going to get there. Now, I can safely say the story most certainly ramps up, but that’s at least 10 hours in if not longer since I was mainlining the story mission most of my time. There’s a reason for that as well. With a few exceptions, the side quests and other activities in the game don’t offer much in either story or rewards. I may get a bit of XP or a blueprint to craft some things, but it wasn’t like many other RPGs that really pushed me to do the side quests to level up.

Speaking of the story, players will be making some decisions here. Mainly on who controls the areas. There are two factions Aiden can choose to have control. The Peacekeepers are a military style faction that tries to rule with an iron fist of law and order. Or the Survivors, the community driven people that want everyone to live in harmony, but still have a way to go to get everyone on board with their plans. Giving these factions control of an outpost or a resource will offer Aiden perks based on the faction. The Peacekeepers give combat perks like mountable turrets or car bombs while the Survivors offer parkour and traversal perks like ziplines or jump pads.

There is the option to go at the game in co-op. Up to four players can take on the post-apocalypse via online co-op. There’s even the option to vote on what choices to make, but the host has the final say in what happens. This also means that aside from items and experience, co-op partners will have no story progress in their own games.

I feel like the best way to describe how I feel about Dying Light 2 is by saying: “I don’t mind it.” It’s got some good things going for it and when it takes off, it gets going well. The problem is it takes a long time to take off. The story gets better eventually, and parkour skills take time to acquire, and the combat boils down to block, dodge, and swing. There’s a lot to do here, but I feel like the mechanics of the game itself gets in the way of really letting the player explore what’s around, and in the end, the rewards just may not be enough to bother with a lot of them. That’s not to say I didn’t have a fun time with the game. I did. There are some great shining moments here and when the story ramped up, I was in it until the end. If you have the patience to get to it, you too can have a good time, but don’t say I didn’t warn you that it will take some time to finally get to it.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.