TAC Reviews...Dying Light 2

Date Posed: 03/07/25

Released in 2022 Dying Light 2 was not surprisingly is the sequel to 2015’s Dying Light, although it was not produced by the same company that did the first game. I have not played the first game but from what I have heard it is basically a zombie game with parkour. I did not play the first game, but watched an Angry Joe review so got the gist of what it was about. In recent months I have started having regular games nights with some of my favourite skin-sacks closest friends and our gaming library has included Sea of Thieves, GTA Online, Aliens Fireteam Elite and most recently Dying Light 2.

So before I get into the review, you may be wondering why it has been so long since my last post, I even referenced my absence in my Star Trek Armada review in which I proudly proclaimed that I was back. However, life as it turns out has a habit of interfering with plans. I won’t bore you with the details but basically in the last few years my life has taken some dramatic turns, and in the last six months I have basically gone native. I have for a long time just assumed that Earth was a temporary home which will be decimated once my people arrive to conquer you all. But it has become increasingly clear that if my people do answer the phone it is probably not going to happen for a long time, I was also forced to put my ship into a deep state of hibernation so I cannot use it as my main base of operations anymore. As a result a few months ago I purchased a house that I am in the process of fixing up, landed a job I care about rather than one I do to just observe you funny little humans, and have been surprised by how much I have enjoyed, for all intents and purposes, being a regular human. Working on my own house, pushed this website to the back of my mind, to the point that I considered deleting it. Still, during a conversation with my skin-sacks friends during a game night, they (who 100% don’t know that I am really an alien in disguise…ahem…quickly moving on) said that they check the website hoping that TAC will reappear and start posting again. I have decided to do just that, and whilst I cannot promise that I will post with the regularity I used to, hopefully I will get back to posting reviews and articles when I can.

Right so now that is out of the way, let’s take a look at Dying Light 2

Going into things I knew precisely nothing about the lore of the game’s world, during the opening mission set in the wilderness, a man known as a Pilgrim called Aiden is making his way towards the city of Villedor. In the context of the game Pilgrims are people who travel from the safer settlements to other settlements taking information and goods. The country and I assume the world has been decimated by the Harran virus.

From what I gathered during the game the Harran Virus infects people and turns them into the typical zombie type forms. The standard biters, people wandering around attacking anything they come across. I don’t know if these are the accurate names by the way. Screamers, zombies that scream at you which drains health. Jumpy things that slash at you with claws before racing away to attack at a distance and fat bastards that blow up when they get too close. Bigger and more dangerous forms called the Goon that generally smash you with a club-like thing on their arm, basically they are the tanks of the game, a couple of bigger goon-like enemies that are more armoured and can throw rocks at you, boss-type enemies called GDR anomalies, and the ones called Volatiles that are bigger, faster, powerful and can wreck your shit very quickly. The main feature of all of these infected is that they have varying degrees of sensitivity to UV light which means that the numerous and very dangerous Volatiles are not out and about during the day. Basically once night falls then the big guys come out to play. Biters also get more aggressive at night, so it is a bad idea to be out after dark.

Aiden is heading to Villedor in the hopes of finding his sister, Mia and a man named Waltz. Years ago Waltz conducted experiments on various children including Aiden and Mia. Aiden is determined to find and rescue his sister from the clutches of the sadistic scientist that tormented him and other children. After his arrival in the city Aiden is attacked and bitten by a volatile infecting him with the Harran Virus. Continuing on Aiden meets a man called Dylan that gives him a GRE key, and hides Aiden as Waltz arrives and executes Dylan. Aiden flees and after reaching a Bazaar he is nearly killed by the locals because he doesn’t possess a bio-marker, a device which shows the progression of the Harran Virus, before he can be killed a man named Hakon arrives. Hakon helps Aiden get a bio-marker, and explains that tensions between the city’s two main factions, the Peacekeepers and, you know I don’t think they have a specific name so I’ll call them what the game calls them the Survivors, are threatening to bubble over into a full scale war after a high ranking officer in the Peacekeepers was killed. The Peacekeepers believe that the Survivors were responsible for the man’s death and want answers.

