Dying Light 2 is slowly morphing into the original Dying Light

destructoid.com:

The jury is still out on whether Dying Light 2 has successfully outpaced its humongous predecessor, the original Dying Light. The really curious bit is that Dying Light 2 has slowly been inching closer to the sort of experience the original game delivered back in 2015.

Now, it’s immediately important to understand and appreciate the fact that Dying Light 2 certainly did improve upon the original game in many ways. Simply by virtue of its setting, it’s a more interesting and fully realized experience: something that paves its own way, though clumsily at times, stumbling across the rooftops, not unlike a zombie of sorts.

Certainly, there’s a vision behind Dying Light 2. Here’s a game about a post-apocalyptic community of zombie pandemic survivors. Survivors who live on rooftops and parkour their way through life willy-nilly with a neo-medieval approach to community and society. It’s incredibly interesting stuff, even if only in concept, and it stands out even in a genre as overflowing as zombie FPS games are.

In comparison, the first Dying Light was far more generic. On paper, the gameplay is technically the same: first-person melee-centric parkour adventure. The difference is in the setting, as Dying Light takes place in a roughly Istanbul and Wroclaw-inspired region in the mid-aughts, with fairly modern technology, gear, and broader societal sensibilities.

The biggest practical difference between the games’ respective gameplay loops isn’t something that could’ve necessarily been put into words early on. Both titles are action RPGs to some extent, with the engine crunching numbers and applying maths in the backend. The end result of swinging a machete at a zombie in Dying Light was subtly different from what you’d get by doing the same thing in Dying Light 2. This is hardly a scientific comparison, of course, but the physics of the experience often didn’t feel right in the sequel.

Once again, this is not easy to convey if you haven’t spent hours playing both of these