The original Dying Light was released way back in 2015 and became a massive hit having been played by over 25 million people since its release. In Dying Light the story revolved around Kyle Crane, a military operative affiliated with the GRE (Global Relief Effort) who was deployed into the fictional town of Harran in order to recover sensitive data about the virus infecting people and turning them into infected. What set Dying Light apart from the hundreds of other zombie games that are available was the ability to use parkour to climb buildings in order to progress across the map, the parkour mechanics in the game were implemented incredibly well and is one of the many reasons the original game sold so many copies, that and the fact that over the past 7 years developer Techland has continued to add DLC packs, events and other content to the game, there are not many story driven games that can claim to have that kind of a lifespan. It has been a long wait but Dying Light 2 Stay Human has finally landed here in our hands, will it live up to the standards set by the original?

In Dying Light 2 you take on the role of Aiden Caldwell, an infected survivor who was experimented on in GRE camps as a child along with his sister Mia. Aiden managed to escape the camps but unfortunately his sister Mia was left behind, this leaves Aiden looking for his sister alongside a cure for the Harran virus. The game takes place in the fictional location of Old Villedor in a location known as “the city”. The city is broken up in to various zones all with their own unique locations to explore and liberate. There are 3 main factions that inhabit the city, those being the law loving Peacekeepers (PK for short) whose motivations are mainly military based, the survivors who are mainly just trying to survive by creating weapons and defenses consisting of scrap scavenged from across the city and the renegades who are basically savages that will kill anybody that tries to get in the way of them scavenging loot. The city in Dying Light 2 is absolutely massive and feels much more alive than the first game due to all of the factions fighting over all of the different territories, so many times I got distracted from completing missions simply because it was so interesting standing on a rooftop watching the various inhabitants fight each other or get slaughtered by a group of roaming zombies. The PK’s and The Survivors are the two factions you will interact with in the game and it’s from them that you will receive your missions, in most of the missions they will send you out across the city to either retrieve an item for them or clear out a bunch of zombies or renegades, it’s pretty much your standard open world RPG type of affair but it is well paced and does keep the story moving along nicely. Due to the infected being more active at night you will also encounter a variety of quests that can only be undertaken at night as that’s when the infected leave their nests making some areas that were very difficult to explore in the daytime much more easier to survive, the twist on this is that Aiden is also infected and can only spend a certain amount of time roaming around in the dark before he himself succumbs to the infection and turns, a timer on screen shows how much time Aiden has left before this happens and this certainly adds a lot more tension to any of the missions that are undertaken at night, thankfully the timer can be reset if Aiden finds one of the safe zones that are marked with UV light.

Safe zones also give Aiden access to his stash and allow you to sleep in order to end the night cycle and wake up in daylight. You will unlock dozens of safe zones as you explore the city and many of the major ones such as windmills and electricity substations allow you to decide which faction you want to allocate the resource to and your choice will have a noticeable effect on the immediate area, if you decide to allocate the resource to the Peacekeepers you then you will find more zombie killing traps around the zone, if you allocate the resource to The Survivors then you will find more things such as ziplines and airbags that will help you to traverse the buildings around you. The way you can control resources is a fantastic addition to the game and it really helps to draw you into the story as every decision you make has a major effect on not only the story but the way the environment around you looks. Another nice touch that also makes the city feel alive are the random events you come across when exploring the map, these usually only amount to killing some infected and freeing prisoners but still it does make the city feel more interesting and lived in as do the various hubs strewn across the map that act as trading posts where you can purchase blueprints, weapons and healing items amongst other things. Crafting also plays a big part in the game as you will be able to pick up items like honey and chamomile and mix them together to create healing items and immunity boosters to keep yourself alive longer during the night cycle.

