Ahhh! It’s great to be back in Harran! Am I right? Beautiful views, plenty of work and hordes of zombies! I tell you, if a zombie apocalypse ever comes to be within my lifetime, I’ll be just fine. Wink, wink!
Anyway, for starters, if you haven’t played the first Dying Light, you’re missing out. Not only is Dying Light a great game, it helps you appreciate and understand Dying Light 2 much more than you would a newbie. So, if you haven’t played the original, I suggest you go pick it up and play it out! It’s worth it.
Moving on, let’s go over the good and the bad until we reach my final score of the review.
Graphics are pretty good on the PS5 and the game doesn’t seem to stutter and buffer when playing through and of course, there are no real loading times to contend with on current Gen consoles, so we’re happy there.
Parkour games don’t always play well, and it’s far from my favorite type of playstyle, but Dying Light does it so well, I forget just how much I hated Mirrors Edge. The developers at Techland definitely offer great parkour gaming!
The controls work great all the way around. Very responsive and the button layout works well without needing to make changes, at least for me. You’ll find that as you level up and upgrade your character, the controls become much more important than meets the eye, so pay attention to those upgrades!
The storyline is alright, but not great. I thought the story in the first entry of the series was better, but that’s just my humble opinion. The story is just fine and as you play on, it does get better. I found myself becoming more emotionally invested half way through my playthrough. We may not always realize we are invested with characters we play, but it goes to show just how good a game can be. Sometimes you just don’t care about the characters or stories because a game is just that bad. Thankfully, that’s not the case here.
The audio is also spot on. Sound effects and music together really make the setting come to life. There is some licensed music in the game, so if you’re streaming, check the audio settings and turn off licensed music to avoid any copyright issues you could run into.
Upgrading your character isn’t the only upgradable thing in the game either. You can mod your weapons which is practically an upgrade in itself. You can also upgrade crafting recipes. If you have a recipe for medicine to heal yourself, you can upgrade that recipe and make the medicine more powerful and quicker to use. You can also upgrade your weapon mod recipes for even more powerful weapons all around.
As far as the bad goes, I haven’t had too much trouble with bugs, but I have had my instances where I couldn’t complete a mission because the AI characters I need to interact with aren’t responding or seem to be missing from the area. I typically have to restart the game and it usually let’s me finish missions.
The game doesn’t have cross-platform play just yet, but you can play with others on the same platform as you. The coop seemed to work just fine for me, but it’s lacking that cross-platform I have gotten used to having. I believe they intend to update that later on.
The developers at Techland did issue a day one patch and it helped immensely. I tried playing three days before the patch and kept getting stuck on my missions and had a hard time interacting with AI characters and the environment alike. With the day one patch in place, it was two different games. More patches are on the way as the dev team means to squash as many bugs as they can.
I’m giving this zombie apocalyptic parkour game a 9 out of 10! If the story was better, I would have gone with 10 out of 10, but I have to call it how I see it, and while the story is alright, it’s not great and that makes a difference when writing a review.
All in all, I highly recommend this game and as I said before, I also recommend the original to those that haven’t played it yet. Both are top notch fun and you can sink hours of gameplay into them.
What are your thoughts on Dying Light 2? Have you played through or are you planning to pick it up? MYhe zombies isn’t your thing and you want to pass all together. Whatever the answers may be, let us know and we can discuss it more!