Aiden’s overriding goal is to track down his sister who he believes in the city’s Central Loop, both the Peacekeepers and the Survivors tell him that they can get him to where he needs to go if he helps them.

At this point you can basically just choose which faction that you want to side with. As you make your choices the story takes a few different directions. Essentially though Aiden will get to the Central Loop to continue his quest to find Mia and find the man responsible for torturing them.

I mentioned that Dying Light is the zombie franchise with parkour, but just in case you don’t know, then allow me to explain. Parkour is an athletic and training discipline in which a person tries to get from one place to another as fast as possible without using equipment and performing various feats of aerobatics. With its original roots coming from military training and martial arts, parkour includes: flipping, jumping, climbing, swinging, vaulting, running, and rolling, basically it is all about moving over, under, around, and through obstacles whilst keeping your momentum going. Typically it is practiced in urban environments but can be done anywhere.

The game is from the first-person perspective and so as you can imagine some of the parkour movements do result in your vision being thrown from city, to ground to sky, to city again as you race around. You can look down as see your feet so this isn’t one of those games where you are basically a camera zipping along about five feet off the ground. The thing is that one of the main game mechanics is running, jumping and rolling, so you are going to be leaping off building rooftops, and basically making frequent leaps of faith. I would estimate that ninety percent of my deaths were a result of falls because I had misjudged the distance of a jump. In most games where parkour is a major mechanic like Assassin’s Creed it was a rarity that a fall would actually kill you. Yes you would get hurt but not an instant death. Sadly Aiden is basically human so a fall from a two-story building will likely kill him, especially in the early game. In the Central Loop you are in a city with much higher buildings. Most of the higher buildings can be scaled but as we will talk about in a bit the controls are not always consistent which can and will result in an instant death plunge.

On the surface of it, Dying Light 2 has a lot of features that I like in a sandbox game. Yes it is separated into two city districts but as soon as the tutorial or intro mission finishes you can pretty much go wherever you want. During the day Dark Hollows and Forsaken Stores are where the Volatiles hang out and will pretty much just straight up kill you if you try to enter these locations during daylight hours. Therefore, certain locations are better explored at night when the Volatiles are out literally painting the town red. I like a game that lets you go off and explore without limiting your movements. There is a levelling system which is separated into Combat and Parkour points, you have an upgrade tree so can unlock new fighting skills and parkour abilities to help you meet the game’s challenges. Once you have fully unlocked all of the parkour and combat points, and reached level nine, the Legend system opens up and you then earn legend points which can be used to upgrade additional abilities, but I will talk about that in a bit more detail in a minute.

Being infected with the Harran virus means that Aiden cannot stay in dark areas for too long or he will turn into a Volatile. Whenever he is in a dark area a timer in the top middle of the screen which ticks down which can be restored by getting back into the daylight, taking an inhibitor, or getting to a UV light. However, you can find Inhibitors which will grant permanent enhancements to either health or stamina. When fighting the infected or human enemies stamina is important because when you run out then Aiden no longer has the strength to swing a weapon, sprint away or do anything apart from ineffectively push an attacker away. But you need health to stay alive whilst being attacked or falling from a building so it makes a somewhat interesting choice to decide which you want to prioritise, and certain parkour and combat abilities can only be unlocked if you have the necessary stamina or health.

If you go to Craftsmasters you can buy blueprints which can also be upgraded. You trip over crafting materials everywhere you go and these can be used to make medpacks, health or UV boosters, and various weapons you can use against your enemies. If you upgrade the blueprints you can craft stronger weapons, or boosters that have longer lasting effects. The weapons in the game degrade over time and will eventually break. The higher the upgrade of the blueprint the longer the weapon lasts. Broken weapons are not gone and can be repaired using resources by a craftsmater.