Of course one of the best parts of the original game was the parkour system and I am happy to say that it is no different in the sequel, the system from the first game has been refined to near perfection, Aiden is a joy to control and the parkour system feels so fluid as you run and jump from building to building by pushing the R1 button. Stamina is a new element introduced for the sequel and it makes you have to really plan out your path when you are trying to climb some of the taller buildings as hanging off ledges causes your stamina bar to go down, once it is depleted you will let go and fall which will cause you to lose health or even plummet to your death depending on what height you falls from. There is an amazing array of objects you can run along and swing from and climb I often abandoned my mission objectives and simply ran around the city exploring instead, at a certain point in the story you even get access to a paraglider which allows you to glide to some of the harder to reach areas. The parkour is also heavily intertwined in some of the missions you will undertake in the form of ‘jumping puzzles’ which are fine however most of the ones I encountered also added a time limit to the equation which made for a frustrating experience. The most frustrating one involved Aiden carrying a bomb having to make his way up to the top of a windmill in order to blow the structure up, I get that adding a time limit to puzzles does increase tension but there is a fine line between tension and frustration and for me the line was crossed quite a few times here, at one stage I was about to throw my PS5 off the balcony and I am pretty sure most of my neighbours in my apartment block now think I am some kind of psycho due to the solid stream of cursing that erupted from me trying to complete some of these timed jumping puzzles.

With the city being inhabited by zombies plus the factions all vying for power it’s inevitable that you won’t be able to explore unhindered and you will eventually find yourself in a fight. The infected that roam the streets during the day known as ‘biters’ are pretty easy to dispatch of as they are slow and easy to pick off however at night it is a totally different story as that’s when some of the more mutated infected come out to play, if you get to close to a ‘howler’ they will scream and alert all of the infected in the area which will lead to them all chasing you as you scramble to find a safe zone and bring the chase to a halt, the infected are tougher and much faster at night and some of the variants of infected that appear when the skies go dark will certainly cause your heart to beat much faster than it normally does (just wait till you run into a ‘goon’ and you will know what I mean) most of the time you are better of running from fights during the night as the odds of survival aren’t stacked in your favor. It won’t only be the infected you are fighting though, you will also come across other humans that are part of the renegade gang who will attack you on sight, and they hardly fight fair and will not hesitate to gang up on you.

The AI when fighting against these human opponents is some of the best I have seen in a video game, if you get to close to them they will push you away, those equipped with bows will scramble to higher ground and rain arrows down on you, when they outnumber you they will actively try and flank around you to hit you from behind and if they if you try to start healing they will throw rocks or knives at you to interrupt you. You really need to have your wits about you and try work out the enemies attack patterns and actively dodge and parry in order to find the best time to attack. The fights were so much fun especially with the way you can combine both your fighting and parkour skills together in order to dispatch enemies that I actively started looking for fights with humans rather than running away from them. Fighting involves weapons and there are lots of them in Dying Light 2, bows, spears, knives, spades, table legs and even Molotov cocktails, C4 and bows if you enjoy taking infected out from afar, some weapons are rewards from quests and others you will find by scavenging through containers or by finding blueprint to build them. As in the original game weapons unfortunately only have a set amount of durability and will eventually break, unlike the original game though you can’t repair weapons in Dying Light 2, once a weapon is broken it serves no further use. You can however still modify weapons by using blue prints you find across the map effectively adding electricity and other elements to them in order to inflict more damage. I am really puzzled by the decision to not allow weapons to be repaired and also the omission of special weapons such as the God Hammer, Fenris Axe and Angel Sword that were in the first game, in Dying Light 2 the weapons are all fairly lackluster and unremarkable, thankfully however, the combat as a whole is challenging and engaging and also incredibly gory as your attacks will dismember limbs and even behead enemies turning them into massive gushing blood fountains, it’s certainly not for the faint of heart!

