Dying Light 2: Keep It Human Review
need to know
What is it? A first-person open-world parkour action game set in the zombie apocalypse.
expect to pay: $60/£54.99
developer: Science and Technology Park
Publisher: Science and Technology Park
audit date: RTX 2080, Intel i7-9700K, 16GB RAM
multiplayer game: Cooperative
I kicked a robber flying with both feet, sending him screaming from the edge of the roof onto the zombie-filled street below. In the last 50 hours of Dying Light 2, this has been my only goal: Kick the handsome guy off the roofNot only is the city at risk from zombies, I have half a dozen unfinished side quests in my diary, and icons all over my map begging me to scavenge resources, discover new locations and take on parkour challenges.
Sorry. Nothing can be done now. Somewhere in the city, another bandit stood too close to the edge of another roof.
Getting to that roof is as fun as kicking someone down. To get there, I slid down a zipline and bounced off a jump pad, swung from a grappling hook’s rope like Spiderman, and sailed through the air with a collapsible paraglider — or I just climbed, climbed, wall-run, and then Catch my way to get there. Dying Light 2 is a massive and exhilarating playground for crunchy, dynamic, bipedal combat and satisfying first-person parkour. That’s not how it started – there are hours before the game really opens up and gets interesting, and there’s a lot of not-so-good storytelling along the way. But it’s worth it.
pilgrimage
(Image source: Science and Technology Park)
Welcome to the European city of Villedor, full of rotting and crumbling buildings, dozens of zombies stumbling through the streets, and hordes of survivors camping in barricade safety zones. As Aiden, a traveling doer of good (known as a pilgrim), I’ve arrived to find my long-lost sister Mia, after several convenient flashbacks that suggest we were the victims of childhood medical experiments before we parted. After discovering a vaccine for the original zombie virus, scientists continued to mess around until they went mad and unleashed a more deadly version of the disease on the world. A particularly evil scientist, a man named Waltz, may hold the key to finding my long-lost sister and my belated revenge.
To find the waltz, I need to please the locals, who don’t trust outsiders and only offer information in exchange for favors, which fortunately often include kicking assholes off the roof. Veledo has two main factions – the Survivors, a filthy but enthusiastic clan who build small farms and safe zones on rooftops, and the Peacekeepers, who wear blue combat gear and act like apocalyptic cops . When Aiden arrives, the two groups are at odds over the recent unsolved murder of a peacekeeping commander, and it’s not long before Aiden’s eagerness to help gets him into faction drama.
(Image source: Science and Technology Park)
When I got to Viledo, I wasn’t a dynamo of flying kicks and smooth parkour. I’m a total idiot and a disgrace to the art of climbing walls and running on rooftops. The first few hours of Dying Light 2 felt shaky, slow and clumsy – I often missed my jumps, hesitated on the ledges of every building before jumping, and often ran out of energy while climbing , and slam zombie legs and baseball bats with ineffective weapons like tables. Slow progress: every enemy I kill and every enemy I climb a wall sends a bit of combat and parkour experience to my bank, and only after I level up these talents do I get a point from both Unlocks a new action in the skill tree.
While a game like Far Cry 6 immediately throws me tons of exciting weapons and abilities, in the first 10 hours of Dying Light 2, I’ve only added to my arsenal Several extra moves. But I kind of like that one. It made progress feel worthwhile, something I had to strive for, and it made it feel important to think carefully about which skill to choose. Every time I have a point to spend, I really have to think about what helps the most when I’ve been kicked in the ass for the past few hours. Most skills are unique and useful enough to change the way I approach fights and parkour.
first foot
In addition to my beloved Flying Kick, there are more interesting foot-related abilities: the Vault Kick, which allows me to use a stunned enemy as a springboard to launch myself at his comrade first (if My kick knocked him out and I could simply turn around and come back to the first guy to kick another kick). An air kick made me target an enemy from above, then jumped off, kicking my foot into his face in gorgeous slow motion. The action of mashing the brains of a fallen enemy into goo was satisfying, and there was even a move that had me hitting a guy directly, knocking him off the roof, and then riding his body all the way to the ground, putting the His skull hit the pavement. It’s no kicker, I know, but it’s still a great (and fun) finisher and a stylish way to get to street level.
You don’t have to kick everyone to death: there’s a steady supply of sharp, rusted and pointy melee weapons to collect, as well as bows and throwing knives for ranged attacks, and explosives like mines and grenades.I absolutely love my shiny two-handed axe, called the Heavy Axe, not just because it chops off arms, legs, and heads, but also gives me a stamina regeneration bonus and Get the damage bonus when I’m at low health, but since it has three slots I’m full of craftable weapon mods that do electricity and Toxic damage, turning a critical strike into a bloody and effective strike. I liked it so much I installed a third module to increase its durability.