I didn’t really pay much attention the boosters with the acceptation of the UV booster but after doing a Raid mission realised that a regeneration booster would steadily restore health so began to use those frequently in my playthrough.

During story missions you do eventually unlock a grappling hook and paraglider which make getting around easier, and the paraglider itself can be deployed pretty quickly so it can, and will, save you from the fatal plunges as long as you can activate it quickly enough. Both of these can be upgraded to improve their functions, like allowing the grappling hook to attach to things further away or get additional boosts from the paraglider. You also unlock a rechargeable UV torch which can also be upgraded to improve how long it can be one, the radius of the light it emits and the speed at which it charges back up.

All of the above are things I like about sandbox games, you can go off and explore, blow off the story missions for a while, and just do whatever you want. The in-game map has various questions marks on it which are areas you haven’t explored yet. Some of these are people who need help, others are Nightrunner hideouts which are small UV safe zones, and the majority are parkour challenges. Sadly Dying Light 2 also suffers from a few things that I find a tad annoying, not deal breakers but annoying non-the-less.

Okay, so from what I understand the main weakness of all of the infected is UV light, and every safe zone is surrounded by UV lights, which prevent the infected from getting to the people inside. Fine, but what I don’t understand is that the generators that run all of these UV lights never seem to run out of fuel. If you activate one then it remains running without any further input from anyone else. So lack of fuel does not seem to be an issue. Finding UV lights also does not seem to be a problem so why don’t the people of this city go building by building taking various UV lights and generators with them systematically wiping out all of the infected within the walls?? Naturally this could not be done in a single day and we see infected coming up through sewer drains, but those drains could be sealed up, and a wall of UV lights put up so the infected couldn’t get back into buildings that had been previously cleared. The humans of this world also typically live on the roofs of buildings to keep them safe from the infected on the streets below. BUT if the humans only live on the roofs to keep themselves safe from the infected below then why not demolish those buildings?? If the infected and the Volatiles have nowhere to shelter during the day then they will literally burn under the sunlight. Seriously knock down a side wall and those infected will be trapped, or set the building on fire, killing anything within. Admittedly the Central Loop had much higher buildings making demolishing the buildings harder, but clearing them room by room, floor by floor could still be a viable strategy.

Also on the subject of fuel there are virtually no moving vehicles in the game, a couple of enemies use them, but you frequently come across military convoys containing tanks so why has no one thought to use one to get around safely at night??

When in a safe zone, you are not surprisingly safe, the name kind of gives it away. None of the infected can get to you so if you are out at night at get the Volatiles after you then high tail it to a safe zone and you are golden. Yet, for some reason all of Aiden’s weapons are disabled when he is in a safe zone. On a quick side note, one of the materials that you need for upgrades are infected tissue samples, small, medium and large, normal biters give you small, screamers give you medium I think, with volatiles and goons giving you large samples. For later upgrades you need a lot of infected samples. It doesn’t make any sense to me that none of the survivors would actively lure these monsters into sealed up areas, and then bathe them in UV light to kill them. Wouldn’t it make more sense to allow you to kill these pursuing creatures so they cannot continue to hunt people in the dark? Also they can stay outside the range of the lights and spit an acid-like substance at you, so they can attack you, but you cannot so the same to them.

When playing the game you have to basically understand that R1 in your jack of all trades button. Depending on the context it can be used to dodge left, right, back and forward. It can be used to jump when sprinting, and can be used to grab hold of ledges. Unfortunately the game doesn’t seem to grasp what control is needed in a given situation. I have been trying to jump to escape during a night time chase when Volatiles are snapping at my heels, and Aiden has dodged instead, allowing the pursuing creatures to catch up. I was fighting a goon on top of a roof and wanted to jump onto a chimney breast nearby and instead Aiden dodged off the roof plummeting me to a rather painful but not fatal landing. I have been trying to scale buildings and tried to grab a handhold only for Aiden to jump instead. I spend longer than I wanted to trying to climb a building because Aiden refused to grab hold of a series of drainpipes. I know he was supposed to be able to climb them because this game (like Resident Evil 4 Remake) uses yellow as a colour cue to let you know what objects can be climbed on, or which floorboards are safe to transverse, or which vents can be accessed. It was infuriating to watch Aiden drop past these pipes time and time again, more so when he missed the roof below and instead smashed into the ground far below.

