Dying Light 2 is a perfect example of the ‘7 out of 10’ game

polygon.com:

Most of my favorite video games are what I call “7/10” games. To be clear, “7/10” isn’t a literal score. (We don’t do scores at Polygon anymore, thank the heavens.) No, “7/10” represents a creative philosophy shared by a small, but precious collection of video games. The open-world zombie basherDying Light 2 is my latest “7/10” game — and I love it for that.

“7/10”s tend to be mechanically ambitious but financially prohibited. Their creators might try to alchemize some fresh way to play, or they might attempt to do a little bit of everything all at once. There’s something magnetic about these games — Earth Defense Force, Driver: San Francisco, and Death Stranding — that have the confidence to take risks, and not just fail, but fail spectacularly.

Eloquently explaining why or how “7/10” works is a headache unto itself because this method of game design is akin to YouTube creators who specialize in trick-shot videos. They don’t throw a basketball off a building and into the hoop because they’re uniquely better at basketball than everyone else; they hit the shot because they’re committed to putting in the time and failing a lot along the way.

Dying Light 2 falls in the “jack of all trades, master of none” camp. Its story spans about 20-30 hours, but its world could entertain you for 500. That’s not a hyperbolic number: It’s the literal amount of time the developers at Techland said players would need to see everything in the game. I spent my first 12 hours hurtling through the game’s town, only to learn – to my surprise and intimidation — that a much larger metropolis, replete with skyscrapers, had been casting a literal shadow over my disguised prologue of an adventure.

500 hours sounds like a lot, but it’s nothing when