Back to the joyous parkour and zombie-decapitating open-world mayhem.
When a game, in an indefinable way, makes you feel at ease from the moment it starts, it’s generally a good sign. That’s certainly what Dying Light 2 does – especially for those who played its 2015 predecessor. The franchise’s two key attributes, parkour-style movement and a creamy, precise and super-satisfying melee combat, are not only in evidence from the start, but have benefited from plenty of refinement since the first Dying Light game. It’s somewhat ironic that Dying Light 2 swiftly makes you feel at ease, since the environment it plunges you into is anything but comfortable. Its events take place 15 years after the original viral outbreak depicted in the first game, and show a world in a dire state (in a way that strikes plenty of chords after our own real-life pandemic experiences). Dying Light 2’s protagonist, Aiden, is a so-called Pilgrim, one of the few intrepid humans willing to venture outside the walled cities that remain. Haunted by memories of childhood experimentation, he is on a quest to find his sister Mia, and his investigations lead him to the city of Villedor. On the way to Villedor, Aiden acquires a GRE access key – the GRE being the medical, quasi-paramilitary organization that sprung into action to find a cure for the first game’s viral outbreak in Harran, but was blamed for further outbreaks and hounded into oblivion. That GRE key – the only means of unlocking anything GRE-related, of which there is plenty in Villedor – eventually becomes the game’s prime plot MacGuffin. After an encounter with some Renegades – a somewhat Borderlands-style street-gang faction – and getting infected with the zombie-inducing virus, Aiden makes it to Villedor. There he is nearly hanged because he doesn’t have a biomarker: a wristband that changes color if he’s about to turn into a zombie. A character called Hakon rescues him and, having acquired said biomarker, the fun begins in earnest. Like the first game, a day-night cycle is a prominent feature: the Infected (as Dying Light 2 calls its zombies) mostly sleep indoors by day and come out onto the streets to wreak havoc at night, so it’s safest for Aiden to use his parkour skills to traverse Villedor via its rooftops after dark. At first, the action is confined to the district of Old Villedor, but Aiden is desperate to reach the city’s skyscraper-studded Central Loop, where information regarding Mia, he’s told, can be found in a bar called the Fish Eye. But before he can get to Central Loop, there’s a lot of story-driven action to undergo. The Metro tunnel leading from Old Villedor to other parts of the city is under the control of the Peace Keepers (known as PKs), whose leader, Lucas, has been assassinated. The new leader of the PKs, Aitor, agrees to let Aiden through if he finds out who killed Lucas. But Aiden also gets caught up in performing missions for the Survivors, who view the PKs as oppressors. It swiftly becomes apparent that, to an even greater extent than the first game, Dying Light 2: Stay Human is a complex, full-blown RPG masquerading as a mere zombie game.
