Dying Light 2 is an ugly game. Taking place some 15 years after Techland’s parkour-fuelled 2015 open world original, it’s set against a world completely ravaged by the viral outbreak that began back in Harran, where disputes are solved with a rusty iron pipe to the head and the people holed up in the small number of mediaeval settlements barricaded against the breakout are well beyond hope (this is a grimly prescient thing in more ways than one).
With its streets lined by crumbled concrete, patrolled by renegades in hockey masks and spiked leather jackets and where the surly survivor’s wardrobes seems to come entirely from Wickes, Dying Light 2 has an aesthetic that’s straight out of a second tier Xbox 360 game. It’s light on innovation but Dying Light 2 has the scope and breadth of your modern triple-A, rippling with systems and overwhelming in size. It looks and feels like the most ambitious Xbox 360 game ever made, and I’m fairly certain I mean that as high praise.
Dying Light 2 reviewPublisher: TechlandDeveloper: TechlandPlatform: Played on Xbox Series XAvailability: Out February 4th for PC, Xbox One and Series S/X and PlayStation 4/5
Coming seven years after the original game and now armed with a new and often outrageous scope, it’s a modern blockbuster in more ways than one, complete with a bulging grab bag of systems lifted from triple-A successes of recent years and like too many other modern blockbusters it comes with a turbulent development mired by high profile departures and reports of dire management. This is a broad, brutal thing, occasionally rough-edged, yet for all its stumbles it is massively entertaining.
Put a lot of that down to the fundamentals of the original, which provide the foundation and are here newly finessed. Underpinning Dying Light 2 is the same heavily pronounced day/night cycle: under sunlight the streets are speckled with the stumbling infected, while building interiors are awash with them; by night they come out and those streets are more ferocious still, and mere survival until sunrise becomes your priority, with safe houses and spots doused in UV light acting as respite.
These mad dashes to safety in the midnight hours are where Dying Light 2’s systems come into focus, and indeed where Dying Light 2 is at its best. The first-person parkour is simply brilliant, its integration into a vast, dense open world simply astonishing, and the act of getting from A to B is an absolute thrill.