A stellar sequel bookended by a slow start and a weak finish

Dying Light 2 is awesome. Dying Light 2 sucks.

Both of those sentiments have rippled through my consciousness at different times during the 50 hours I’ve spent playing Techland’s twice-delayed sequel. In its very best moments, this first-person, parkour-fueled zombie apocalypse is a blissfully satisfying action game. But it’s also woefully uneven: A dull, grating introduction and messily paced finale bookend a thick and meaty mid-section where I’d happily spend another 50 hours if there were more things to do. A study in contrasts, a game that contains multitudes — whatever you want to call it, Dying Light 2: Stay Human‘s great promise is too frequently undone by its own inherent messiness.

That’s not even accounting for all the bugs. Technical issues get patched away over time — that’s just how games work these days. But anyone who is looking to pick up this game at launch should know that my single save file — you only get one — broke in a way that left me caught in an inescapable loop after more than 38 hours of play. Techland has since patched the bug, and also manually fixed my save file after the patch failed to get it done. So that’s my problem solved. But a fix for me doesn’t help you, and therein lies the problem.

Technical bugs are like actual cockroaches: For every one you see, there are dozens more hiding in the darkness. So I worry for players hopping in on day one who don’t have an attentive public relations professional to call on for help like I did, so they instead have to rely on support services from Techland’s Poland-based team. Because let me tell you: It feels rotten to lose 38 hours of progress, even temporarily. That’s a bad result for any game, and it definitely shouldn’t happen with a blockbuster sequel that spent at least four years in development.

For as much fun as I’ve had with Dying Light 2, it’s still a hard thing to recommend right now because of the technical failure risks. So buyer beware. Wait a few weeks or months if you can bear it, see how patch releases change the landscape first. Techland will surely iron out the rough spots eventually, but it’s clear right now that there’s more work to be done.

That said, it is worth waiting for. 

Leap of fun

Dying Light 2 is every inch the sequel that a fan of the first game might want — more of the same, but better. The first-person parkour that empowers you to scramble up the sides of skyscrapers and sail through the air as you treat towering radio antennae networks like your own high-altitude jungle gym has never felt better. I spent plenty of my 50 hours in the city of Villedor tackling story quests and helping out the locals with other, optional activities. But I also spent ample amounts of time just savoring the feeling of movement.

Dying Light 2 is one of those games where the feel of the gameplay becomes hypnotizing once you fall into a groove. More than once, I’d look up from playing only to realize an hour or more had gone by with me doing nothing more than wandering the streets, scaffolds, and rooftops. There’s plenty to be found out in the world, in the form of makeshift weapons, crafting supplies, and other helpful tools for surviving a zombie apocalypse. But it’s the act of movement, and the way things look and feel in the game as you manipulate buttons and sticks on a controller, that keeps you focused.

Aiden Caldwell, Dying Light 2‘s milquetoast bro-tagonist, isn’t exactly dripping with personality, but he more than makes up for it with his feats of acrobatic skill. While you’ll bash zombie and human foes alike with an assortment of clubs, hammers, axes, and blades — all of which are cobbled together out of debris from the old world, and upgradeable with the same —your most potent weapon in any situation is Aiden’s knack for parkour.

Even in the early going, scrambling your way to the top of a low-lying tenement or using a staggered enemy to launch into a flying drop kick is child’s play — just a few button presses and it’s done. But you earn skill points as you play that you can spend to unlock a wider range of possibilities for movement and combat. Some are simple, passive upgrades, such as being able to survive falls from greater heights. But many others have a tangible impact on how you play.

Dying Light 2 technically draws a line between Combat and Parkour skills — each set of skills levels up separately — but it’s all just different flavors of parkour. Pulling those abilities out of Aiden’s proverbial toolbox and using them in complementary ways is where you’ll find some of the most exciting “holy shit” moments. Far Jump, a useful early Parkour ability that lets you use any hip-high obstacle as a jump-boosting launchpad pairs perfectly with Ground Pound, a Combat skill that lets you smash your weapon on ground at the end of the jump in a move that leaves any nearby enemies temporarily stunned and open to further attacks. Tic Tac (aka wall-running) is great in its own right, but it achieves new levels of “that was rad!!” excellence when you channel your momentum into an Air Kick that sends an enemy tumbling off the side of a building.

