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Run, fight, and climb your way out of trouble in the day and retain your humanity during the night in the 2022 NYX Game Awards Grand Winner and best zombie game yet!
Introduction
I’m going to be brutally honest with you: Zombie games? Definitely not my thing.
Yes, the appeal of the whole one-versus-all concept is extremely appealing to most of us gamers, and I can’t fault that. Being all alone with nothing but your gear about to crumble and standing in front of a horde of thousands of enemies is a fantasy that we all would like to experience at some point in our lives.
I already had my fun with a good selection of zombie games for a time. I enjoyed both of the Left 4 Dead games, the Dead Rising series at its absolute peak in popularity, Zombi U when the Wii U came out, the first Dead Island game still remains as one of my favorite zombie games to this day, and I’ve always looked forward to a zombies game mode in every yearly release of the Call of Duty games. The thing is, though, that throughout the years, I have already played many PVE games that are just better in every other way in terms of challenge and gameplay.
When I was asked to playtest Dying Light 2: Stay Human with a PC review code submitted from an entry submission from Techland, a Polish game developer, I came in with little to no information other than watching the trailers. And I’m grateful that I came in with no expectations, because Dying Light 2: Stay Human gave me a brand new and unique experience that I desperately needed in the zombie genre. Even though I haven’t played the original Dying Light game released back in 2015, I now understand the well-deserved hype behind it and why the sequel won the Grand Winner prize in the 2022 NYX Game Awards.
The Story So Far
I was scared that since I didn’t play the original game, I would feel left behind on the lore and the events that happened in the first one. Thankfully this wasn’t the case and the entirety of Dying Light 2 takes place years after the first Dying Light.
The opening parts of the game starts out with you the player, Aiden Caldwell, is running away from the group of zombies and just barely escaping from them. After your close shave with death, you are greeted by longtime friend Spike, a pilgrim like you. Pilgrims are individuals in the world who roam around the zombie-infested world with no permanent home and just getting by with their years of experience in surviving in the open world all on their own. During this time, you are put in a tutorial session where you progress throughout the beginning hours of the game on how to harvest materials and craft items, the basics of combat, and how to maneuver around the environment like the world’s most dangerous game of ‘floor is lava’.
During this time, you also find out Aiden’s main intention for the game: Searching for his sister that he was separated from at a young age, and Dr. Waltz, a doctor who experimented and tortured children like them, and will not stop at anything to find both of them, dead or otherwise. Spike later tells us that he cashed in all of his favors and tells Aiden that he came into contact with a man who has information about Waltz and possibly his sister’s location.
However, very early on, Aiden is bitten by a variant of a zombie known as a ‘volatile’, and is infected for the rest of the game (more on that later!) until the informant comes along and save him from certain death and them thrusting you into a short tutorial on basic human-to-human NPC combat mechanics. After that, the informant gives us a working GRE key that allows us to open up areas that cannot be accessed through traditional means and unlocking some high-value materials, resources, and loot.
Shortly after that, you get your bacon saved by a smooth-talking survivor and resident of the next area you’ve entered, known as the ‘Bazaar’, and notes that the citizens of the area almost executed you due to not having a ‘bio-marker’, an essential tool for all citizens, whom are also all infected just like you, to track the progress of the infection and has to suppress it using UV light and/or inhibitors.
Eventually, you do get a bio-marker and shortly after that you are put at a crossroads: You find out that both sides of Villedor, the survivor group of Bazaar, and the ‘Peacekeepers’, a militaristic group whose sole purpose is to keep Villedor safe by any means necessary. From here on out, you have to choose whom to side with as both of these groups can provide you with items that can help you as you progress throughout the game, as well as an added bonus of being smuggled into the ‘Central District’ continue your quest.
Many of the choices that you will face and make will have an impact that changes your approach in the game from here on out. So you have to decide on your own whether you want gear to increase your chances of survival, or making sure you survive your entire journey from point A to point B during the dead of night (or blowing up zombies sky-high and watching them rain, that’s even more fun!).
The Visuals
Short answer: Simply put, the visuals are fantastic.
Long answer: Visuals are incredibly well-executed in the given setting of the game cooked up by the geniuses over at Techland. During my first minutes in the game where I had finished looting a house with Spike and us sitting down and having a chat with each other over a couple of beers and watching the last moments of a sunset together, the warm rays of light really did give me some sense of hope that humanity still perseveres through the worst of times.
