Search results
HUMANITY IS SLOWLY DYING. You play as Aiden Caldwell, a wandering Pilgrim who delivers goods, brings news, and connects the few remaining survivor settlements in barren lands devastated by the zombie virus. However, your true goal is to find your little sister, Mia, who you left behind as a kid to escape Dr. Waltz's torturous experiments.
Dying Light 2 Stay Human is a 2022 action role-playing game developed and published by Techland. The game is a sequel to Dying Light , and was released for PlayStation 4 , PlayStation 5 , Windows , Xbox One , and Xbox Series X/S on 4 February 2022.
- Packed with top-notch parkour, an awesome open world, and every painful bug in the book.
- What's your plan for surviving the zombie apocalypse?
- Dying Light 2 Stay Human Review Screenshots
- Bug Alert!
- What We Said About Dying Light
- Score: 8.5
- Best Zombie Games of All Time
- Verdict
- Dying Light 2 Stay Human Review
- More Reviews by Travis Northup
By Travis Northup
Updated: Feb 4, 2022 4:06 pm
Posted: Feb 2, 2022 3:00 pm
The weird, surreal tone of Dying Light 2 Stay Human combines very serious end-of-days themes with silly characters and minigames that have you smacking zombies off a skyscraper with a cricket bat is bizarre, but somehow it works extremely well. This zombie-smashing action game is a strong post-apocalyptic adventure with top-tier parkour movement, an expansive open world in which to put them to good use, and lots of great characters. What doesn’t work so well is how it combines a near-lethal case of bugs with a story centered around a protagonist so uninteresting that he’s all but (un)dead on arrival. I’m sure that when the developers at Techland set out to make this sequel they had no idea that they’d end up releasing a game about a global pandemic two years into a global pandemic, but it’s clear that trying to finish such an ambitious game under these conditions didn’t do it any favors.
Sticking largely to the plan laid out by its surprise-hit predecessor in 2015, Dying Light 2 takes place in an excellent, highly explorable city where the rooftops are home to eccentric survivors who have become masters of parkour, scavenging, and chopping zombie heads off with assorted sporting equipment. By day the zombies swarms crowd into buildings to hide from the sun, and by night they pour into the streets in daunting masses, but the real tension comes from managing the terrifying meter that counts down to you transforming into a brainless shambler. Like nearly everyone else you’re infected with the zombie virus, and staying in near-constant contact with UV rays is the only thing delaying the inevitable. The ever-present need to recharge that meter – which will deplete in a matter of minutes if you’re inside a building away from the light – is an excellent addition to Dying Light’s moment-to-moment gameplay that keeps up the pressure on every step of your journey.
During the night you have to be extremely deliberate with everything you do so you can make it back to a nearby oasis with UV lights to replenish your meter, like a diver with a limited oxygen supply. Do you risk looting every corner of a mission area or rush through and complete the main objective to mitigate danger? Should you take the time to sneak around to avoid conflict or would it be easier to press the attack and risk getting stabbed to reach a goal faster? Decisions like this layer on top of the action and give you something to think about beyond just splattering the nearest zombies and looting their corpses.
Take over a shopping mall (always ends well)
Hide in a bunker
Find a motorcycle and keep moving
Get real good at camping
Paddle out in a boat and hope zombies can't swim
Other - tell us in the comments
I also didn’t feel all that imperiled while running around at night, even when I was being chased by tons of zombies. That was disappointing since the first Dying LIght had me sweating bullets anytime I had to go out after dark. Maybe it’s because Dying Light 2’s powerful skills and weapon options put those in the original Dying Light to shame, like modified weapons that can cause an explosion on a critical hit or light an enemy on fire for several seconds allowing you to pummel them to death while they’re defenseless. Or maybe it’s the fact that you can more easily over-level yourself in each area before moving to the next, making any new threats feel like pushovers. Maybe it’s a combination of those and other factors, but it wasn’t long before I could easily clear an entire warehouse of angry biters without breaking a sweat. That said, having a Howler sic an entire army of screaming zombies after you is still a stressful encounter, because they follow you everywhere you go (even on rooftops) and make going about your business normally nearly impossible, so they’re still a force to be reckoned with even if they rarely do you in.
Working in its favor, though, even when combat isn’t challenging there are so many fun options for finding inventive ways to kill a whole room of bandits or bloodthirsty brain-eaters that it’s rarely a tedious undertaking. Throwing giant exploding gas tanks at groups of enemies, setting a dozen zombies on fire with a well-placed molotov cocktail, or just walking up to them one at a time and drop kicking them out of a window are just a few ways I rid myself of unwanted undead.