Night and day

Exploration is complicated somewhat by Dying Light 2‘s day/night cycle. Just like in the first game, UV light doesn’t play nice with zombie skin. The more freshly turned creatures have greater resistance, so the streets are never empty during daylight hours. But the most dangerous threats take refuge in darkness when the sun is out, which turns most abandoned buildings into unassailable death traps. When the sun goes down and night falls, that danger moves into the streets.

The first game treated nighttime like a terrifying otherworld that was best avoided unless absolutely necessary. Dying Light 2 rethinks that whole approach, filling the world with abandoned businesses, hospitals, and other maze-like facilities that are safest to explore at night.

The sunless streets are flooded with threats — including a kind of zombie that summons a horde and sets off a chase if it spots you — but using rooftops you can make your way to Dark Hollows (for scavenging valuables) and Forsaken Stores (for scavenging crafting supplies). These are the Dying Light version of treasure-filled dungeons. You’ll still find plenty of zombies inside, but it’s much safer than dealing with the terrors that hide during the day.

It’s not quite that simple, however. For reasons tied to the story, Aiden is infected with a strain of the same illness that wiped out most of the world’s population. His body is able to fight off that infection easily in the sunlight (or under a UV lamp), but it starts to take over if you spend too much time in the dark. The addition of a ticking clock for any foray into one of Dying Light 2‘s nighttime dungeons ratchets up the tension of every outing. There are ways to reset the clock or get back some lost time, and you can even increase Aiden’s resistance so he’s on a longer timer. But darkness is never totally safe from his zombie within.

Hurry up and wait

Dying Light 2 struggles to keep things exciting during the early hours of the story. While even your default movement skills make the act of running and jumping enjoyable, an extended string of tutorials disguised as critical story quests quickly grows tiresome. Part of the issue is a heavy reliance during the early hours on story-establishing flashbacks. These intrusive momentum-killers are dotted throughout the opening hours and they slow the already-creeping pace to a labored crawl.

The city itself is also just less inviting early on, and not in the sense of it being threatening. The starting map of Old Villedor is much smaller than the Central Loop downtown area where the bulk of Dying Light 2 unfolds, and it’s largely just a collection of low-lying tenement buildings. It’s also populated by a lineup of grating characters who want Aiden to do stuff for them. The people of Villedor have splintered into multiple factions, and while some are just jerks who crave the thrill of combat (they’re called Renegades), the two largest groups — the hardscrabble peasant Survivors and the militarized Peacekeepers — are yours to work with or against as you please.

You can’t turn either of those main factions fully against Aiden, but you can shape the way the world comes to life as you ally with one versus the other. Scattered around the map are windmills, power stations, and water towers that can be captured and, in the case of the latter two, assigned to the faction of your choosing. The more power sources you provide to Survivors, the more you’ll see Survivor-controlled neighborhoods filled with ziplines, jump pads, and other movement aids. Powering up the Peacekeepers, on the other hand, fills the areas they control with traps and other zombie-killing tools.

It’s one of the ways that Dying Light 2 makes you feel like your choices actually matter. There are story moments that can re-shape the plot to some extent — I’m not clear on how much because who has time to play a 50-hour game twice in two weeks? — but the so-called “city alignment” system brings much more visible and impactful changes that you can actually see and make use of. It elegantly incentivizes players to seek out these facilities and conquer their parkour puzzles early, since expanding either faction’s influence makes getting around a safer prospect overall.

