Dying Light 2 review: Story or gameplay, which would you save?

polygon.com:

Midway through Dying Light 2 Stay Human, I took a side mission that, in hindsight, neatly summarized the strange pacing and unmet ambitions of its larger story — a story that often struggles to match the compelling gameplay and richly detailed world that developer Techland has created.

It unfolds like a bog-standard fetch quest. You’re a stranger in a strange land, searching for a lost loved one and finding yourself pivotal to a dying city’s fight for survival. Right now, an ally is gravely wounded and needs medicine urgently. But seeing as how this version of the zombie apocalypse has — quite convincingly — turned the fictional European city of Villedor into a Middle Age society, the only remedy is folk medicine from a blind witch. She provides the player character, Aiden, with specific instructions on what to gather, when to gather it, and what parts to administer to the dying man.

Zombies only mildly inconvenienced me as I snatched up the item. As I was parkouring back to the sick bay, the game gave me a strange update: “Choose which medicine to give him.” Wait, why wouldn’t I give him the correct dose? Only then did it occur to me that the blind witch might have been lying, intending for me to poison him as revenge for what his faction did to her.

In an instant, I went from a desultory side quest to making a decision with huge stakes. Taking people at face value in this game had already earned me some legitimately angering betrayals. So here I was again in Dying Light 2, putting in a lot of extra work — against a timer, no less — to care about characters and situations that aren’t central to the story.

Used well, this kind of vexing indecision could have elevated Dying Light 2’s color-by-numbers narrative into