Dying Light 2 Review: Less Would Have Been More

thegamer.com:

Dying Light 2 is a game obsessed with dichotomies. There’s the city above where survivors have retrofitted the rooftops into gardens and safe-havens, and the city below where the hordes of infected roam. Polarity is baked into the day/night cycle and the upgrade paths that turn the city into either a parkour playground or a death trap dungeon for the undead. Every choice is a binary, typically between two opposing groups: the fascistic Peacekeepers that want to rule the city and the Free Folk who resist them. Techland was so committed to splitting every concept, mechanic, and system into two equal halves that it even managed to make Dying Light 2 equal parts elating and miserable. There’s a remarkably engaging and satisfying open-world experience at the core of Dying Light 2, but it's buried too deeply under so many layers of half-baked systems, unrewarding mechanics, and unpolished gameplay to really shine through.

Following the events of the first Dying Light, the GRE organization managed to develop a cure for zombie-ism. Like any evil megacorp though, they continued to iterate on the virus until inadvertently causing a second outbreak that quickly swept across the entire planet. You play as Aiden Caldwell, a pilgrim who travels from settlement to settlement looking for his long-lost sister. Aiden’s journey leads him to Villedor, the last known city in existence, where he's quickly swept up in a conflict between the lawmaking Peacekeepers and the ideologically opposed Free Folk. To find his sister, Aiden will have to cooperate with the survivors of Villedor by using his extreme parkour skills to help them take back the city from the undead and repel a group of violent marauders called the Renegades.

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