My biggest issue with games like this and stories like this are that it never makes any sense to me why the playable character is not running the place. In the Mad Max game I played Max would go to various settlements, set up food, water and security features, bows to the person in charge and then head off to the next place to do the same again. Seriously put a bullet in these useless people’s heads and proclaim yourself the leader, just point out that during the previous person’s reign, they basically did nothing but in the short time you have been there, you have provided, security, food and water, and generally massively improved the quality of life for everyone. If you were able to do that in a few days what could you do in a few months? Or years? In Dying Light 2 it turns out that no one has guns, however, there is a mission in which Aiden tracks down a stockpile of guns, and he gives them to a guy named Jai to decide what to do with them. Aiden, seriously, you have found guns, the only guns left in this world. At this point in the game I had activated numerous safe zones, and water towers, set up power stations to give electricity to the city. So, why wasn’t he running the whole show?? The Peacekeepers and Survivors are constantly fighting one another, but both will work with Aiden at various points in the game, regardless of some of the actions that he has taken. During the first water tower mission he must deactivate explosives before confronting the guys that set them up. Here’s a thought Aiden, place explosives on the water towers and in the power plants that you have reactivated, and basically proclaim yourself as the leader of everyone. If people disobey or try to kill you then you will detonate the explosives destroying the water towers and the power plants. I get that this may sound a little extreme but on the flip side the Peacekeepers and the Survivors could see that they are better off working together under one banner than fighting amongst themselves for the left over scraps of the society that once lived in, then that would be better for everyone.

As I was working through the game I somewhat accidently activated the endgame mission, in all fairness the game did warn me that it would begin the epilogue, and I did it anyway. I assumed that once the game ended I would be put back into the sandbox to do any challenges or side missions I had missed. I could have likely done that but after the game ended it then told me that I could begin a new game+. At that point my eyes immediately lit up because I have made no secret of my love for a game that allows you to begin again with all of the stuff that you have unlocked in your first game. In my excitement I jumped straight into a new game+, I started after the mission in which Aiden gets his bio-monitor and jumped straight into a the story missions that I know unlocked more sides missions. Now, one of the first missions you do in the Bazaar revolves around investigating the claims around a tainted supply of water. You make some enquiries and talk to a few people before discovering that the guy who sold the water was supplied it by another guy who had allowed the water to be tainted by an infected. The guy didn’t realise this was the case until after he’d sold it to the other guy, who had then sold it on. He tells Aiden that he is not about to come forward and admit it was his fault, and would rather let the guy in the Bazaar hang despite being innocent than come forward. Aiden can either threaten to expose him or keep his secret. In both of my playthroughs I opted to expose him, this leads to a fight between the two. The first time I did this mission I was a lowly Level 1 noob to the game, in my new game+ I was a mighty level 7 (the maximum level is 9 by the way). I assumed that this was going to be a cakewalk because I was using vastly more powerful weapons now that had transferred from my original game to this one and I’d be fighting a level 1 enemy. Only when his health bar appeared on screen it was not a pathetic level 1 but a far more intimidating level 7. It was at this point I realised somewhat to my dismay that the enemies in the game are not based on when you encounter them but rather what level you are. As I had been working through the game the first time I had assumed that I was starting to fight more end-game enemies because that is how a challenge curve generally works. The final boss was a higher level not because of my level but just because he was the final boss. Regrettably the enemies got tougher as I levelled up, they got more resistant to damage as my weapons got stronger, which immediately begged the question: What is the point of a levelling system in the first place?? In the Batman Arkham games if you begin a new game+ the enemies are tougher, and you don’t get the helpful lighting indicator to tell you when to counter, crucially though, lowly scrubs are still lowly scrubs, yes they hit a little harder but nothing that causes you too much trouble unless they are in a group. Bosses don’t suddenly gain an additional health bar or something. The Mister Freeze boss fight in Arkham City is more of a challenge because you need to use nine different moves on him rather than five, but the bat computer helpfully tells you what the nine are so a great and challenging boss fight doesn’t become an irritating exercise in frustration. In Dying Light 2 a Volatile will straight up wreck your shit because it is matching your level, if you have more health it hits harder, if you have more stamina it runs faster. My problem with this is that the gameplay doesn’t change; bigger enemies are always going to be a ball ache to fight.