The variety among zombies in Dying Light 2 is, thankfully, a lot better than it is with the human enemies. There’s your run-of-the-mill, slow-moving lurches which are about as useless as you’d expect; the recently turned, fast-moving “Virals” that leap at you and make you curse in front of your kids take a little more agility to deal with; “Howlers,” which scream like maniacs and draw attention from all nearby zombies need to be dealt with quickly, and many more freakish beasts – including some terrifying bosses that can require some effort to take down. They’re certainly not the most difficult bosses ever, of course.
By the time a weapon finally broke on me it had already become too low-level to be useful.
“
Speaking of killing things, it’s almost entirely done up close and personal. You won’t find any guns in Dying Light 2 and ranged weapons in general are fairly rare (and often impractical, since bows have a low rate of fire). So most of the time you'll be hacking away with a wide assortment of melee weapons that run the gamut from samurai swords to brass knuckles to a metal pipe with a tin can on the end of it. Weapons come to you as randomly generated loot out in the world or as purchases from vendors at social hubs, but either way they have a limited number of uses before they deteriorate and eventually break. However, if you don’t care for having your trusty weapons crumble to ash in your hands, know that Dying Light 2 doesn’t force it on you as often as, say, Breath of the Wild. In fact, the best weapons can be modded to improve their durability, deal more damage or apply status effects, and can even be repaired a limited number of times to extend their use. In my experience, by the time a weapon finally broke on me, odds are it had already become too low-level for me to want to use it anyway. Besides which, you’re constantly replenishing your selection with better stuff as well, so it’s unlikely you’ll ever find yourself empty handed when you’re fending off a horde.
If your tolerance for bugs is low, I do not recommend jumping into Dying Light 2 on day one. Or day 10. Maybe day 30? I was able to play it to completion, but only barely: leading up to launch it is absolutely drowning in a sea of upsetting technical issues, whether it’s crashing (which happened to me dozens of times in my more than 80 hours with it on Xbox Series X and to others at IGN on PlayStation 5 and PC), all dialogue stopping during cutscenes, all audio being replaced with a loud screeching noise, getting locked out of quests because a character won’t let you talk to him or being unable to finish because the objective never spawned in, uneven framerates making me seasick, and too many more to list here. Most glitches are temporary annoyances or even amusing wonkiness, but some are more dire – one IGN editor playing on PS5 had his entire save file corrupted, leaving him with a never-ending loading screen and locking him out of his save pending an upcoming patch.
Normally I expect a certain lack of polish in ambitious, open-world games, but even with my expectation for jankiness set to maximum, Dying Light 2 has been really, really rough. The longer I played, the more frequent the issues seemed to become; by the end I was having to quit out and reboot multiple times per hour, and breathed a huge sigh of relief when credits rolled and something hadn’t catastrophically broken my save file. In terms of stability issues and the danger of losing progress, it’s been considerably more severe than our experience with the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077, where the bugs we hit were mostly visual in nature. Techland is aware of all of this and is reportedly hard at work on patches to address it, but if history is any indication it’s going to take more than a few real-world day-night cycles to sort out this many issues.
After chasing down so many threads for so many hours, it was deflating that the main plot of Dying Light 2 ended up feeling so weak despite an embarrassment of riches when it comes to great characters. Rosario Dawson’s Lawan, for example, is a fantastic antihero you get to hang out with a lot as she broods, drinks, and kills people indiscriminately with a crossbow. Then there’s the washed-up former hero Frank, the charming ladies’ man Hakon, and many, many more who left me with fun and dramatic moments to remember them by. The real issue is that Dying Light 2 just has us kinda meander from character to character without any cohesive story materializing between them, mostly because the one thing that would connect falls flat thanks to the character with the most screen time of all: Aiden Caldwell (that’s you).
Your character is one of the dullest people on one of the most humdrum adventures.
“
Aiden (like so many other Aidens) is what you’d get if you ordered a cardboard cutout of a generic protagonist on Amazon and got the cheap knock-off version instead. The tale of revenge he’s on is confusing, cliche, and borders on the nonsensical by the end. Without going into spoilers, the flashbacks to Aiden’s mysterious and tragedy-filled backstory sprinkled throughout the campaign left me wondering when the other shoe will drop… but it never did. It’s especially irritating because there are so many interesting stories and well-written characters throughout the campaign, but for some reason your character is one of the dullest people on one of the most humdrum adventures among them.
Beginning as a furtive, desperate survival-horror experience, Dying Light gradually and gratifyingly evolves into a fast, hyper-violent celebration of vertical freedom and zombie destruction. Its main story is unspectacular, but the memorable side quests and sheer fun of exploring its world do a fantastic job of offsetting that, making Dying Light ...