You can’t repair weapons in Dying Light 2, but I never rest – there are newer, deadlier ones to buy or find when my favorites are no longer in use. I replaced Heavy Duty with Bad Gal, a katana that deals extra damage at night and more extra damage during the day. I made another mod that means critical hits will set enemies on fire, which could spread to the entire mob. It’s more fun to kick the bandits off the roof when they’re bleeding and on fire.
There are also some great one-shot “weapons of opportunity” scattered around enemy encounters, like spears that can be snatched from corpses and quickly thrown at enemies for one-hit kills, or bottles that can be grabbed and thrown away Stun or stagger someone with bricks and give big brawls a fun improvisational feel. Strangely, my favorite weapon turned out to be the only gun in the game, called the Boomstick. It’s only good for a single shot, and it’s so expensive to make that I didn’t fire for hours – until a ridiculous robber boss in a bird costume sucker punched me. It barely hurt him, but after hours of beating people with clubs and axes, it felt great to hit him straight in the beak.
The smooth, uninterrupted sprint sliding across the roofs of an area felt almost superhuman to me.
Parkour progression isn’t as good as adding new combat skills or weapons – at first. It focuses on more practical needs, such as being able to roll after landing, or bounce back immediately after landing, or skills that allow you to jump farther or climb faster. But these skills add up to make the movement more fluid in the end, which gives me a lot of confidence. Being able to slide through a low gap instead of walking under it has never saved my life, but it does feel good. The city ended up starting to feel less like a bunch of obstacles and more like a jungle gym, and a slick, uninterrupted run across a roof over an area made me feel almost superhuman.
There are many more tools for navigating the city that arrive only about halfway through the main story missions, such as the paraglider I can use to navigate the rooftops, turn updrafts from vents to extend my flight time and open up exciting trails new way of travel. It’s also the perfect way to escape the minion zombie mobs. I ended up getting a grappling hook too, not the Just Cause type for yanking myself in the air, but a hook that I could sink into objects above me and swing through gaps like Indiana Jones. With all these tools, Villedor becomes a fantastic playground, a giant puzzle full of zombies that I can solve by climbing, jumping, gliding and swinging whether I’m exploring or exploring.
club
(Image source: Science and Technology Park)
I didn’t really mention zombies too much because, well, they’re kind of boring, and fighting them isn’t as fun as mixing with living humans. Some zombies stagger slowly, some swarm quickly, and there are zombie features like growlers that attract thugs, spitters with long-range attacks, lumbering hunks that explode, and huge, slow-moving tanks, Smashing the ground and windmills with huge fists. During the day, they rarely felt too threatening once I got good at parkour, but like in the original Dying Light, nighttime changed everything.
When night falls, traversing the city becomes extremely dangerous, as all the zombies who avoid daylight flood the streets, meaner and faster than the zombies during the day. But night also means the interior of the building is easier to navigate, as most of the crowd is outside. Nighttime events give you more loot and more experience, so it’s a real risk-and-reward prospect. It’s also a great way to increase tension. Crawling over sleeping zombies that might wake up at any moment, or speeding through rooftops wishing I didn’t do anything to make noise and alert thugs, always took my breath away. What a terrible time to complete a long mission and realize night is coming, then frantically sprint to safety, alarm bells rang throughout the city and the howl of the undead started ringing in my ears. Parkour while panicking is a real test of your skills.
control point
(Image source: Science and Technology Park)
In addition to the tools for navigating the city, there is a system to change it. In many areas throughout Villedor, there are structures that can be conquered, such as water towers and substations. These buildings make excellent parkour puzzles, especially in electrical buildings where you have to run cables between a series of transformers. The cables are of a fixed length, so just wrapping them through hallways and ladders is unreachable. Instead, you have to find the most efficient parkour route from the cable source to the correct transformer. Some of the puzzles are so complex that after jumping, climbing and swinging, it’s a great feeling to finally plug in the last cable and complete the puzzle.
These choices are about shaping the city into the type of playground you want.
Then you have to decide whether you want to hand over control of the building to peacekeepers or survivors. Every building you hand your peacekeepers adds something that turns city streets into a playground of traps – you can detonate car bombs, saw blade-throwing turrets, exploding lanterns, electronics and pendulum traps – if You love to dramatically take down thugs, it’s all great zombies on the street. If you prefer to parkour over zeds, handing over control to the survivors means more ziplines, jump pads to bounce to roofs, airbags to grab and ride to the ground, extra ventilation Allows you to use the glider, and other parkour-related features to make navigating the city faster and easier. This system completely undercuts any character drama you’re involved in – if you hate peacekeepers, it might feel weird to hand over control of the building to them. But these choices are about shaping the city into the type of playground you want, and honestly (at least to me) matters more than which side you’re on.
When it comes to character drama, there’s a whole bunch. story…
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