Dying Light 2 - Reviews

Wccf Tech reviewed Dying Light 2 Stay Human, which releases in 2 days. Other reviews have appeared as well: COG, PC Invasion, PC Gamer, Shacknews, IGN, Ars Technica, …

Dying Light 2 Stay Human Review - An Apocalypse Divided

Trying to follow the development of Dying Light 2 Stay Human over the past several years has been a bit of a rollercoaster. The game was announced with much fanfare at E3 2018 and showed off a very impressive demo at E3 2019, but then creative director Chris Avellone left the project amid accusations of personal misbehavior at previous studios, the game was delayed multiple times, and reports of behind-the-scenes turmoil at Techland emerged. Ultimately, when Dying Light 2 staggered back into the light last year, it looked rather different than what was originally promised and demoed.

These facts would usually be red flags, but Techland has shown an impressive ability to adapt over the seven years they supported the original Dying Light. Have they managed to make the best of a bad hand and delivered another zombie-slashing cult hit? Or has the shambling specter of development issues terminally infected the game? Grab some good shoes; it's time to give this one a thorough run-through.

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Overall Score: 8

Dying Light 2 Stay Human is another exhilarating parkour and zombie-pummeling playground from Techland, although at times, the seams holding it all together are a bit obvious. Given the game's glitches, minor gameplay annoyances, and crudely bisected story and world, reports of behind-the-scenes issues feel all-too-plausible. That said, the foundation here is rock solid, and Techland has proven they're capable long-term builders, so I'm confident Dying Light 2's embers can be stoked to a full flame in time.

Pros

• Parkour is more satisfying than ever
• The City is packed and exciting to explore
• Lots of interesting characters and missions
• Some genuinely tricky decisions
• Offers some impressive sights
• Lots of content
• Looks stunning on PC with ray tracing enabled

Cons

• Story and world jarringly split in two
• Overall plot is fairly straightforward
• Plenty of glitches
• Co-op appears to be an afterthought

More information.

I'm hearing that the weak part of the game is the story and characters, which is a bummer. The first game had that problem aswell and I thought with Chris Avellone included in development the story and characters would be better. Seems like thats not the case.

I heard enough good stuff that I went and bought it even though I won't get to it anytime soon.

I hear they are selfpublishing which is surprising.

I would say that overall this sounds pretty darn good.

Co-op…is of zero interest to me. Glitches…will likely be fixed by the time I buy it. Story…will always be fairly individual whether you like or not.

I've played plenty of games that have recieved lots of praise for storytelling…while I've found the same to be dull, contrived, overused, too predictable or some other negative epithet. You never really know until you try it.

Truth be told, I've loved DL1 and can't even remember any of the story. I doubt DL2's story will be worse or that that is too important for this kind of game.

Techland did good with DL1, so it earned my trust for DL2. It's very rare for me to replay games (and not very common to finish the ones I play), but I've finished DL1 and then replayed it when The Following DLC was released (both the main game and DLC). And finished it.

So my guess is that I will play DL2 now and then replay it when the next big DLC comes out.

Also, I check out the reviews less and less these days. Specially for big releases. The amount of negativity, clickbait and everyone wanting to be a downer to score more internet points, is annoying and takes out some of the joy before even trying a game for the first time and form our own opinion. I still check some reviews from trusted sources, to know if there's serious bugs or other problems.

It's a little bit shady the release of the information that the game has the Denuvo DRM, just 3 days before launch. I didn't cancel my preorder, I'm too hyped to have the discipline. I just hope there won't be performance issues.

Originally Posted by danutz_plusplus
I hear they are selfpublishing which is surprising.

Square Enix is involved in some way.

Originally Posted by Gwendo
Truth be told, I've loved DL1 and can't even remember any of the story. I doubt DL2's story will be worse or that that is too important for this kind of game.

Techland did good with DL1, so it earned my trust for DL2.

This.

I get that some people will be disappointed because Techland hyped up the story and C&C, but that's on them. Why expect a great story from a developer that isn't known for that?

As long as the atmosphere and gameplay are on par with DL1, I'll be happy.

Originally Posted by JDR13
Square Enix is involved in some way.

Yeah, seems they're publishing it in the Americas. The rest of the world is Techland themselves it seems. Still, pretty remarkable that they're able to.

I wonder if publishing, to the article I read, means both financing and distribution. I doubt that you can isolate financing just for the Americas.

Originally Posted by danutz_plusplus
Yeah, seems they're publishing it in the Americas. The rest of the world is Techland themselves it seems. Still, pretty remarkable that they're able to.

I wonder if publishing, to the article I read, means both financing and distribution. I doubt that you can isolate financing just for the Americas.

Techland apparently has their own publishing division called Techland Publishing that they started a few years back. I don't think they've published a lot of games, but I know they were a distributor for Torment: Tides of Numenera.

Originally Posted by JDR13
I get that some people will be disappointed because Techland hyped up the story and C&C, but that's on them. Why expect a great story from a developer that isn't known for that?

Well, yeah, because they hyped it up. Simple as that.

GamesIndustry.biz wrote an article that comments on several reviews and looks interesting, but I've only read it partially.

Isn't that game becoming like Ubisoft's AC (and perhaps Far Cry though it's been a long time for me), a vast and well-designed world full of filling content with an OK story?

As long as one doesn't feel compelled to do everything the game offers and focuses on the good, it should be fun enough.

