Dying Light 2

Going into this game I was so excited to get my hands on it because the first person parkour mechanics in Dying light 1 felt so good that I could only imagine what types of improvements they were going to make to an already fantastic system. After playing roughly 25 hours and beating the main story, it has left me with one glaring question.. Does a great game have to tell a great story?

In Dying Light 2, you play as the main character ,Aiden, who stumbles upon the city of Villedor, where you are barely alive and in need of desperate care. From the very beginning, Aiden makes it clear that his nomadic exploration is purely motivated from trying to find his sister. The story revolves around his desire to help find and save his sister from the scientific torture that they endured as children. It’s your job to gain the trust of the Villedor townsfolk and try to find out where your sister may be located to save her. Once you complete the tutorial portion of the game, the European inspired town of Villedor becomes your open world sandbox. Once the game opens up, you are free to go about the world however you see fit, which usually involves doing some crazy fun parkour lines. Above all else in this game, I want to point out how utterly satisfying the parkour system is in Dying light 2. 

I found myself enjoying the journey to the next objective more than the objective itself because of how engaging the parkour felt. With large open world games all having a fast travel mechanic that is easy to rely on, it was so refreshing to be playing a game that cherished the journey and not the final destination. Similar to dying light 1, you start out with limited combat and parkour skills that can be improved through skill progression trees. They keep these trees separate which forces you to make decisions on what you want to improve first. I pretty much tried to max out my parkour skills to start because the system was oh so satisfying. The skills that you unlock pair so well with the progression because you feel these very tangible improvements such as longer jumps, faster maneuverability around obstacles, and the ability to chain moves together. Having this tangible progression paired with a responsive parkour control system left me oftentimes mobbing around town looking for slick lines to make and forgoing the next objective until I was satisfied.

In regards to the combat portion of the skill tree, many of the abilities to unlock had a focus on adding parkour elements into your combat. I found that the combat abilities fell into two categories: 1. You use the ability every fight and 2. The ability feels so niche or specific that you forget you have it and dont use it.. This isn't a knock on a good chunk of the abilities in the combat tree, but rather they are abilities that the game never really forces you to use or learn to complete an objective. Learning and mastering the full set of combat skills is something that you essentially will have to coach yourself to do because you can be successful in combat with just a few moves. I'm not saying that the full combat system is limited, because it's actually very deep, but the game never really forces the issue of requiring you to use your full set of combat skills. Overall with the skill trees, it did feel like the most important and impactful skills were on the parkour side.

Outside of the improvements to the combat and subtle tweaks to the parkour, Techland made some major changes to how you approach night time. For those who didn't play the first one, when the sun goes down, the zombies come out and my goodness it is terrifying. In the first game it was very much ingrained into you that you NEVER want to be outside at night and you definitely get punished for it in the first game. Techland made changes to the night mechanics drastically and created more of a system that forced you to do certain things at night. To keep the stakes high and tensions even higher, they littered the streets with Howlers, who are essentially zombie fire alarms alerting everyone around you if you got too close to them. If a howler got alerted, it queues up a chase where it is now your sole duty to run for your life to the nearest safe area. The longer it takes you to get to a safe area, the stronger the chase becomes and the strongest zombies come out to play. It felt very much like the wanted level system in grand theft auto, and it left me short of breath with my palms sweating from some of the frantic chases that occurred. Techland also created night specific missions in order to force the players to face their fear of night and complete difficult objectives.

The other main mechanic they added to the 2nd installment is the addition of fractions. The two factions you are torn between are the Survivors and the Peacekeepers. The survivors are essentially the group that wants everyone to have a voice and be free while the peacekeepers have a more military minded approach to how the city should be run. Throughout the campaign and story, you work with both parties and sometimes have to make decisions on who you want to side with for the time being. Where these choices have the most impact is determining what factions get certain areas of the map. By giving areas to the peacekeepers, it would unlock more offensive environment abilities throughout the area such as car traps or spike traps to take out zombies that might be chasing you. If you hand the area over to the survivors, then you would get the benefit of more parkour environment abilities like landing pads and ziplines. Due to the fact that your choice had a direct impact on the environment, I often chose the survivors because I wanted to maximize my full parkour potential and I made decisions based off of that, and not based on how it would affect the story campaign.

