Dying Light 2 review – city of the dead

metro.co.uk:

After years of delay, Techland’s open world zombie game is finally here, and the question now is whether it’s been worth the wait.

Although the pandemic has quickly become the main reason most games are delayed, the coronavirus has not been the only problem Dying Light 2 has endured in the four years since it was first announced. Originally meant to be out in 2020, not only was narrative lead Chris Avellone forced to leave because of sexual misconduct allegations but the game subsequently lost its lead writer and art director as well, with many fearing that it would never see the light of day.

Thankfully, things never came to that and now Dying Light 2 is finished and ready for release and… it’s a solid sequel. It’s a shame it didn’t come out two years ago, because it does feel very much like a last gen game, no matter what you play it on, but the massive game world and an ambitious use of branching narrative offers an additional layer of freedom in a genre that is beginning to feel increasingly stale and predictable.

Dying Light 2 does reuse plenty of tropes from Ubisoft style open world games, including a map (and HUD) littered with icons of nearby points of interest, while the zombie setting is by now painfully overused. This sequel does its best to compensate for those problems, but the irony is it still needed a little more time in the oven.

The original Dying Light barely had a story, but in the sequel you play as a ‘Pilgrim’, essentially an on-foot courier who delivers items between the few stable settlements left in the wake of a global zombie pandemic. The opening hour of the game takes place outside the largest remaining city (vaguely implied to be somewhere in Eastern Europe) as the game teaches you the basics of