![]() It’s perfectly fine, except some of these upgrades were available in Dying Light and they’re now gated off behind factions, levels and an interminable story. Choosing to support the anarchist Survivors yields parkour upgrades, while supporting the Peacekeepers gives you combat upgrades. The faction system isn’t a bad idea, hence why most games have it in some form or another these days, and Dying Light 2 does it well enough. This seems like an interesting idea, but instead it feels more like compensation the night zombies are a little weaker in this game, and they’re a lot easier to evade, especially post-paraglider, so the timer at early levels is just an arbitrary limit on exploration, and in later levels it’s a minor inconvenience at best. So at night, outside of areas lit with UV lights, you have a limited amount of time before the infection takes you over. As mentioned, the progression of the zombie plague can apparently be stalled by UV light (again, not sure how that works), and Aiden is infected. Techland also added a timer for night time excursions. You just float gently away, like a leaf on the wind. The problem is, it makes night-time zombie chases the easiest thing to handle. ![]() It takes a while to get the hang of it, but the paraglider does add a fun dimension. A sequel needs new features, or at least interesting iterations on previous ones. I’m never going to entirely hate gameplay that lets me dropkick a zombie off a roof, but I could get that from Dying Light. You could kill your way through half of a given faction, and the leader will sit there calmly and discuss an alliance, even welcome you in their territory. This level of writing extends to most corners of the central questline. It’s a writing trick that generally comes off as lazy, and signals that there’s nothing interesting about the character beyond the most bland levels. You could replace her with a cute cat the mad scientist stole, and the story wouldn’t shift at all. I’m sure she’s nice, but I don’t feel any reason why I should help her above anyone else. I don’t care about Mia, I’ve never even met Mia. Techland uses something I hate seeing in video game writing - dropping you me straight in the middle of Aiden’s quest to find Mia leaves me with no investment beyond “quest”. Frankly Techland would have been better served by ditching or curtailing the central story. However, when it’s your only avenue into the gameplay, and content is locked behind your story, you’d better write a story that’s worth my time. Straight away, I should clarify: the story being bad doesn’t make the gameplay bad. It’s a pretty straightforward story, if a little boring, but it gets more than a little confusing when you consider that this zombie plague can just be stopped by sunlight (I’m no doctor, but I’m skeptical about this). I’ll get to the mechanics of this in a bit, but through all of this you’re also tracking down leads about a mysterious mad scientist who had something to do with Mia’s disappearance. In Villedor, you’re given the option of siding with two factions, the anarchic Survivors and the authoritarian Peacekeepers. You travel to Villedor, a city somewhere in Europe with a strange and distinct lack of non-English languages and accents (I’ll admit, that’s nitpicky), and get infected with the zombie plague. Aiden is a “Pilgrim” - the in-world term for folks that walk between the last human settlements - with a dark and gritty backstory that has him searching for his sister, Mia, because the two were lab rats together in flashbacks. Yay, escapism! Enter you: Aiden, a generic gravelly voiced dude delivering lines like a non-union Nolan North. Following the events of Dying Light, in which a zombie plague was quarantined to the vaguely located city of Harran, the zombie plague becomes a pandemic and humanity is locked down in small, isolated settlements. Let’s get the story out of the way, because it’s not good, and none of the events or characters are going to stick in your mind for too long anyway. ![]() ![]() You’d think publisher/developer Techland could have dropped one or two hundred hours of “content” to fix the more glaring issues, but no. ” Somehow, the writing and gameplay manage to be less coherent, the environment feels less varied and the atmosphere is so very bland. I have a lot of thoughts about Dying Light 2 : most of them are “oh, hey, just like in Dying Light ”, while others are more along the lines of “oh no, this is worse than Dying Light. Instead, you’ll get the same amount as in the original (which came in at 20-30 hours), because this is… pretty much the same thing, but with some more stuff added. Right away, as Dying Light 2 ’s marketing team eventually admitted, you’re not actually going to get 500 hours of actual content. ![]() Break out the climbing shoes and duct tape - it’s time for parkour and zombies. ![]()
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