However, the 2019 gameplay demonstration of Dying Light 2 is pure fantasy in retrospect.
Some features are ramped down because they were too ambitious or didn’t work as well as the developer hoped, stories are iterated upon and rewritten. Video games change during the course of development – that’s an inescapable fact. Dying Light 2 manages to coast on its traversal, too, but you can see the scars of a troubled development if you stop running for a minute to take things in. It’s the foundation that Super Mario was built upon, and smooth traversal is what made Marvel’s Spider-Man memorable, despite the fact its missions were mostly forgettable. In the second map, buildings stretch right up into the sky, looming over you. It looks gorgeous, too – from the billowing quarantine covers rippling in the wind to the leaves and dust raining down over the city. Add in a stamina gauge that forces you to think on the fly about whether or not you’ll make that next climb, and it all adds up to make simply getting from Point A to Point B feel thrilling, even without the zombies. You intuitively know where and when to jump thanks to yellow tarps and paint, almost crying out to you in the same way Mirror’s Edge highlighted routes in red. If I had hair, I’d swear I could feel the wind in it. It feels fantastic – especially when the music swells and the tempo increases to signify that you’ve reached maximum velocity in one smooth, unbroken run. As with the first game, you spend most of your time jumping and sprinting over rooftops, taking advantage of the over-and-under level design of this parkour sandbox, balancing precariously over dangling scaffold beams, sliding under obstacles, hopping from chimney to chimney, clambering across handholds, swinging, wall-running, and cutting through zombie-infested building interiors.
Outside of the zombies, this sequel at least has a far better world to explore, particularly once you reach the second map and unlock the paraglider and grappling hook.
#Zombie drop kick windows#
When the night falls, you have to be much more careful because of more aggressive enemies who smash their way out of skyscraper windows and chase you across rooftops, but that’s the closest you come to feeling threatened. You’ll struggle to see more than a dozen in the same place in Dying Light 2. The hordes in some areas of the first game were huge – dozens of zombies grouped up, forcing you to hop between abandoned vehicles to avoid being overwhelmed. That’s a good way to sum up the game.Ĭompared to the original Dying Light, there are also fewer zombies and enemies out in the world (likely a consequence of higher graphical fidelity), which means even the streets don’t feel particularly perilous. It’s so close to being cool, but fumbles and falls at the last hurdle. Rather than exploding on impact, they take minor health damage and stand right back up as if they didn’t just fall 350 feet with 200 lbs of man on top of them. There is, however, an ability you can unlock to lunge into enemies, pushing them from a height before riding their body down and cushioning your landing with their soft bits. Remember how you’d boot zombies’ heads through car windows? That’s gone, too. Kick a zombie off a roof here and they’ll often fall feet-first, rather than going limp and floppy as soon as they lose balance, and you never see them taking a tumble by accident outside of one scripted sequence near the start of the game. It might sound a little deranged, but it’s a feature I miss in Dying Light 2. They’d just slip and fall before plummeting to their second deaths. In a game about fighting the undead and performing parkour, it made those dizzy rooftop heights feel dangerous – seeing a reanimated cadaver splatter on the pavement was almost enough to give you vertigo. Dying Light’s zombies tumbled from rooftops like Lemmings, their heads popping on the pavement below as if they were water balloons filled with entrails.
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