To illustrate my above point, let me talk about the Co-Op. Dying Light 2 features drop in and drop out Co-op. During gameplay you might get a distress call from another player and can enter their game to help them with bosses or whatever. If you leave your game open then others can join your game. Now, what you have to understand is that I am a gamer. I like playing games and since my house purchase when I am not working on the house itself, I have a peaceful and drama free life with Columbo by my side. He will often curl up on the floor or lie next to me on the sofa whilst I sit back and play a video game. This usually means that when we have a games night I will be far more powerful that J, Matthais or Shamie. As the three of them have other commitments they are not able to sit down and play games like I do. If you join another player’s game then you are matched to their current level. Shamie and I were for a while around the same level with J and Matthais much lower. We joined J’s game the other night and immediately all of our higher tier weapons had their effectiveness slashed by around three quarters. The other week I did twig that a way around this was that the weapons I had unlocked doing tower raids hat these two upward facing chevrons and those who change if we joined J’s game because his Aiden was a lower level than Shamie or my Aiden. But, if I used Tier 9 weapons then they remained Tier 9 regardless of who was holding them, thanks to my Legend rank and levelling up through that rank, I had level 9 weapons coming out of my ears. I would simply drop them to the ground, one of the others would pick them up and bish bash bosh, they were using much more powerful weapons on weaker enemies. We spent an in-game night standing out in the darkness as Volatile after Volatile attacked us and we painted the walls with them. I mentioned above that to upgrade blueprints you need large mutation samples, and we all got so many samples that I was able to upgrade a lot of my blueprints to their maximum level. THIS is what I want when I do a new game+, I want to make every enemy into my snivelling bitch. I want to feel like a freaking god, and in the majority of games the new game+ does exactly that. I remember playing The Evil Within with fully upgraded fire-bolts and turning anything that looked at me funny into a burning pile of ash. But Dying Light 2 doesn’t let you do that, and as a result fighting the enemies in my own game is a chore, it doesn’t matter if I am fighting infected, human enemies, or bosses, it is always the same. If I go in with my weapons they will ignore my attacks like they are nothing more than butterfly kisses whilst decimating my health bar with their own strikes. I can claim their weapons but in my hands they have the effectiveness and damage of a hitting someone with a novelty foam finger. I have looked through the settings and I cannot see an adaptive difficulty option that can be turned off so I am basically stuck with this mechanic. Plus I don’t know if my Legend points are making a difference because if I upgrade my damage when attacking with a slashing weapon like a knife or axe, are the enemies being upgraded at the same rate? If they are then as I said before what is the point of a levelling system in the first place??

