Dying Light 2, like its predecessor, knows that its installation sells as much as its gameplay. The development team at Techland switched from the Dying Light setting to Harran in a nuclear-powered ‘salt to earth’ hit, and shifted focus to Villedor. You play as a stranger, Aiden, who travels to this once majestic capital to find his missing sister, and the second you step foot within its protective walls, you are faced with a city put together from pieces of Paris, Berlin, Hamburg, Ostrow and other European landmarks. In Villedor proper – a city designed by actual town planners and urban designers – you will see the scope of what Techland is all about. This is a big game, with some big ideas. It’s not just the same as the Dead Light.
That’s immediately noticeable if, against your gaming instincts, you look up. The design team worked hard to ensure the roofs were woven together with all the correct bits of visual language so you could clearly understand how to get from roof to roof, avoiding corpses swaying at their feet. A reworked parkour system (which feels more fluid and empowers) underpins a game that favors agility and poise over violence and aggression.
More than once, I skipped the supposed quest to find an opera singer’s missing mink shawl, or some pretty girl, to test my body – toss out from the rooftops. , jumping through windows, climbing the sides of rotting churches. Even in combat, movement is key: you’re encouraged to dodge, block and dash relentlessly, weaving and jabbing like a rewarded warrior to close in on your foes , and then rush into their plunder.
You want rhythm in the way you approach transmission; you can’t just hold ‘go’ and expect to climb as in Assassin’s Creed. No, the satisfaction in Dying Light 2 comes from perfectly passing an oncoming zombie or bandit and stabbing a Stanley knife in their ribs, or latching it from a fight you can’t can win. Improve a route based on all the visual language you’ve learned from games over the past decade, to jump, skip and jump to safety – it’s catnip action. Lying under a broken trellis, sliding under the vent, then free-falling onto the mattress in a relatively safe place? It’s an exhilarating thrill reminiscent of The edge of the mirror his best.
But you’re only human (for now), so of course you’ll have to fumble in weird climbs or miss a step and have an occasional street tumble. Turn around, look for a drain, a window ledge, a street sign – something! – put your foot on a zombie as a springboard, and you will be back to safety. Edema.
And you’ll want to know how to avoid and run away from encounters, because the game can be brutal. For story reasons, there are very few guns made available to the public in this pseudo-European city (makes sense, when you think about it), so rudimentary melee and ranged weapons like bows and arrows. and the crossbow is standard. It all plays into what Techland calls its ‘Modern Dark Ages’ setting; an era when electricity was scarce, feudalism was making a comeback, and conflicts were increasing. Good. It makes a better game that way.
The downside to this is that you’ll often find yourself surrounded by bandits wielding spiked bats, lead pipes, or something else that’s sharp and (usually) bloody. When the odds are in your favor – two against one, three for one – you feel nimble and agile enough to take on all the matches. When they’re inactive, you’ll want to stretch your lungs and run. It’s handy when the streets are so pretty, because you’ll watch so many of them fly past your peripheral as you oscillate from street to rooftop, over and over, as you Poke your limits to find out exactly what you are capable of beating.
Our practice focuses on two slim pieces of the game, each taken somewhere from the middle of the experience, so it’s hard to comment on the quality of the story. Suffice it to say, all seems fine. It perfectly matches the function of the two real stars of the game: the horizontal and the city design. If you like the battle in Dying Light, you’ll love the battle here; it’s neater, lighter and cleaner, and ends up looking like Skyrim on steroids. The great sound design helps with landing with a lead pipe and feeling the zombie skull crack so there’s always that brutal feeling.
The real star of the show though (for this is recovering Cry away apologizer) is the bow. At the end of our demo, we were given a simple periodic bow, and it felt like the game had unfolded in a hundred different ways at once. Stealth is a game in Dying Light 2 that’s much more viable than its prequel, so rush out of cover, fire a well-timed shot at a vanguard bandit, then charge up rooftops to pick up their accomplices like a lunatic. Batman is a legitimate tactic. And that’s where the game comes into its own.
One quest sent me deep into the depths of an underground parking lot, and after a series of brutal hand-to-hand skirmishes that left me breathless and at a loss, I felt deadly again. Distract the zombies with bottle caps and bricks (thanks, The Last of Us, for that gimmick) before knocking them down with a well-timed arrow that complements the fast-paced and intense exploration perfect way. Having the option of running fast behind them and pounding their brains on the pavement – helping you feel confident in your stamina and timing – is a welcome solution to the problems you create for yourself when it comes to bad purpose.
You can also pull the bowstring out in the middle of a match to slim down the guitar a bit if that’s your style. Or you can even opt to try out some stunning aerial shots as you bounce from a three-story window, if you’re in there for a few white zombie safaris. My practice has only given me a little taste of the broader Dying Light 2 game, but, similar to the first game, the real fun in this look comes from watching all the sets. interactive small moving parts.
Give me a bow, let me level up my parkour affinity to get the most out of my stamina, and send me some late night high risk/reward quests. Let me sneak through a street full of the undead, stealing a cache of military-grade weapons they’re guarding. Let me mess it up. Let me see the undead flood the streets as I stomp on the broken Villedor concrete and venture a glance over my shoulder. Let me jump in the wrong time, rush directly into the iron railing and be miserably eaten alive. And then let me do it all again, but better.
Techland got their hands on a real star with Villedor – we’re talking Fallout 3– level world building, from what we’ve seen so far – and if it can maintain momentum and continue to give you a reason to get out on the streets and fight for your life , Dying Light 2 could actually be something very special .
