![]() He’s working undercover with the Survivors, whose leadership feels forsaken by the Peacekeepers. Caldwell is working for the Peacekeepers, who take on the role played by the first game’s Global Relief Effort in the Middle Eastern city of Harran. ![]() Dying Light 2’s map is supposed to be four times bigger than the first game, so you’ll need a commensurate number of safe zones and staging areas.Īs in Dying Light, Caldwell is again infiltrating a group of mistrustful survivors, and again, there are three factions in Dying Light 2’s European city of Villedor. It looks like I’ll have to scale every deactivated windmill I encounter (and every one is a jumping puzzle) to use its portion of the map, much like the towers of Assassin’s Creed or previous Far Cry games. Of course, it also made the decision to help a settlement reactivate its windmill generators, and the UV lights they power, something of a false choice. In the open world, I found the countdown limitation helpfully reinforced my familiarity with my surroundings, by requiring me to remember my escape route to another bath of blue light, acquiring a muscle memory for the jumps, grabs, and slides along the way. Another multi-part rescue mission was set in a mazelike interior, with UV safety lights reasonably spaced apart, so my countdown became a concern only if I stumbled into a protracted battle or lost my way entirely. Some time-consuming levels - such as a power plant where the puzzle involved connecting cables - will be safe zones entirely, free of any infected or pathogens. I later upgraded it to nine minutes in Dying Light 2’s more expansive perk tree. At the point I was playing early in Dying Light 2, Aiden’s immunity gave him about seven minutes of activity before he had to find safety. In Dying Light 2, stepping into UV light resets (or stops) a countdown that kills you if you reach the end. ![]() In the first Dying Light, UV slowed down or repelled the infected. Dying Light 2 ramps up the urgency by giving the protagonist - a “pilgrim” named Aiden Caldwell - shorter bursts of time among the infected before he has to scramble back to the safety of ultraviolet lights, most often set up on the rooftops by survivors. Still, I was able to play an effective, if halting, game all the way through, never dying once. ![]() I got three hours with the game, roughly two of that in the same stretch of the game’s new city, Villedor, and was familiar enough with its surrounding rooftops only to make two, maybe three jumps without stopping to deliberate my next move. ![]() This is, however, a gentle way of saying that, once again, those thrilling gameplay trailers you’ve seen, full of perfectly chained counters, strikes, and jumps, are as idealized for Dying Light 2 as they were for its predecessor. In Dying Light 2, it’s supported by a much more interesting cityscape, stronger role-playing game systems and narrative hooks, and a new kind of open-world progression that should culminate in more meaningful choices, as opposed to clearing an area or a jumping puzzle for their own sake. Techland didn’t fix what wasn’t broken Dying Light’s fluid traversal and balletic combat is still here, still easy to learn and apply, still hard to master, like all worthwhile athletic endeavors. I reached that comparison after playing Dying Light 2 Stay Human in a preview event and then compared it to the first game’s Platinum Edition (which just launched on Nintendo Switch). In this way, it was a bit like the sports video games I routinely review, something that had a solid gameplay base, but maybe a drooping career mode that didn’t sustain much interest. The first Dying Light largely executed on its novel approach to the zombie genre - survive the horde with parkour and melee, ambitiously presented as a first-person experience - while coming up short in some of the supporting elements. ![]()
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