A second Co-Op mode is a Tower Raid in which you work through several floors of infected and battle a boss on the rooftop. All of the parkour and combat skills are atomatically unlocked, and you can choose from four characters to play as. You cannot move your custom Aiden over or any of your weapons. In this mode you have a default weapon that cannot break but is also not very powerful compared to others you can find. Weapons and loot drops are somewhat random with each player picking up different things that don’t necessarily match up to the character you are playing as. One guy is basically a Tank and his default weapons is a two-handed axe, and his role is to soak up a lot of the damage, others have one handed weapons and another has a long range weapon like a bow. Guns can be found and used but generally the best tactic is to save all of your good weapons for the final boss on the roof because you don’t just have to contend with it but an endless mass of respawning enemies including exploders, volatiles, the jumping slashing things, biters and screamers, which will only stop spawning once the boss is dead. Once it is, you kill anything remaining, before getting your reward. This mode is separate and has its own upgrades and unlocks. You get three lives and if you run out of lives it is mission over. It is not quite as unforgiving as Aliens Fireteam Elite because you still get some xp and rewards but not a lot.

In my second playthrough I have gone around to basically every question mark in the map only to discover that the vast majority are parkour challenges, and similarly to the challenges in Spider-Man there is no quick way to restart if you realise that you are going to fail it. The control issues mentioned above with the R1 button also rear their head because the challenges are about quick movement, scaling buildings, making jumps and so on, so if Aiden decides to dodge rather than jump then you loose precious seconds that can result in the challenge being failed and having to start over.

Depending on your choices there are multiple endings, which again is generally par for the course in games like this. Again though some of the actions Aiden takes in cutscenes make no sense to me. In the first playthrough during the final mission you have the option to save Mia, who is dying anyway, or another character that I won’t spoil. At this point missiles are about to be launched which will level the city, your other companion is going to detonate an explosive which will destroy the missiles but kill them in the process. Apparently the explosives Aiden had recovered which had timers were not available. Anyway, throughout the game Aiden loses control and seems to be turning into a Volatile, it is implied that sooner or later he will turn. In the ending I chose Aiden is turning, and I assumed he would use his remaining humanity to save his companion before setting off the explosives himself before succumbing to the virus and turning. But this is not what happens. Aiden saves his companion then just stands there whilst the missiles launch, and basically destroy the city, killing almost everyone there. In the epilogue Aiden is seen walking in the wilderness to continue his life as a Pilgrim. I sat there thinking “what the F…??” That ending made no sense. I would have happily sacrificed my companion to save an entire city of people. How was I possibly supposed to know that would be the outcome?? It made no sense to me as Aiden didn’t turn in the ending I saw so does that mean he will turn eventually but not yet??  Naturally I will chose a different ending as and when I get there next time but how am I supposed to know if saving Mia will actually result in a good outcome or the missiles will detonate underground causing a massive sink hole that swallows the city anyway.

When all is said and done, I have enjoyed playing Dying Light 2 when I have been playing Co-Op with my friends and during my first playthrough when I thought the enemies were just ramping up in difficulty naturally. The tower raids in co-op are generally just the right mix of fun and challenge, and some of the unlocked weapons that can be transferred over into your own game. I really liked slaughtering the volatiles when playing in J’s game because they were effectively level 1 where the ones I have to fight are level 9. The trouble is that the new game+ mode left me disappointed, I want to be a badass; I want to be able to upgrade everything I couldn’t upgrade the first time around, but in my own game that is not what happens. The combat is a slog to do, enemies can take my health down in seconds, and I can go from full health to nothing with a couple swipes from an enemy weapon or getting jumped by a volatile. I am 100% going to wander around at night in J’s game with my friends around me all sporting Tier 9 weapons so we can make those volatiles sorry they ever went out for an evening’s hunt.

My Thumb is Up because I have enjoyed the game and am working through my second playthrough basically doing the opposite of what I did last time to see what changes. Sadly the new game+ was disappointing and I really wish that I had been able to kill volatiles as easily in my own game as I could in J’s, but it was not to be. 

7/10 – If new game+ had been what I had hoped it would be the rating would have probably been a nine, but ultimately the game play simply doesn’t change, you are either fighting weak enemies with weak weapons and a small health bar, or you are fighting tougher harder hitting enemies with stronger weapons and a longer health bar. All this does is draw out the combat and makes it more likely that sooner or later you will just be mobbed by enemies that keep coming and are not really affected by your weapons.