Speaking of story, this is likely where Dying Light 2 is going to take some heat. I'm not going to give any spoilers, but the premise throughout the entire game is finding your sister. Your main objectives often involve going around looking for someone who has info about her, finding them, having to do something to gain their trust, and then getting a small piece of info about your sister. This becomes a bit of a rinse and repeat situation which honestly, wasn't a gripe of mine because the parkour mechanics were just so much fun when getting from point A to point B that I didn't really care about the outcome of the objective. Throughout the story you’re met with fork in the road decisions that early on felt like they had a lot of impact but in reality only had a temporary effect. For example, there was a time early on in the game where I made a decision that definitely angered the opposing faction, and left me feeling like I closed the door to a lot of missions from that faction, when two missions later I'm back working with them as if nothing had happened. It didn't feel like there was a disconnect or holes in the story because of it, but rather I put more stock into my decisions than the game did. Where I have issues with the story of this game is the last 20% of it. The campaign is a bit of a slow burn but does provide enough twists to keep you wanting to find out more so the pacing felt good. Where the story loses me is that at some point, they begin to get away from what got you there. You build up all these combat and parkour skills for hours and then near the end of the game, you’re not really using any of it. There are moments in this game where my palms were SWEATY from doing parkour objectives that have you hundreds of stories in the air, yet near the end of the game you're doing more puzzles than parkour. The story goes in a direction that felt like all my work leading up to that last 20% of the game didn't really matter from a mechanics standpoint because those mechanics weren’t required to complete the tasks at hand. Pairing that with one of the more forgettable final boss fights that ive experienced in a game left a sour taste in my mouth when the credits rolled. However, I had to pause and think about an important question.. does a great game have to provide a great story? And my answer here is no, it doesn't. I was looking forward to this game because of the parkour mechanics from the first game and they somehow made an amazing parkour system even better. This game truly is all about the journey and not about the destination because they make this game so easy to get distracted from what you originally set out to do. Did it bother me that the story fell a bit flat? Sure it did, but once I finished the closing credits and hopped back into the open world, I was quickly reminded about why this game was so fun. If an amazing story is the biggest criteria for a game you enjoy, then you will likely be left with a sour taste in your mouth. However, the side quests, parkour challenges, and open world goodness that you get from this game greatly makes up for them dropping the ball on the story just a bit. I consider this a great game, regardless of the story, because I keep finding myself going back into the city of Villedor to jump, skip, and slide along the rooftops.

From a technical standpoint, I really did not come across any bugs or technical issues with the game that many other reviewers were pointing out. They did have a Day 0 patch to fix a bunch of bugs so I want to give you peace of mind that many of the bugs that you’re likely seeing online, have been fixed. The ONLY time I ran into an issue was a mission where there was an in-game cutscene and none of the characters rendered, so I experienced a hilarious floating walking talkie for a bit. I found this to be quite the sight to behold and gave me way more laughs than frustrations. I did a quick game reboot and it picked up right before that same cutscene with no issues. The graphics look great and the character’s faces were strikingly familiar to the point where I yelled out “that's Rosario Dawson!” without prior knowledge of her involvement in the game. Near the end of the game, I did notice some framerate drops but only at times where I was standing in water and there were a lot of zombies in the water with me. If I had to guess, all those bodies messing with the water physics caused a bit of a framerate dip, but other than that I did not experience any of the bugs that many reviewers mentioned having.

Overall I think this is a game that will get heat for how the story ended, but i don't think that it is fully deserved. Dying light 2 is such a fun game to pick up and go do what you want and truly takes full advantage of what it feels like to play in a sandbox environment. The combat and parkour progression feels tangible and rewarding so getting around town via rooftops will always be satisfying and intoxicating. Regardless of how the story played out, this game is worth grabbing for the high octane parkour elements alone. There isn't a game out there that comes close to the feeling that Dying light 2 creates with their parkour system and I can't remember the last time a video game has made my palms sweat the way they did. If an amazing story is the main and only driving force into buying this game, then I would tell you to proceed with caution. While dying light 2’s story can fall flat at times, it's not enough to warrant passing up on this game. Dying Light 2 shows that fun and engaging gameplay mechanics can make a game great and also help you forgive and forget any shortcomings in the story. Even with its flaws, dying light 2 is a game that cracks my list of must play games in 2022. Whether that is playing it now or later, this is a game that you don't want to miss out on because of the parkour experience alone.