Read the full Dying Light review
That said, since Aiden is mostly along for the ride by involving himself in the lives of other characters, you spend a lot of your time hearing from people who are a lot more compelling. In the first act, for example, you’re caught in the middle of a dispute between two opposing factions involving an unsolved murder and suspicion on both sides. The egos and suspects you encounter along the way make taking sides a legitimately difficult choice between the lesser of two evils. It’s when Dying Light 2 thrusts you into the morally gray areas of this bleak future that the storytelling is at its best.
Another disappointment is that most of the major decisions I made had little impact on the overall flow of the story, despite Dying Light 2 seemingly going out of its way to focus on your choices supposedly carrying weight. For example, I did everything in my power to piss off one of the city’s biggest and most powerful factions, even going so far as to unsubtly assassinate several of their leaders. I expected bigtime consequences… and yet, by the end of the story I still found myself working alongside them, even moments after I’d betrayed them for the third consecutive time. (Fool them once, shame on me. Fool them thrice…) For what it’s worth, they did give me a stern talking-to, but none of it had a whole lot of impact on where I ended up. Although my actions certainly changed some characters’ opinions of me and altered some story quests here and there, I ultimately still did all the same major story missions regardless of my decisions. Likewise, the ending felt like an inevitability, with only minor details changing along the way when I went back to check to see what might’ve gone differently.
I did everything in my power to piss off one of the city’s biggest and most powerful factions.
“
The biggest impact my free will had was that certain decisions led me to entirely different story quests and unlocked side quests that were specific to whichever faction I had sided with. Since I was such a heartless monster to one faction in particular, for example, someone in that faction almost got killed as a result of my shenanigans and was left comatose, which unlocked a mission for me to either cure him or take him out for good. (I had him killed, obviously – you don’t just leave a job half-done!) So it’s not that your decisions don’t have some immediate impact on how certain elements of the story plays out but, much like a Telltale game, you always end up in the same major events and don’t have much ability to change things in the grand scheme of the story. The results are simply typical and not very ambitious next to other games.
Dying Light 2 also features a drop-in co-op mode (there’s no cross-platform play available, FYI) where up to four players can explore the city together and take on any activity, from story missions, to parkour minigames, to boss fights. It’s not only impressive that so much of the campaign can be enjoyed together, but it has just about every feature I could’ve asked for from a modern co-op game: There’s difficulty scaling to account from more people in the action, player-specific loot so you don’t fight with friends over weapon drops, and crucially, all progress, XP and story decisions carry across to your save file whether you’re the host or a guest.
The downside, as seems to be a running theme with Dying Light 2, is that there are some additional bugs and technical issues introduced when playing co-op. In my time playing with friends, I suffered framerate issues and occasional lag that wasn’t present in single-player as well as infrequent disconnects and technical hitches. Overall it seems that Techland is rapidly deploying fixes to improve the experience, but co-op seems to run at the very least slightly worse than playing solo (which has plenty of issues to begin with).
Another in a long series of big, ambitious games whose potential greatness is visible just beneath a grimey layer of bugs, Dying Light 2 Stay Human could very likely become the stellar zombie survival adventure it’s meant to be someday. For now, though, it’s best added to your backlog unless your irritation with crashes and technical issues is outw...
Review scoring
good
Dying Light 2 Stay Human is an ambitious zombie action adventure that's packed with top-notch parkour, an awesome open world, and every painful bug in the book.
Travis Northup
Dying Light 2 Stay Human: Reloaded Edition. Humanity is fighting a losing battle against the virus. Experience a post-apocalyptic open world overrun by hordes of zombies, where your parkour and combat skills are key to survival. Traverse the City freely during the day, but watch the monsters take over during the night. Release Date:
- (132.1K)
- Techland
- Techland
- Feb 3, 2022
Feb 2, 2022 · Dying Light 2 Stay Human has a Feb. 4 release date for PP4, PS5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. Our review finds an ambitious open-world adventure that is more game than it is story, but ...
- Owen S. Good
Poet Dylan Thomas c. 1937–1938. " Do not go gentle into that good night " is a poem in the form of a villanelle by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914–1953), and is one of his best-known works. [1] Though first published in the journal Botteghe Oscure in 1951, [2] the poem was written in 1947 while Thomas visited Florence with his family.
People also ask
When does Dying Light 2 Stay Human release?
Is Dying Light 2 Stay Human on Nintendo Switch?
How good is Dying Light 2 Stay Human?
How many items are included in Dying Light 2 Stay Human?
Could Dying Light 2 Stay Human become a zombie survival adventure?
Where can I buy Dying Light 2?
Jan 31, 2022 · Dying Light 2 is a sequel to the 2015 zombie survival game that takes place 20 years later, in one of the last remaining large human settlements, called The City. The game is up for preorder now ...
