After years of delay, Techland’s open world zombie game is finally here, and the question now is whether it’s been worth the wait.
Although the pandemic has quickly become the main reason most games are delayed, the coronavirus has not been the only problem Dying Light 2 has endured in the four years since it was first announced. Originally meant to be out in 2020, not only was narrative lead Chris Avellone forced to leave because of sexual misconduct allegations but the game subsequently lost its lead writer and art director as well, with many fearing that it would never see the light of day.
Thankfully, things never came to that and now Dying Light 2 is finished and ready for release and… it’s a solid sequel. It’s a shame it didn’t come out two years ago, because it does feel very much like a last gen game, no matter what you play it on, but the massive game world and an ambitious use of branching narrative offers an additional layer of freedom in a genre that is beginning to feel increasingly stale and predictable.
Dying Light 2 does reuse plenty of tropes from Ubisoft style open world games, including a map (and HUD) littered with icons of nearby points of interest, while the zombie setting is by now painfully overused. This sequel does its best to compensate for those problems, but the irony is it still needed a little more time in the oven.
The original Dying Light barely had a story, but in the sequel you play as a ‘Pilgrim’, essentially an on-foot courier who delivers items between the few stable settlements left in the wake of a global zombie pandemic. The opening hour of the game takes place outside the largest remaining city (vaguely implied to be somewhere in Eastern Europe) as the game teaches you the basics of the controls and you end up being bitten by a zombie during your attempt to get in.
This is not the life-ending problem you would imagine though, as everyone in Villedor is bitten and has a device on their wrist to indicate whether they’re about to turn or not, which can be prevented by exposing yourself to UV light.
You play as one Aiden Caldwell (so there’s no character customisation) who has been experimented on by a comically evil scientist and is trying to find his sister, who he was separated from while they were both young. Despite all the different people that have worked on it though the script still feels very stodgy and inorganic, with much of the voice-acting being similarly unrefined.
That’s the set-up though and if you’re familiar with the previous game, or Techland’s work on Dead Island, you’ll be able to imagine that it involves an awful lot of fetch quests carried out on the behalf of complete strangers. There is an obvious attempt to increase the mission variety but nevertheless a lot of it involves being told to go to a certain location and retrieve a piece of loot, or dispatch a human or zombie enemy.
Thankfully, the processes for doing so are much more interesting than the contrivances for why you’d ever be wandering about after dark, which is when the zombies begin to swarm. They’re still out and about in daylight (you would’ve thought there’d been ample opportunity to wipe them all out by the time the story begins, but apparently not) but at night you’ll end up being chased by hordes of the creatures, including several specialist types that are faster, stronger, or which act as beacons to call others.
You can defend yourself, primarily with melee weapons that can be modified with gadgets to make them electrified or shoot flames, but in most cases there’s too many to comfortably deal with and running is the only option. That’s a good thing though as the chases are by far the most thrilling part of the game, as you leg it towards a safe house with a hundred zombies at your back.
Parkour seems to have fallen out of fashion lately but, thanks to the delays, it’s front and centre in Dying Light 2. It works very well too, despite this being a first person game (the strange flailing of your arms, just at the edge of the screen, can look very silly at times). There’s enough leeway to the jumps that you’ll be sprinting and leaping across the rooftops within just a few minutes, plus you can also fight using parkour moves – using enemies as launch pads to attack others with powerful kicks and other unlockable abilities.
Although it borrows a lot from Bethesda games like Fallout and Skyrim, including some offputtingly weird facial animation, Dying Light 2 isn’t really an action role-playing game, because you have no stats. However, you do level up as you unlock more combat and parkour abilities, with the level of enemies clearly indicated on-screen, so that you know whether you have a chance against them or not.
Mechanically speaking, Dying Light 2 is competent but not in a way that fully justifies a 30+ hour game (Techland initially boasted it would take over 500 hours to see everything, until they quickly realised that put off more people than it attracted, given how much bloat it implies). The combat is fine, and the parkour works well, but the stealth is so simplistic it often breaks your suspension of disbelief.
It’s the chases and the fact that, at night, you often have a clock ticking down until you become fully infected that brings the game to life. That tension is probably going to be somewhat lost when you’re playing in co-op, but that option wasn’t available to test pre-launch.
The game’s final trump card is the way your story decisions affect the plot and the world around you. There are several different factions vying for control of the city and while you can play them all against each other, inevitability you’ll end up coming down on the side of one or another.
Your decisions affect not just who’s in control but the lives of non-player characters and what parts of the city remain inaccessible or not. Although this is undermined by the fact that it’s hard to care about most of the characters thanks to the clunky dialogue and tonal inconsistencies, which veer from deadly serious to goofy and silly at a moment’s notice.
The script really could’ve done with more more work but while that’s unlikely to happen there will have to be a lot of patches to fix all the game’s bugs. We’ve seen a lot worse pre-launch but it’s still common for characters to glitch in and out of existence or story missions to not start or complete as they should.
Dying Light 2 is too long, and its action elements and atmosphere can be very one-note, but if you’ve been waiting this long for the game you’re unlikely to be disappointed with the results. Despite the storytelling improvements the game still needs a better script, and if you’re worried you’re bored of zombies this will do little to restore your enthusiasm for them, but it does succeed in achieving something at least a little different with its well-worn premise.
Dying Light 2 review summary
In Short: A little rough around the edges, especially in terms of the storytelling, but the interminable wait for this open world zombie sequel has been worth it.
Pros: Parkour, including parkour combat, is a lot of fun and the branching narrative works very well. The chases and failing immunity at night are great at creating tension.
Cons: A lot of busywork and repetitive missions, and while the combat is good the enemies are rarely very interesting. Weak script and unremarkable art design. Undercooked stealth and lots of bugs.
Score: 7/10
Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £54.99
Publisher: Techland
Developer: Techland
Release Date: 4th February 2022 (Switch TBA)
Age Rating: 18
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