It's perfectly functional set-dressing for the game’s two real stars: traversal and city design. Our hands-on focused on two slim chunks of the game, each taken somewhere from the middle of the experience, so it’s hard to comment on the quality of the story.
It’s handy that the streets are so pretty, because you’ll be watching a lot of them fly past in your peripherals as you oscillate from street to rooftop, over and over, as you poke at your limits to find out just what, exactly, you’re capable of besting. When they’re not, you want to gird your lungs and run. When the odds are in your favour – two-to-one, three-to-one – you feel agile and responsive enough to take on all comers. The downside of this is that you’ll often find yourself surrounded by bandits wielding spiky bats, lead pipes or else something sharp and (usually) bloody. It all plays into what Techland calls its ‘modern Dark Ages’ setting an era where electricity is scarce, feudalism is returning, and conflict is much more in your face. For story reasons, there are very few guns available to the public in this faux-European city (makes sense, when you think about it), so melee weapons and rudimentary ranged weapons like bows and crossbows are the norm.
You know, for the zombies.Īnd you’re going to want to know how to avoid and flee encounters, because this game can be brutal.
Zip Wires, paragliders, grappling hooks and your own calloused hands and feet are the most important tools you have in Dying Light 2. Spin around, search for a drainpipe, a window ledge, a street sign – something! – plant your foot on a zombie like a springboard, and you’re back to safety. Ducking under a broken bit of trellis, sliding under an air vent duct, then free-falling onto a mattress in a relatively safe place? It’s an exhilarating thrill reminiscent of Mirror’s Edge at its best.īut you’re only human (for now), so of course you’re going to fumble the odd climbing hold or miss a step and take a tumble to street level every now and then. Improvising a route based on all the visual language you’ve learned from games for the last decade-plus, to hop, skip and jump to safety – it’s action game catnip.
No, the satisfaction in Dying Light 2 comes from perfectly outmaneuvering a lunging zombie or bandit and lodging a Stanley knife in their ribs, or pegging it from a fight you can’t win with gusto. You want to be rhythmic in how you approach traversal you can’t just hold ‘go’ and expect to climb like in Assassin’s Creed. Even in combat, movement feels key: you’re encouraged to dodge, block and dash incessantly, weaving and poking like a prize-fighter to get in close, nut your enemies, and then scamper off with their plunder. More than once, I ignored my supposed mission of finding an opera singer’s missing mink scarf, or some guff, in favour of experimenting with my body – flinging myself from rooftops, vaulting through windows, scrambling up the sides of decaying churches. A reworked parkour system (which feels more fluid, and empowering) underpins a game that favours agility and poise over brute force and aggression. The design team has been hard at work making sure the rooftops are knitted together with all the correct bits of visual language so it’s clear to you how to flow from roof to roof, avoiding the shambling undead underfoot. That’s immediately noticeable if, contrary to your gaming instinct, you look up. It’s not just more of the same Dying Light. In Villedor proper – a city that’s been designed by actual town planners and urban designers – you see the scope of what Techland is going for. You play as a stranger, Aiden, travelling to this once-majestic capital to locate his missing sister, and the second you step foot into its guarded walls you’re faced with a city kitbashed together from pieces of Paris, Berlin, Hamburg, Ostrow and other European landmarks.
The development team at Techland has moved on from Dying Light’s setting of Harran in a nuclear-powered ‘salt the earth’ parting blow, and has shifted focus to Villedor. Dying Light 2, like its predecessor, knows that its setting is as much of a sell as its gameplay.