Dying Light 2: Stay Human

This game is captivating. It is captivating on every single aspect, from the beautiful and harsh land scapes of the city to the cruelty and gore of the darkest places in the darkness. This game is not perfect but in some ways I actually prefer it to the first game. The first game is great, Crane is a legend, but this has some surprising power to it.

First of all, I love the voice acting, it is SO amazing and in some ways way more convincing that in DL1. Second of all, I know it's a stretch to get the trees and plants to grow on top of a buildings, but I love it. It gives such a organic feeling to the game amd makes it more enjoyable than the first game. Sometimes I just glide down to watch the scenery. The paraglider is a great add.

Third of all, the music is VERY recognizable and I enjoy it.

What makes this a 8/10 game and not more, is the plot. Finding Mia is not a convincing motivation for Aiden to do stuff. I wish he was fleshed out more. Lawan and Hakon are a great add and I enjoy connecting with both of them, but Mia stays as a distant character that I have no reason to go after.

Overall this game is a great experience. Now on my second play through and nearly 300 hours behind, the story keeps on going.

Trash, ruined by directors. Made dl2, then were reworking it and deleting content for the last 2 years. A lot of things removed, downgraded or deleted again.

This review is a bit pre-mature as I've yet to finish but here's a few stand outs of the game so far.

Parkour - This a major step up the from Dying Light 1. It takes everything you know and love about Dying Light's parkour and turns it up to 11. This is certainly the best parkour system I've seen in a fist person game.

Environment - While there are a few issues the environment is near perfect, everything has been designed around the parkour element so you'll always find a path on the rooftops of where you need to go.

Graphics - They are a major upgrade from the first game but for a 2022 game it does suffer is some areas. The lighting is not as good as most games nowadays and when you use the flashlight no shadow is cast. But my main issue with the graphics is the NPC's. The faces are very cartoony and the facial animation overall is not acceptable for a game released in 2022. With that said the story is not a major part of the Dying Light franchise so it is not a huge impact on the overall enjoyment of the game.

Performance - This is a bit of a mixed bag, the graphics settings are very limited so it's difficult to tweak it for optimal performance. It's not terrible but it's not great either. With my 1070ti and 9700k with 32gb of ram I was running at about 35-45 fps @1440p on medium to low settings. The game is poorly optimized and mid level systems will struggle to run it. But there is a solution, there is an option to lower the tender resolution then upscale it with post processing.

This takes my fps from about 40 to over 100, the downside is with a lower render resolution textures become blurry.

Combat - Combat has both improved and declined since the release of Dying Light 1. Human vs Human combat has significantly improved since the first game, the flow is much nicer and more defined than before. But Player vs zombie combat has taken a hit, the rag dolls that were in the previous game were pretty incredible. Hit a zombie in the leg and he falls over, kick them and they'll fly backwards and fall on the ground. Kick them into someone spikes and they'll go right through the zombie. Unfortunately with Dying light 2 the rag doll is almost nonexistent. Instead if plays one of several pre-canned animations depending on where you hit a zombie. This is fine at first but becomes very repetitive and apparent it's just repeating the same animations instead of the dynamic rag dolls in Dying Light 1.

Story - I will not be going over this as it's spoiler free and I've yet to finish it.

Conclusion - Overall this is a great sequel and addition to the Dying Light franchise, some of the things that I've mentioned can be fixed post launch and I sincerely hope that Techland does fix them as this has potential to be one of the best games of 2022.

From what I have played so far I am highly enjoying, I loved the first dying light so have been waiting for this sequel for what seems like forever, unfortunately there are a few issues and I'm finding some of the controls especially combat rather difficult, hopefully once a few more updates have been applied the issues will be resolved.

I just read a much-hated review of this game on this board. Could you have possibly imagined even five years ago that someone would complain that most of the zombies in a game are white? That's where we are, folks.

I put the title in quotation marks because I'm borrowing it from an article about this game. And I agree with it. This game has improvements from its predecessor-- I especially like the fact that so far the enemies aren't cartoonish James Bond movie-like villains. But the animation for the combat is a bit weird to me, and it's maybe even too easy. I've really enjoyed it so far, though. I will probably update this review when I complete it.