At night, though, it’s a completely different story. Going through the city in the dead of night with a fast-moving group of zombies hot on your heels completely robs you of any hope in surviving for the remainder of the night and you have to make your desperate run for to the purple UV lights scattered around the map for safety. Which is a color that most people would not associate with safety.
I personally feel that Dying Light 2 looks even better in the dark parts of the game rather than it being sunny and bright half the time, and I make it an effort to go through dark tunnels and even running across rooftops without ever having to use it most times as the dark really add to the atmosphere that something is lurking around in the dark and waiting to take a bite out of you. Especially with areas with sources of lighting ranging from hospital signs, emergency lights, purple lights from UV lamps from afar, fire from bonfires and Molotov cocktails, and even light from the moon itself adding even more cinematic and dynamic moments both in cutscenes (though your flashlight is turned off by default during those times) and in normal gameplay.
Speaking of which, raytracing (a very important feature to have in games today) is implemented in Dying Light 2, albeit being restricted to only your flashlight rather than every possible light source. But speaking from the heart (and as a person running a 3070 Ti at 1440p resolution), I don’t necessarily need super-accurate lighting in a game where you are exploring in the dark 40% of the time. The dark parts of the game are already pretty good-looking to me already and limiting raytracing to the light particles coming from your flashlight is more than enough to give you an immersive experience, plus it really does save your device you are playing on a couple of frames in return.
Playthrough Highlights
Starting out this game with an open mind and reasonably low expectations, my first experience into the Dying Light franchise definitely surprised me all the way to the very end of my playthrough, the endgame, and a brand-new playthrough just for co-op with my other colleagues during the night.
Almost immediately, I had found out that there is less of an emphasis on combat in both Dying Light 2 and the original Dying Light game and focuses more on navigating around your surroundings with parkour mechanics instead. Your items have durability levels that can only get you so far, so your best is to find a path that involves less-hostile encounters. But if you really do want to engage in combat, you can still craft strong weapons with an absurd durability level and kill both zombies and other hostile human NPCs and rack up some combat EXP.
Speaking of which, there are also two skill trees that you naturally get by normal parkour use and combat in both day and night time (although you get double EXP for each kill during the night). Each ability both active and passive will help streamline your parkour actions and combat moves further down the line. You will start to hang on to ledges for much longer, and for combat, you can stun and parry human enemies and unlock a brand-new layer of combat where you can utilize your parkour skills to deal massive amounts of damage, stunning them temporarily to give yourself some breathing room to gather yourself, or even finishing them off quickly when they are down.
And if you aren’t the type to run in with both weapons in hand and start hacking away at each other, stealth is also a very viable option to progress through certain sections of the game. You can instead sneak up on human enemies without them noticing your presence and take them down one by one instead, or you can get a bow or a spear to snipe them from a distance and recover them early on. And as a person who is used to stealth archer builds in Skyrim and a veteran of the Metro games, this pleases me!
One extra aspect of your night-time escapades is the addition of a timer that indicates your level of infection. Since UV lamps and the daylight are the only things that is pushing back the dangerous effects of your infection and turning you into those zombies, you have to carefully plan out your night trips farming for EXP or looting goods and resources by finding out which location with UV lights is the closest and resetting the clock before you hit the game over screen. Plus, UV lamps are also a way for zombies to stay away from.
There is, however, another gameplay feature that is extremely fun and incredibly useful for getting places you are already heading to: The paraglider! This can be unlocked after you finish the first act of the game and it gives you the ability to fly across the air as long as you have the stamina to last for the entire experience. You can dive down and then climb back up again to sustain your altitude and distance, but you’re much better off finding air ducts and airways to gain more speed, altitude, and distance reliably. A grappling hook is also at your disposal to climb to areas that you otherwise cannot access to by climbing towards them, and can also be used to Spiderman your way out of trouble if need be.
I also thoroughly enjoyed the story of Aiden and his journey of being hellbent of finding Dr. Waltz and his sister, but what really pulled me into the campaign aspect of Dying Light 2 is the cast of colorful and lively characters with their own backstory and their reasons. With each new area that I entered, I make it an effort to know everyone and even completing side quests to get some items that I otherwise wouldn’t have gotten in my first attempt of my playthrough. Lawan, whose codename is ‘Fish Eye’ and played by Rosario Dawson of The Mandalorian fame as Ahsoka, has done a spectacular job playing her character and also providing her own voice and mocap in the game.