I enjoyed DL1, but I wasn't expecting much from the story and didn't care for the finale nor the silly boss fights.

Companies are just collections of human beings. Switch up the human beings your company is comprised of and you can change the nature of your company.

So when Techland talked a lot about how story and characters and writing were important to them for Dying Light 2, I took that to mean that they hired people who were talented in those areas and made it a focus of development. What I didn't ever think is that the same people would just try harder or something. The Chris Avellone hiring obviously ended disastrously, but I didn't think he was the only guy they brought in for that purpose.

Anyway, DL1 wasn't highly regarded for its story elements and I thought it was perfectly fine, so I'll probably think this one is too.

Somehow I never got into the zombie apocalypse stuff. There got to be an enemy. The Nazis got old, the Soviets were out with the end of the cold war (but may be in soon again), the Muslim terrorists are seen racistic…we are left either with zombies or aliens. Those are neutral and do not hurt anyone's feelings. I find the zombies completely uninteresting in modern settings.

Originally Posted by largh
Somehow I never got into the zombie apocalypse stuff. There got to be an enemy. The Nazis got old, the Soviets were out with the end of the cold war (but may be in soon again), the Muslim terrorists are seen racistic…we are left either with zombies or aliens. Those are neutral and do not hurt anyone's feelings. I find the zombies completely uninteresting in modern settings.

Zombie stories are never about the zombies. What you have to find interesting is what a zombie apocalypse does to break down and reshape society.

Yeah, they put out one particular video ages ago that made the C&C with the various factions look really interesting, but I've suspected for a while that it might not pan out that way. Pity.

I just played the first two hours. I haven't been in the city for long (you start out in the wilderness), so I haven't experienced much of the main game loop.
However, compared to Dying Light 1 (which I've played through twice) the first two hours seem to be even stronger in story, though I've not seen any C&C yet.

So far, my impressions are very positive. If you liked the first, I think you'll love this one.

Some of the reviews seem to be a little bit bullshit. One even criticizes it for things that are supposedly changes but were actually in the first, and the idea of comparing the story to the story of proper RPGs seems a bit silly - it's unlikely to compete with the likes of Witcher 3 or Mass Effect or whatever in that regard. [I'm not referring to the hyped C&C aspects here, which I can't opine on yet, but more the other story aspects that some of the reviews were on about]

Performance wise, It runs better than I thought it would. I'm only running it on Medium on my home "work" PC with an AMD 4GB RX570, bit it looks pretty good and running at around 50-60 fps. It's going to look amazing for you guys with truly decent PCs. I might try it on our other PC yet, which has twice as much VRAM (8GB RX580).
There was one flashback bit that looked a bit last-gen graphically, but I wonder if that was a stylistic choice.

Originally Posted by Shagnak
There was one flashback bit that looked a bit last-gen graphically, but I wonder if that was a stylistic choice.

If you're referring to the scene that looked much worse than last gen. It wouldn't have stood out on the Xbox 360. Weird, since the graphics are generally nice enough.

Originally Posted by JFarrell71
If you're referring to the scene

That's the one! Yeah, it looked terrible. Certainly needed some more TLC before release.

I kept watching some twitch streams of people playing DL2, and it's looking pretty solid to me. I'm sure it has bugs and issues, but hopefully those can get ironed out. But the core of the game seems solid. I think, when I actually get to it, I'm gonna go through DL1 first, since I never made much progress in that. And I feel I'm in the mood for an immersive first-person action game, similar to Dishonored.

I can't remember, but how does DL1/2 handle the leveling? Do you get xp from killing enemies, and so stealth is discouraged? Or can you max your character even while stealthing encounters?

Originally Posted by danutz_plusplus
I kept watching some twitch streams of people playing DL2, and it's looking pretty solid to me. I'm sure it has bugs and issues, but hopefully those can get ironed out. But the core of the game seems solid. I think, when I actually get to it, I'm gonna go through DL1 first, since I never made much progress in that. And I feel I'm in the mood for an immersive first-person action game, similar to Dishonored.

I can't remember, but how does DL1/2 handle the leveling? Do you get xp from killing enemies, and so stealth is discouraged? Or can you max your character even while stealthing encounters?

You should definitely play DL1 first. It's a fantastic game imo, and I think you'd like it based on other games you like.

As for stealth, you won't really be using it much. It's a game where you're constantly criss-crossing the map, and you want to get from point A to point B as fast as you can. Not to mention you're often racing against time and other survivors.

XP is contextual. You have three primary skill trees, and each one has its own XP meter. i.e. You get XP for the Agility tree while doing parkour, etc.

*Edit* That's for DL1 obviously. I have no idea how those things work in DL2.

Originally Posted by JDR13
XP is contextual. You have three primary skill trees, and each one has its own XP meter. i.e. You get XP for the Agility tree while doing parkour, etc.

*Edit* That's for DL1 obviously. I have no idea how those things work in DL2.

Seems very similar, other than maybe the labels, e.g., I think they have a Parkour tree instead of Agility? I'll check next time I play.

Re: gfx
I notice some muddy looking gfx now and then , so I checked my settings and I see that it has auto-selected FSR (AMD's scaling tech). So, those numbers I'm getting are from scaled gfx. Forcing it to use native resolution drops it down to 30-ish quite often. I think I def need to use my other PC.

Edit: down to 2 trees: combat and parkour