Dying Light 2 Is Both Beautiful and Brutal

In recent memory we’ve seen some very good video games released in nearly every month of the year. For many years this just wasn’t the case. After building quite a cult following upon releasing Dead Island in 2011, Techland built on that momentum and created a parkour survival action game and released Dying Light to the world in January of 2015. It was often thought that games were just dumped into the spring months and left to die. Publishers wanted to get their best titles out by the holiday in order to really boost their sales. Anything releasing in the months after that had a history of not being critical or financial successes. Dying Light came out of nowhere and completely changed everything.

We were fortunate enough to have a closed-door look at what they’ve been working on for the last few years on their follow up – Dying Light 2.

In the first game, night and day brought completely different experiences and challenges. This time around nearly every decision you make will have a lasting consequence. Dying Light nailed the gameplay. Moving around a city using your parkour abilities felt so smooth and fluid and the combat felt like a nice improvement over their prior titles. If our look at the sequel showed us anything it’s that they’ve only improved all of these areas making what already felt great even better. Modded weapons can be used to send destructive blows to the infected and humans alike. When asked if you could get through the game without killing any humans, the developers answered with a simple no, after chuckling about it for a second or two. When killing things looks and feels this good you’ll want to make sure you do plenty of it.

Techland also wanted to focus on crafting a story that matched the fantastic gameplay on every level. Every situation requires a quick answer from you and you won’t have long to decide because this is an action game and things happen fast. Making a decision will lead you on a completely different path than you would have been on if you’d have picked the other option. Kill a man that could get you into a base and you’ll have a much harder time getting in. Stay and save your mate and you may lose a chance to follow the “killer” in an attempt to avenge them. Upon rolling the credits on Dying Light 2 the developers said you may only see about 50% of the game. If this doesn’t make you want to play it again and see the other options, I’m not sure what will.

The demo introduced us to Aiden. A different hero than we are used to. Aiden lives in a city where everyone is infected fifteen years after the events of the first game and he’s no different. They’re about to run out of water and a meeting is being held between two rival factions in order to work together and plead with the colonial to turn on the pumps and restore water to the people.

When things go terribly wrong and the leader Frank is shot, Aiden has a choice to make. Stay with Frank or pursue the attacker. In our demo Aiden chose the latter and took off after the driver of the truck. With no view of the culprit it’s time to see the parkour in action. Finding the high ground in order to spot the truck leads Aiden on a foot race through the city as he tries to locate the truck. As expected, things go terribly wrong and he has to fight his way from building to building, killing as many infected as he can along the way. Once spotting and catching up to the truck it’s decision time… kill the alleged killer or use him to enter the castle. One way gets you in quicker and the other allows you some retribution for the now confirmed death of Frank. In our demo we saw Aiden spare the driver which allowed him to enter the Castle fairly easily.

Once inside the castle we learn from The Colonial himself that we had been played and that the water could not be turned on from here. Now came the last decision of the demo. Trust the Colonial or complete the mission. We completed the mission and turned on the pumps. This drained the water, exposing a brand-new area of the city that was once under water. This will undoubtedly bring on more missions and terrors as the game progresses.

Dying Light 2 has upped the ante by not only improving the gameplay from the first game but also appearing to have added a thought provoking decision driven story to the game. One that we were not expecting at all.

It’s unclear at this point how much the day and night cycles will affect the game, but we can’t wait to find out when the game releases in the Spring of 2020 on Xbox One, PS4, and PC.