Finding your footing

All of this gets introduced in Old Villedor, but the fun really starts once you break out of that starting map and reach the Central Loop. This massive and visually diverse cityscape is a true urban jungle, with soaring skyscrapers and elaborate self-contained complexes providing a much more exciting playground for Aiden’s parkour skills. Reaching the main map also immediately gives you the Paraglider, a retractable parachute that you can deploy at any time to slow your descent and, with the right upgrades and a large enough pool of stamina, climb to new heights. You can even stand on any working air vent you find and pull out your glider for a quick boost into the sky.

This middle section of Dying Light 2 is where the game really finds its footing. It operates under the same set of rules you’re introduced to in Old Villedor, but with a much more varied backdrop that effectively supercharges the sandbox. Taller buildings increase the danger, but they also mean there’s significantly more vertical space to explore. It’s one thing to parkour your way up a five-story tenement. It’s quite another to bring that same kind of challenge to a 30-story building. I lost so many hours to just wandering around, jumping and gliding from building to building, exulting in the freedom and the tactile thrills of Dying Light 2‘s sense of movement.

The story pace picks up considerably, too, leaving behind the flashbacks and one-dimensional schmucks of the first section for a more carefully drawn cast of characters (including Aiden’s top ally Lawan, played by Rosario Dawson!). I also felt a distinct shift in the writing here. The early hours of the game are marked by what I can only describe as casual sexism — a snippet of dialogue here, a stereotypically manly man there. But not long after I made it downtown, I noticed more women in prominent roles, fewer men doing the alpha thing, and writing that colors Aiden as a bro, yes, but a bro capable of learning and growth.

That could just be the arc of the story, but it’s a jarring turnaround and the way it’s written left me feeling like it was two different visions smashed together. (Hard to imagine how that might’ve happened.) I spent the first stretch of Dying Light 2 wishing I could tune out every character only to find myself emotionally invested in the trials and travails of Villedor’s local population as I spent more time downtown. For any other faults with the pace, I was all the way in for Aiden, Lawan, and all the rest by the end.

That’s not to say it’s a great ending. Dying Light 2 has some terrific story quests, but the final act is an exception. Its handful of strong moments are undermined by a return to the glacial pace of the early game. Except this time, there’s no tutorial-as-quest excuse. Instead, you run through a gauntlet of locations that just… go on for too long, really. It’s wretchedly tedious. There’s a shorter version of the ending somewhere in here that’s amazing, but Techland’s “too much of a good thing” approach turns it into a slog.

Yes or no?

As overstuffed as the story sometimes feels, there are also major missing pieces that leave Dying Light 2 feeling unfinished. There’s no way to check in on your city alignment progress that I could find, for example. And for PC players, using a mouse and keyboard is a waste of time if you don’t like the default controls. For whatever reason, only some commands can be reassigned to different keys. It’s as if someone started building a keybind menu for this game and then stopped halfway through. An utterly baffling choice.

Dying Light 2 is also somewhat lacking on the accessibility front. You’re able to change the size and color of subtitles and give them colored backgrounds, and you can make it so button-tapping moments, say to force open a door, become button-holding moments. There are also three profiles for color vision deficient players in the Video settings menu. But there’s no screen reader and no audio descriptions, and the accessibility features are scattered across a couple different menus. Techland would do well to tighten all of that up and expand it sooner rather than later.

This is a big sequel by any conceivable measure, and it’s one that we already know is set to grow even more in the coming years. The technical issues are a worrisome nuisance, but they’re sure to diminish over time. The bigger stumble of uneven pacing is a legitimate bummer, and the shortfalls on the control and accessibility front are even moreso. 

Dying Light 2 is a wild, wild ride, nonetheless. I cursed its name plenty over the course of 50 hours; I also fell hard for it once I found my groove. It’s easily one of the most thrilling and deeply satisfying parkour action experiences I’ve ever come across in a video game. And with all that Techland has planned for the years ahead, the real Dying Light 2 story has only just begun.

Dying Light 2 comes to PC, PlayStation, and Xbox on Feb. 4 with a Nintendo Switch (cloud version) release to follow later in 2022.