Dying Light 2

Dying Light 2 Stay Human drops you into Villedor, a sprawling post-apocalyptic city where the real danger is not always the infected shuffling through the streets but the factions of surviving humans who have carved the ruins into their own competing territories. You play Aiden Caldwell, a wandering Pilgrim searching for his missing sister, which is a serviceable hook even if the main story never quite earns the emotional weight it clearly wants. The game is built on two intersecting systems: parkour traversal that genuinely feels great once you unlock enough movement upgrades, and a faction alignment structure where assigning control of settlements to either the Peacekeepers or the Survivors reshapes the city with new obstacles, shortcuts, and tool dispensers. That faction system is the most interesting RPG lever the game offers, and it does matter in a tangible, environmental way, even if the binary moral framing rarely gets complicated enough to make you sweat the choice. The combat is melee-focused, weapon-degradation-heavy, and deeply satisfying on a moment-to-moment level when you are kiting a horde off a rooftop or timing a drop-kick into a screamer. The infected variants escalate well across the game, and night sections, where more dangerous Volatiles patrol and the stakes for dying spike upward, capture something close to the tension the first game delivered. Guns arrive very late and feel tacked on by design, which is a deliberate choice but will frustrate players who expected an action-shooter loop. Build variety exists across combat and parkour skill trees, though the RPG depth is shallower than the genre label suggests. You are not constructing arcane synergies or reading ability tooltips with the focused obsession of an ARPG player. You are picking movement unlocks and asking whether you want to hit harder or dodge faster. The writing is where Dying Light 2 earns most of its mixed reputation. Aiden as a protagonist lacks the rough texture that makes damaged characters compelling in the best post-apocalyptic fiction. Side quests swing wildly between genuinely strange and memorable (there are a few that land) and completely forgettable filler that exists to pad hours. Dialogue choices appear frequently but rarely alter outcomes in ways the game acknowledges beyond a line or two. For an RPG specialist that stings because the bones of something more interesting are clearly visible underneath. The worldbuilding itself, Villedor as a crumbling medieval-modern hybrid, is actually lovely and rewards exploration more than the main questline does. Rooftop-hopping at dusk with the infected waking below you is one of the better atmospheric moments the genre has produced in recent years. Co-op for up to four players is present and adds a layer of chaotic fun that compensates for the story's weaker passages. Post-launch updates have addressed a number of the rougher launch bugs and added content, though the core structural issues with pacing and narrative shallowness are not the kind of thing patches fix. If you played the first Dying Light and loved its scrappy survival energy, this sequel is larger and more polished in most respects but has smoothed off some of the edges that made that game feel desperate and weird in good ways. It is a solid open-world action game that reaches for RPG depth and lands somewhere in the middle. Go in for the parkour and the atmosphere, temper expectations on the character writing, and try not to think too hard about what a tighter narrative could have been.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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