Running around the map discovering things, killing infected and completing missions wouldn’t be fun if there were no rewards for your efforts so Dying Light 2 features an experience system and skill tree much like the first game just expanded slightly, the advancement system in the original game worked proficiently so there really wasn’t much of an improvement needed in this area but what Techland have added on here makes sense. There are three different types of level advancement in the game “player rank” is the overall level of your player and will help you surmise what quests you are ready to take on as all quests are handily tagged with the recommended level required to take them on, your overall health and stamina are also governed by skill levels and are also tied to two skill trees, parkour and combat.

The only way to raise your health and stamina levels is by finding special GRE caches that are hidden in several places on the map and then selecting whether to put points into health or stamina this will also then have an effect on your overall player rank. You gain points for the previously mentioned parkour and combat skill trees by actively doing those things, run around and climb buildings then you will gain a skill point in the parkour tree which you can spend on skills that will help you run faster and climb more efficiently, decapitate a few dozen infected and you will earn a point towards the combat tree which you can spend on skills to help you become more deadly in combat. Overall the skill system makes sense, is easy to grasp and versatile enough so that you tailor your overall range of skills to what suits your playstyle.

Graphically the game looks amazing and is the prettiest open world game I have ever seen. I know that is a big statement to make but once you see the game in action I am willing to bet that you will agree with my statement. The game features vivid and vibrant colours which is a stark contrast to the muted tones of Harran in the original game but the change to a much more colourful landscape definitely works here, sometimes I found myself gaping in awe at what I was seeing on the screen, this game is just beautiful from the textures, the lighting and the animation right down to the character designs, if you don’t have a 4K display, Dying Light 2 is probably the biggest reason I have seen yet to buy one. As far as display options go you can play the game in quality, resolution or performance mode, quality mode is the only mode with ray tracing and places emphasis on graphical quality over frames per second, resolution favors resolution over frames per second and performance mode will prioritise frames over textures and resolution. I played the majority of the game on resolution mode and did not notice any slow down at all and the game seemed to run at a steady sixty frames per second, the quality mode while looking nice in all its ray tracing glory just felt too sluggish as it struggled to keep rendering at 30 frames per second. As beautiful as the graphics are there are also unfortunately some problems that come along with them, the major one being a really annoying screen flicker that seems to happen randomly, the screen will flash to black for a millisecond, skip a frame or two and then render again, as you can imagine this is really annoying and is also a major immersion breaker, one of the other issues rears its ugly head if you have your torch turned on and then enter a cut scene, the screen will flash and then render again as if there was no light source emitting from your torch, whilst not game breaking these issues certainly are annoying. There were also several times where I entered a cut scene only for the audio to drop out and also the subtitles disappear from the screen this caused me to miss out on some major plot points in the game as there is no functionality to replay previous cut scenes. Hopefully all of these issues are addressed with a day one patch. Apart from the major niggles with audio dropping out in some situations the soundtrack of Dying Light 2 is superb, the music score ranges from downright creepy and ominous in some situations through to upbeat orchestral numbers when there is any fighting taking place, the voice acting is also utterly superb with several stand out performances.

I enjoyed a majority of the time I spent playing Dying Light 2 however after around 20 hours or so I started to feel I had pretty much seen all that the game had to offer me and the only thing drawing me back to playing the game was the fact I had a review to write on it. There is nothing majorly wrong with the game, I would even go as far as to say the game is quite good but it just doesn’t seem to hit the heights of greatness that the original game did. The graphics are outstanding (when the previously mentioned issues don’t rear their ugly heads) the soundtrack and voice acting is fantastic in places and the story, though predictable, is also believable. I just couldn’t shake the fact that I had done all this before, several times in fact, maybe it’s because of all the hours I have spent playing the Far Cry and Assassins Creed franchises it just feels like even though there is a lot to like about Dying Light 2 it still does nothing that sets it apart from the many open world games that have come before it, at times it feels like it is a massive sand box with not much substance holding itself together. If you liked the original game then you certainly won’t hate Dying Light 2 but I can’t guarantee that you won’t be at least mildly disappointed with what it offers, it comes so close to greatness only to fall just short.