Dying Light 2 Stay Human For PS5

Dying Light 2 Stay Human For PS5

The weird, surreal tone of Dying Light 2 Stay Human combines very serious end-of-days themes with silly characters and minigames that have you smacking zombies off a skyscraper with a cricket bat is bizarre, but somehow it works extremely well. This zombie-smashing action game is a strong post-apocalyptic adventure with top-tier parkour movement, an expansive open world in which to put them to good use, and lots of great characters. What doesn’t work so well is how it combines a near-lethal case of bugs with a story centered around a protagonist so uninteresting that he’s all but (un)dead on arrival. I’m sure that when the developers at Techland set out to make this sequel they had no idea that they’d end up releasing a game about a global pandemic two years into a global pandemic, but it’s clear that trying to finish such an ambitious game under these conditions didn’t do it any favors.

Sticking largely to the plan laid out by its surprise-hit predecessor in 2015, Dying Light 2 takes place in an excellent, highly explorable city where the rooftops are home to eccentric survivors who have become masters of parkour, scavenging, and chopping zombie heads off with assorted sporting equipment. By day the zombies swarms crowd into buildings to hide from the sun, and by night they pour into the streets in daunting masses, but the real tension comes from managing the terrifying meter that counts down to you transforming into a brainless shambler. Like nearly everyone else you’re infected with the zombie virus, and staying in near-constant contact with UV rays is the only thing delaying the inevitable. The ever-present need to recharge that meter – which will deplete in a matter of minutes if you’re inside a building away from the light – is an excellent addition to Dying Light’s moment-to-moment gameplay that keeps up the pressure on every step of your journey.

During the night you have to be extremely deliberate with everything you do so you can make it back to a nearby oasis with UV lights to replenish your meter, like a diver with a limited oxygen supply. Do you risk looting every corner of a mission area or rush through and complete the main objective to mitigate danger? Should you take the time to sneak around to avoid conflict or would it be easier to press the attack and risk getting stabbed to reach a goal faster? Decisions like this layer on top of the action and give you something to think about beyond just splattering the nearest zombies and looting their corpses.

The distinct feel to each part of the day-night cycle creates a balance in what types of things you’ll get up to: you’ll need to spend nights delving into abandoned subway stations, power plants, and hospitals to gather new weapons and crafting materials, completing missions along the way; by day you travel through the city and complete story missions outdoors unless you absolutely have to go inside.

Your biggest asset in this – and the biggest highlight of Dying Light 2, by a mile – is its liberating and smooth parkour system, which improves upon the first game’s already impressive toolbox. You’ll leap from building to building, scale skyscrapers, and even swing around with a grappling hook with intuitive ease. Since the city streets are flooded with the undead by night and not-yet-dead bandits by day, sticking to rooftops quickly becomes one of the most intricate and high-stakes games of “The Floor is Lava” of all time – and it’s consistently entertaining even when you’re just running from point A to point B.