Dying Light begged for a follow-up and now, almost seven years later, Techland has finally made good on that idea after a worrying period of silence and multiple delays. The wait has given the time for Dying Light 2 to evolve into a more nimble and agile zombie, one that has stronger traversal and combat systems. But those upgrades have come at a cost as this undead corpse, in typical Techland fashion, is also covered with a fair bit of rotting, bug-infested flesh.
However, its ripped sneakers are still fast enough to outrun some of those issues. Dying Light was always likened to Mirror’s Edge but through the lens of The Walking Dead and Dying Light 2 goes further in that direction. Players are still able to hop, long jump, and wall run around the apocalypse with an array of athletic abilities and Dying Light 2’s additions make that process smoother and more exciting.
Sprinting now happens automatically and isn’t tied to stamina, which is more natural and allows the player to more readily escape at a moment’s notice without needing to catch their breath. Nighttime spelunking, while much easier and not nearly as scary, is where these improvements shine as being able to quickly duck and weave through obstacles is the key to escaping the horde. In addition to the returning move set, Dying Light 2 also has a few more acrobatic abilities that give players more ways to traverse. This is exemplified by the new paraglider that can salvage a bad jump but is better when used in conjunction to connect buildings separated by large gaps. The City is also better suited to free-running as it is more open than Dying Light‘s Harran and contains structures that aid the player in moving around like air vents, monkey bars, tightropes, and more.
Analyzing the environment and chaining together a long line of nimble feats is exhilarating, showing that when protagonist Aiden Caldwell picks up speed, the game does, too. Running from rooftop to rooftop while bouncing off various street lamps, broken bridges, and hanging ropes is involving enough to constantly require that players pay attention, yet it is forgiving enough to empower almost everyone in realizing the dream of becoming a skilled free-runner. However, it does take some time to get to that point since its long skill tree locks out many of these useful moves, which is tantalizing and means the early hours can be relatively slow.
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While the best part of the game, parkour still has its share of downsides and oddities that keep it from being the ultimate, free-flowing traversal experience. Some buildings do have a handful of paths in and around them, but there are still many that stringently force players to search around for one specific pathway. Aiden will also sometimes get stuck on weird angles or fail to grab ledges above him, a frustrating problem seen in every Assassin’s Creed game as there will always be fiddly ledges strewn across the many structures of an open-world game. These problems don’t happen often enough to ruin the parkour, but they are frequent to the point of being persistent annoyances that slow down the pacing.
The paraglider and grappling hook have more fundamental problems. Gliding around the skies is usually liberating as it makes the vertical nature of the City a little easier to get around. Although still a net benefit, the paraglider is unwieldy as it doesn’t always come out when it should and leads to a ton of cheap deaths as Aiden falls to his doom.
The grappling hook is not as much a liability but is more of a clumsy tool. Instead of pulling players toward an object as if they were Spider-Man, it’s more comparable to a rope dart that players can throw out and swing around from like Tarzan. But it behaves erratically, often missing its target or killing the forward momentum nearly every time it does make a connection. Wildly undershooting targets is built into the physics driving it and not being able to climb the rope to correct some of that instability makes matters worse. It’s meant to be a less automatic and more skill-based way of swinging around, but it ends up being one of the cumbersome grappling hooks in the medium.
The rope dart is only consistently useful in combat where it, once upgraded, acts like Scorpion’s spear from Mortal Kombat. Pulling around ragdolled foes is a hilarious sight and just one part of the game’s enhanced combat. Guns are thankfully gone and give Techland the space to focus more on melee brawling. Assessing threats and using the meaty and slightly overpowered drop kick to boot bandits off rooftops is as satisfying as redirecting a charging character’s momentum and tossing them headfirst into a spiked fence. The expanded move set, enemy hit reactions, gratuitous gore, and crunchy sound effects (aside from the pathetic kick) all mean combat is much better and more sophisticated this time around.
Although, like parkour, combat has its share of quirks that keep it from greatness. Aiden’s hit box is much, much bigger than it seems and his dodge move is the same as the jump button, meaning that it’s not always easy to get out of the way. The arbitrary gear and leveling system throw off the difficulty curve and mean some enemies are pushovers and others take too much punishment for no good reason. Being able to block and parry is also great, but the lack of follow-up options after a well-timed parry is limiting.
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The ever-present aura of awkwardness hovering around the combat that leads to one-off, unexplainable oddities covers the entire game as it just generally feels rushed and unfinished. And this goes beyond the occasionally broken mission or hard crash. Characters might not talk in cutscenes. Dialogue can overlap and create a cacophony of competing noises. Some of the trophies don’t unlock. Aiden can easily get stuck in random corners or crevices. Even the terrible final boss can clip through a container, get stuck, and force the player to restart.
None of these bugs repeat too often, but they all coalesce with the other rough parts of the game to paint a damning picture. Getting revived from a survivor is awkward and missing sound effects. The menus are painfully slow. Lighting will almost always radically change as the game transitions into a cutscene. Quality mode on the PlayStation 5 is a stuttery mess. Co-op doesn’t work yet. The last-gen versions reportedly did not work until a very recent patch. Techland itself told players who picked up an early copy to wait for its day one patch to play it “the way it’s meant to be played.” All of these mishaps (and more!) point to a game that deserved to sit near a UV light for a few more months to kill off the lingering bits of infection.
The story is finished, but it’s so awful that it probably could have actually been incomplete, and little would have changed, quality-wise. Aiden’s familial relationship at the core of the story is extremely melodramatic and corny and the characters around that focal point are shallow, boring, poorly written, and have faces that hardly emote. This also means that the choices — which fall extraordinarily short of the “world-changing” dilemmas that Techland initially discussed — lack weight since it’s nearly impossible to actually care about what happens to these characters or the undeveloped factions they are a part of. The bad writing is a constant headache since almost every scene from short side missions to pivotal story beats is horribly overwritten and poorly paced. Everyone drones on and on through static first-person camera shots; an astonishingly boring combination.
The game even repeatedly stops players during gameplay, too, as it usually has scenes that would be better served as gameplay or hold the player hostage as they watch a walkie-talkie conversation. With some memorable and noteworthy exceptions, main missions also regularly fail to take advantage of the game’s impressive parkour move set and confine them to enclosed spaces or combat-heavy zones. Most of the adrenaline-filled free-running is oddly relegated to the side content littered around the fairly standard open world. Between the constant gameplay interruptions and the inability to craft story missions around moving quickly, Dying Light 2 often misunderstands what it does best.
Dying Light 2 doesn’t reach its full potential and is partially betrayed by Techland’s inability to ship a game that isn’t riddled with bugs but still manages to fulfill enough of the fantasy associated with being a free-runner during the apocalypse. Swiftly moving through the surrounding hellscape is satisfying and its violent melee fighting mechanics can sometimes achieve those same highs when everything goes right. Like the zombies in 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, Dying Light 2 sometimes limps along and other times, like the undead in the film’s 2004 remake, it sprints ahead at full throttle. It might take a moment for it to transition from limping to sprinting, but it is thrilling when it finally does.
SCORE: 7.5/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 7 equates to “Good.” A successful piece of entertainment that is worth checking out, but it may not appeal to everyone.
