Race against time: Dying Light 2 review
After as many as 7 long years, the Polish studio Techland released a sequel to their sensational game Dying Light, which combined elements of parkour and survival in a city inhabited by dangerous zombies. Did the sequel manage to jump over the original, or at least turn out to be just as good?
Again for the old
The authors from Techland clearly understand that after 7 years even those who once played this exciting adventure at the very start could forget about the game. Yes, and while we were fueled by interest in the continuation of the trailers and announcements, there could be people who decided to immediately start with the second part, without playing the original before.
Start
Dying Light 2 begins immediately with an informative introductory video that briefly retells the tragic events in Harran, where the original virus leaked from and, in fact, where it was successfully destroyed. True, they managed to live in peace for a short time, because human greed for profit and power eventually changed the whole world. The virus, which should have been destroyed, is now not only restored to its original state, but also improved by various manipulations by the research laboratories.
Only this time it was not the city that plunged into darkness, but the whole world. Now people began to build walls not to isolate terrible creatures, but to save them from them. Many cities fell before the onslaught of the spread of this virus, turning into ghost towns, over which nature took over, and the zombies themselves became their full-fledged inhabitants.
Who and what
The main character, a guy named Aiden, has a difficult fate: once he and his sister were among the experimental people on whom they tested developments based on a zombie virus and tried to derive the ideal formula for creating superhumans. It was not possible to finish what was started by this unit of the VGM due to the cleansing by order from above. Several children were among the missing, and one of them is Aiden. He became a pilgrim, traveling from city to city in search of traces of his sister and continuing to entertain the hope of restoring family ties. One of the leads lies in the city of Old Vellidor.
The events of the first and second games are not directly connected, and the main moments of the past remain completely in the past, retaining only the general plot in the sequel. This makes it as easy as possible for all beginners to dive into the game. The prologue of the game is perhaps the most lyrical event that the player will experience while getting acquainted with the basics of the game. This is not only training, but also an emotional plot segment that leaves a pleasant aftertaste. The feeling that the prologue was created intentionally with a different tone of narration compared to the rest of the game, and the musical accompaniment completely creates the atmosphere of an indie project in the spirit of Firewatch. Behind the walls will be a completely different game...
Far Cry with zombies
In the first Dying Light, the developers tried their best to create maximum realism in terms of stylistic design: a realistic city and characters, zombies that frightened with their study. The second part from the very announcement was already positioned by the creators as a modern world that falls into the dark Middle Ages in order to show how human society can fall. In fact, the game now feels like a fantasy story with a minimum of realism from the original. And now with RPG elements.

Civilization returned to the Middle Ages due to the general apocalypse, the government fell, technologies were lost. Thus, you can see a modern city, which is supported, so to speak, by medieval orders.
"Civilization returned to the Middle Ages due to the general apocalypse, the government fell, technology was lost. Thus, you can see a modern city, which is supported, so to speak, by medieval orders."-Timon Smektala
Lead Game Designer at Techland
From the fact that the atmosphere of the game is seriously different from its predecessor, at first you begin to feel uncomfortable, especially if many hours were played in the last game. Nostalgia begins to show up strongly at moments when, among a number of changes, original mechanics appear, but the shell of the project is already completely different.
As such, there is no “dark Middle Ages” in the game, and all the plot points on this topic are more like Mad Max, but not in the way the authors intended.
Between the houses are wide and rather deserted avenues. Of course, if you go down the street, then the main range will be from dirty and brown tones. In general, Old Vellidor looks pretty uniform. Tall buildings, which you quickly remember, save as landmarks.
RPG with zombies
Zombies no longer look so realistically creepy, rather the opposite - typically stylized as a fantasy design, and the system of information plates with health, stamina and the level of the enemy, on the contrary, changes the attitude towards them. They are now perceived as a unit for the grind, and not those from whom you want to quickly take your legs off. The level system, in general, is not a level system as such - rather, it informs that the higher the level unit, the more tenacious and strong the enemy is in front of the player. Anyway, killing him with stealth or hand-to-hand combat is not a problem.
Life boils at night
The game adapts in every possible way to the player, constantly throwing up good weapons in boxes. There is no such thing here that you have to run around with a rusty key for half the game, trying to avoid clashes with enemies as much as possible, as in the original. On the contrary, the game pushes the player to physical violence rather than escape. For example, before the zombies were both day and night in the maximum concentration on the streets of Harran - now in Vellidor there are practically none during the day, as this is due to the fact that the sun kills them. Only those units that have immunity to ultraviolet rays come out. The rest of the zombies sleep in abandoned buildings but patrol the streets at night, just like the Freakers from Days Gone.
It seems that the developers have studied the statistics of the players, compared the percentage of daytime and night attacks and decided to radically change their attitude towards nighttime. Now both story and side quests almost always take place at night. The game even constantly gives hints that it’s not scary to play at night, on the contrary, there will be much less zombies in buildings, and more loot! Indeed, playing at night has become much more comfortable, and I met an aggressive jumper only once ...
Towers, towers, towers
In the best "Polish traditions" of sandboxes, the city is crammed with interesting side quests and various question marks. Useful information is collected with binoculars and marked on a map. In addition to this, in the best "French tradition", windmills were added, analogues of towers from Far Cry, the activation of which not only helps to secure several areas, filling it with a settlement of people, but also introduces ultraviolet lamps, making night races even more comfortable.
Dying Light 2 as a game is revealed quite slowly. The changed atmosphere may not be to the liking of some fans. Gameplay innovations may seem superfluous, such as spending stamina energy during parkour or an immunity counter. Others will notice the outdated borrowings from open-world games that have set the teeth on edge that have come out from competitors throughout all these years while the project was in development. But still, the developers have created an excellent variable story with a new world, albeit significantly changing the vector that was set by the original Dying Light.