After a long wait, Dying Light 2: Stay Human arrives with some interesting changes and, maintaining its essence, a different proposal. We tested it on PC and we tell you all the details in this review.
The expectations that are generated around the preview of the different great titles is an issue that must be handled very well. Dying Light 2: Stay Human, with all its delays and promises, it generated huge expectations that we always like to question, minimally. How much was going to be the difference between one game and another? Techland He had a great challenge ahead of him, although he always showed himself, at least in front of the public, more concerned with aesthetic issues and directly related to parkour, than with the rest of the game. The wait was long, but, finally, after that glimpse that we were able to see at E3 2018, now at Geek Culture we were able to try this long-awaited game in its PC version.
The first thing we feel is that same feeling as when we first put our hands in the first part. The first-person view, the huge settings, the zombie plagues, the almost unbeatable hordes of undead, the power to almost fly across the roofs, climb anywhere and almost no obstacle to stop us. The feeling is still there, intact, but with a big difference: his story now makes a little more sense. The characters matter to us, we can generate immersion in the narrative. We stop being a courier cadet as we were in the first part, to be a survivor, a pilgrim, a character with all the letters.
The basis of the story hovers between finding our lost sister and taking revenge (although it is never said in this way, the feeling is always in the air) of a character from our childhood, a kind of mad doctor that he experimented on us as chaos exploded across the world. Around that, in the search for our character, the story begins to fill with nuances and secondary missions, which makes the game more lush. Techland He echoed a lot of time of the 300 hours that his adventure lasted if you played it complete. And although we did not do all the secondary missions because there comes a time when you just want to collect that long-awaited and sweet revenge, in just over 30 hours we complete the main story. Surely if we stay touring the open world and visiting every corner and admiring the landscapes and fulfilling every little request that they make of us, the game can be expanded not just a little more, but a lot more. In that aspect, there is game for a while.
If we remember, the first dying light as soon as it came out it was not even close to what it knows how to be today. Over time, not only did it get patches, improvements, and endless DLCs that made it increasingly rich in content and, therefore, in hours of play. Dying Light 2: Stay Human is already starting out giant and it’s clear it’s also looking to expand. Just by reading the news that, two days after release, they published an update that came with more than 1000 patches and fixes. That’s a great sign. The number is overwhelming, but it also speaks of the good reception it received and the commitment of its developers.
Aiden, our protagonist
The first big difference that we notice at first glance is also that the new protagonist, Aiden, does not have to learn too much. Apparently the young man we control is a well-known “hero” of the underworld who knew how to make good friends thanks to his abilities. So as soon as we put our hands on the mouse and keyboard, things came naturally. And it builds trust.
The first time we saw each other on a cliff, facing our objective that was more than 1000 meters away with a huge river through it, we did not hesitate for a second and jumped off that cliff into the water. In the air we looked down, without fear, and the intention was successful. We swam forward and reached our goal much faster than if we had gone all the way around as the marked trails suggested. Sure, we missed out on supplies, power, and all the cute stuff, but our theory is: the fewer zombies we come across, the better. George A. Romero He has taught us a couple of things with his saga.
Another of the big changes focuses on combat. In the previous title, the main thing was to pay close attention to the resistance bar, since everything we wanted to do weakened us and we had to make intelligent use not only of climbing, running and escaping, but also when fighting. In this second part, the fight is more relegated to action, having to cover at the right time, counterattack and even use some parkour movements to eliminate enemies. Regarding this, it is true that parkour feels improved and, therefore, the character feels much more skilled, but it is also true that at times this causes the realism that is sought to permeate the experience to be lost a bit.
Day and night
In Dying Light 2: Stay Human, as in other survival titles, day and night end up being allies or enemies. It really depends on how we play, both ending up being allies, at least in our experience. Why? The main enemy of our beloved zombies and mutations are ultraviolet rays. During the day, except for a few stragglers, the open-air maps are completely oblivious to any danger, which will allow us to advance as much as we need to go from one point to another, and collect some resources such as honey or flowers. As soon as we enter a tunnel, house or shelter, we are going to run into the enemies, crouching from the sun, waiting for night to fall to go hunting.
