Dying Light 2 Is Techland’s Best Game Yet

Techland’s Dying Light had two ideas going for it that were so smart that it’s a wonder no other studio has tried to copy them since. Its horror parkour raised blood pressure levels everywhere, with few ever forgetting their first encounter with a Volatile, while the game’s genius day and night cycle provided its world a sense of dynamism that’s sorely lacking elsewhere, as well as giving its players anxiety to go along with the aforementioned stress. Six years and about two million free updates for the original game later, it’s finally Dying Light 2‘s time to shine after a long and tumultuous development period.

Dying Light 2 represents a turning of the dials from Techland, an evolution of the previous game that takes everything that worked, makes them better, and adds cherries on top. It’s ambitious to say the least, featuring the kind of interconnected, living RPG world that New Vegas mastered and so few studios have attempted to better since, mixed with the kind of decision-making that would make prime Telltale sweat. It’s not perfect, with a few of the basics and odd design decisions letting the overall experience down, but Dying Light 2 marks Techland making a play for the crown that now loosely fits CD Projekt Red’s head.

You play as Aiden, an outcast who’s travelled to Villedor, the last known standing city on the planet after a new strain of the Harran Virus decimated civilization in record time. You’re searching for your sister among the rubble of humanity, with some factions simply trying to survive while others want to steer a rudderless world. You play all sides as you hunt down your ghosts, one dropkick at a time, shaping the world as you glide through the air like a somehow gruffer Randy Orton.

Those familiar with the original game will feel right at home with Dying Light 2, though its combat and general movement feels far silkier from the off. Leaping from building to building is an absolute delight, particularly once Olivier Deriviere’s amazing soundtrack kicks in and you feel one GoPro away from starting up your own niche YouTube channel. The verticality is simply unmatched by any game that doesn’t see you swinging from webs, as Aiden scarpers up and across walls, even using the heads of the infected to provide enough air to pop open a Paraglider and reach even greater heights. You don’t need cars when you can basically fly.

Then there’s the combat, which again feels like an upgrade on what came before, especially against human enemies; often cited as a weak point in the original. Enemies learn and adapt to your moves, with them blocking you if you keep trying to cheese the same move, forcing you to make full use of Aiden’s arsenal of tricks. Enemies dodging your power attacks? Chuck some Throwing Knives at them. Finding it difficult to break down their defences? Grenades for dinner, followed up by a few arrows for dessert. Want to dropkick them? Dropkick them. It’s your right. You deserve to.

The infected are also a step-up from the original in terms of design. 15 years of atrophy has left them looking rather not pretty, with a shuffling pack of them likely to send a shiver down the spine. It’s good, then, that there’s still primal joy to be had in simply lopping their heads off, with Dying Light 2 featuring some of the crispest and most gruesome death animations ever committed to a video game. I caved in a bandit’s head at one point and he looked so awful as he mechanically twitched around with his brain in bits that I genuinely felt bad, almost sickened. Very cool.

While Dying Light 2’s general gameplay feels like Techland saying “again, but better“, they’ve really focused on putting the RP in RPG this time around. Crafting allows you to make your own tools of destruction from the resources you scavenge around the world, while you can also find just a crazy amount of different gear and weapons out in the wild. Some players will no doubt get their haunches up over the inclusion of health bars and levels above the heads of enemies by default, though this can mercifully be turned off at any time. Where Dying Light 2 really tries to embrace the RPG is in its storytelling, world-building, and progression, often to magnificent effect.

The original Dying Light had a solid though overall forgettable story, but its sequel immediately tries to put it at the forefront — Techland really want you to feel like a citizen of Villedor, someone who can change the world by saying the right things to the right people, or maybe even the wrong things to the wrong people. The writing is sharper, the characters feel more like people, and you do genuinely feel like you’re having an impact through your decisions. The choice system is perhaps not as impactful as initially thought, with your decisions not changing the very design of the city, but it still definitely feels like the world around you is being shaped by your choices both good and bad.

Some changes are more overt, like whichever faction you side with in a zone offering things like trampolines or traps, while others are more subtle, like NPCs discussing your decisions amongst themselves. Also, this might feel silly to some, but NPCs having specific conversations depending on the time of day never stopped impressing me. Little things like that, as well as how no player will likely ever have a playthrough the exact same, really immerse you in the world of Dying Light 2. I’ve played it for 100 hours and written eighty articles on the behemoth, yet I could still easily jump into my save again and start kicking some idiots for many more hours.

A lot of that comes down to just how little of its map feels like filler. Villedor isn’t the biggest open world map ever, but that’s because it actually does stuff with its spaces rather than just having them be spaces. It’s hard to forget the first time you walk through an open door and encounter a pack of sleeping Biters, you quietly manoeuvring around them to loot what used to be an opulent apartment. The game is also teeming with things to collect, see, and do, though never to the extent that it feels overwhelming or like you’re just ticking things off a list. Techland has managed to balance the quality of the content with the quantity expertly here.

However, for as inviting as Dying Light 2 is, it does have some design decisions that feel misguided or just overlooked, especially in a massive open world RPG where your choices can shape the story. The lack of a manual save feels like the biggest, with you unable to return to any earlier point than what the autosave deigns, meaning that you can’t go back and change any decisions. While this does give each decision more weight, it also means that you have to start a whole new save (there’s also no new game plus) to see what the other side of the coin entails. This wouldn’t be so bad except the power curve that’s so engaging in your first playthrough feels like a rather limiting millstone the second time around — having to relearn how to simply sprint is just really offputting, even more so with the game’s glacial pace in the early going.

I also have some technical concerns from my time with the pre-release build, though I’m cautious about focusing on them too much with a day one patch right around the corner. While I didn’t have any crashes and the performance remained (mostly) steady at 1080 60fps on my barely-above-minimum-spec rig, mostly thanks to some rather innovative in-game upscaling, there were some instances where it felt like the game creaked under the weight of so many different variables. Side quests that I had put on the back burner quietly disappeared, while I was constantly getting asked to complete a quest I’d already completed (multiple times) and rediscover spots on the map I’d already discovered. I’m really sick of the Water Tower in Horseshoe. My time with the PS5 version was relatively fault-free, though I didn’t spend nearly as many hours with it.

However, Dying Light 2 creaks the loudest in its finale, a frankly bonkers section that feels like a direct response to the disappointment of the Rais showdown that unfortunately goes way too far in the opposite direction. It’s as if Saints Row and Resident Evil 6 are playing keep-ball with the kitchen sink, it’s that overblown. Not only that, but you can really sense the game struggling to compute every choice, every action you’ve made to come up with the right ending for you by its end, with it also having the least convincing action across the whole game. Even though I unlocked what I think is the best ending, the story still felt like it had some holes to fill. Dying Light 2 weaves a grand tapestry of different threads, but sometimes forgets to knit them all together.

Despite it not always being able to meet its own grand ambitions, Dying Light 2 is still one of the easiest recommendations I’ve ever made for anyone who pines for a time when open world RPGs actually remembered the most important part of being a role-playing game: the role-playing. It’s easy to get lost in Villedor and with Techland likely to support the game for the next half-decade (if the previous game was anything to go by), its story is likely only just beginning. Dying Light 2 deserves its time in the spotlight this month, and hopefully for many more months to come.

A Steam and PS5 key was provided by PR for the purposes of this coverage.