Playthrough Highlights
Starting out this game with an open mind and reasonably low expectations, my first experience into the Dying Light franchise definitely surprised me all the way to the very end of my playthrough, the endgame, and a brand-new playthrough just for co-op with my other colleagues during the night.
Almost immediately, I had found out that there is less of an emphasis on combat in both Dying Light 2 and the original Dying Light game and focuses more on navigating around your surroundings with parkour mechanics instead. Your items have durability levels that can only get you so far, so your best is to find a path that involves less-hostile encounters. But if you really do want to engage in combat, you can still craft strong weapons with an absurd durability level and kill both zombies and other hostile human NPCs and rack up some combat EXP.
Speaking of which, there are also two skill trees that you naturally get by normal parkour use and combat in both day and night time (although you get double EXP for each kill during the night). Each ability both active and passive will help streamline your parkour actions and combat moves further down the line. You will start to hang on to ledges for much longer, and for combat, you can stun and parry human enemies and unlock a brand-new layer of combat where you can utilize your parkour skills to deal massive amounts of damage, stunning them temporarily to give yourself some breathing room to gather yourself, or even finishing them off quickly when they are down.
And if you aren’t the type to run in with both weapons in hand and start hacking away at each other, stealth is also a very viable option to progress through certain sections of the game. You can instead sneak up on human enemies without them noticing your presence and take them down one by one instead, or you can get a bow or a spear to snipe them from a distance and recover them early on. And as a person who is used to stealth archer builds in Skyrim and a veteran of the Metro games, this pleases me!
One extra aspect of your night-time escapades is the addition of a timer that indicates your level of infection. Since UV lamps and the daylight are the only things that is pushing back the dangerous effects of your infection and turning you into those zombies, you have to carefully plan out your night trips farming for EXP or looting goods and resources by finding out which location with UV lights is the closest and resetting the clock before you hit the game over screen. Plus, UV lamps are also a way for zombies to stay away from.
There is, however, another gameplay feature that is extremely fun and incredibly useful for getting places you are already heading to: The paraglider! This can be unlocked after you finish the first act of the game and it gives you the ability to fly across the air as long as you have the stamina to last for the entire experience. You can dive down and then climb back up again to sustain your altitude and distance, but you’re much better off finding air ducts and airways to gain more speed, altitude, and distance reliably. A grappling hook is also at your disposal to climb to areas that you otherwise cannot access to by climbing towards them, and can also be used to Spiderman your way out of trouble if need be.
I also thoroughly enjoyed the story of Aiden and his journey of being hellbent of finding Dr. Waltz and his sister, but what really pulled me into the campaign aspect of Dying Light 2 is the cast of colorful and lively characters with their own backstory and their reasons. With each new area that I entered, I make it an effort to know everyone and even completing side quests to get some items that I otherwise wouldn’t have gotten in my first attempt of my playthrough. Lawan, whose codename is ‘Fish Eye’ and played by Rosario Dawson of The Mandalorian fame as Ahsoka, has done a spectacular job playing her character and also providing her own voice and mocap in the game.
Concluding Thoughts
Coming back to the zombie apocalypse setting after years of ignoring the genre, I can start to see the appeal and hype behind Dying Light’s concept when it first came out in 2015. It was a breakout title that completely flipped the genre upside down on its head and actually made it about survival rather than getting into a clapped-out vehicle with a steamroller for a front bumper and start mowing down hundreds of enemies at once.
This is definitely a game where you are forced to analyze your surroundings, plan out a pre-determined route and wondering whether or not you are able to make that leap to that one ledge, and also crafting some items and weapons that you would absolutely need in the worst-case scenario. And running away does not mean that you aren’t skilled enough to take on stronger enemies or multiple weaker ones at once, it just means that fighting is a last, last, last resort. The main priority is your survival.
If you are tired of the same old zombies formula, I strongly recommend that you give the Dying Light series a chance and experience a completely different way of playing a zombies-orientated genre and hopefully its revival thanks to its big win at the 2022 NYX Games Award.
Credits
Author: Ryan L.
Game: Dying Light 2 Stay Human Developer: Techland Publisher: Techland Release Date: February 4, 2022