For his part, at night, the outdoor maps they are going to be crowded with the undead and their variants, so it is going to be very difficult to advance. On the other hand, all the buildings, tunnels or closed places that are difficult to explore during the day will be completely at our mercy at night, generally free of any threat. Therefore, if we are fast and use stealth as our main weapon, we will be able to avoid night walkers and get fully into these places to continue collecting resources. If at night we prefer not to take risks, we can go to sleep as in the Minecraft and wait for daylight and electromagnetic radiation emitted by the sun to fill us with tranquility.
There’s a little twist to all of this, at night, especially. There is a type of enemy that, when it sees us, begins to emit an alert howl, like a supersonic alarm that tells the rest of the zombies that there is a human nearby, a prey to catch. This generates what is perhaps the most adrenaline-pumping moments in the game, where you have to run in a hurry, without looking back, with dozens of enemies hot on your heels. The only objective is to reach a point that gives us ultraviolet light, which melts the enemies as if they were butter in the sun. There are several of these points around the entire map, and we can locate them many times with a kind of spider sense that our character has.
this skill what we like to call spider sense it is activated by simply pressing a button or key, it depends on how you are playing it, and it shoots like a wave of perception in all directions that will mark everything we need to continue advancing: resources, zombies, and anything with the that we can interact. It can happen many times that, due to lack of light, or because we are a bit lost or simply out of laziness, we do not thoroughly explore each location we are in, and this ability greatly simplifies the task. It is only necessary to trigger this ability and we will see everything we have available in a fairly wide radius, although reduced considering the size of the map: do not think that we will be able to see a zombie or a honeycomb with honey at 200km.
If you have to find a fair balance, the game gained a little more adventure, but completely lost that shocking difficulty that the first part had. In the story mode, everything always leads us to the empty places, so to speak. During the day, the threat is very low and we can easily dodge the zombies. Even if we advance enough, we can unlock an ability that is precisely to be able to pass between them without being caught. At night, the story sends us to the roofs to stealth or get into buildings to sleep and hide. Definitely, this second part is much simpler than the first installment and it shows in several of its concepts.
We just mentioned this thing about unlocking skills. The truth is that there is not much to say, because it is like in any other game. We collect certain objects that are converted into points in order to unlock skills. The skill tree, as it is often called, is divided into two: combat and parkour, to simplify it somewhat. As we level up, we will be able to access new skills that will better shape the feeling of fighting and progress. While many new abilities can be accessed, Once we have learned two or three and have gotten used to those, we will always use them, except when we are forced to use one in particular at certain moments of the game.
The entire sound section is noteworthy, especially the melodies composed by Olivier Deriviere (Obscure, Remember Me, Vampyr) that perfectly accompany the different moments of the game. It’s not just that the music changes its hue when there are more zombies or less zombies, or when we hit a mini boss. Music constantly affects what we do and generates everything you need to achieve a correct immersion. The chases, without the music, would not be what they manage to be, definitely.
Visually Dying Light 2 is superb at what it does. The load times, considering all the visual details that we constantly see on the screen, are amazing. The design of the map, the forests, the open areas, the lakes, reaching the highlands and contemplating the landscape… in this sense, what the people of Techland is very good, even running it on machines with not so many resources, the game does not feel slow or heavy (everything has a limit, obviously), and it shows that it is very well balanced in that aspect.
With a much less prominent sense of difficulty than its predecessor, but no less entertaining for that, Dying Light 2: Stay Human it becomes a simple but interesting challenge for those who already love the saga, and a great exponent for those who just want to feel immersed in an adventure where we can go through beautiful landscapes, collect things here and there, and feel the freedom of being able to run and parkour through mountains, towns, bridges and anywhere we find along the way. The game feels like a fair continuation, with something that seeks to reach more audiences without losing its essence. And although it loses the surprise factor that the first had for, logically, being the first, here they know how to counteract it with a range of factors, missions and much better elaborated situations.
Dying Light 2: Stay Human is out now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series and will be on Switch.
RELEASE DATE | February 3, 2022 |
DEVELOPER | Techland |
DISTRIBUTOR | Techland |
PLATAFORMS | PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch |