![]() Yes, someone's been kind enough to paint every ledge you might be able to latch onto in bright yellow, yet there's still some thought that needs to be put into planning the path upwards, the best challenges and parkour runs putting to mind the fleet-footed Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. At various points in the campaign there might be windmills to climb to unlock new safe zones, or TV towers to ascend, and they provide platform challenges that unfold gratifyingly. ![]() The experience seems to lean towards high-end PCs rather than new-gen consoles, and while there's a decent number of options on the Xbox Series X version we tested such as a locked 1080p60fps mode as well as a 4K30fps one - plus the ability to play with RT shadows enabled at a lower resolution - it never really pops.Īs a first-person platformer, it's hard to think of anything that can match what Dying Light 2 achieves (though there'll always be a place in my heart for the OG, the PlayStation's dear Jumping Flash). Catch it at the right moment and Dying Light 2 can look incredible - at other moments, however, it can look mediocre. The amount of traversal options available to you at any one time is simply staggering, and that it holds together at all feels like an outstanding achievement in itself. Get stuck in the quagmire of the streets and you might trigger off a chase that escalates in stages, GTA-style, where you'll bound from car bonnet to a fire escape before scuttling away to the rooftops in one swift succession. This is a stubbly Mirror's Edge with knuckledusters on, and it's to Techland's credit that they've managed to serve that moveset so well with its open world - something DICE sadly stumbled at itself with Catalyst. The first-person parkour is simply brilliant, its integration into a vast, dense open world simply astonishing, and the act of getting from A to B is an absolute thrill.Īs in the original, the parkour moveset is slow to build momentum with the bulk of abilities unlocked via a skill tree - it took about 20 hours for me to unlock the simple slide that allowed me to scoot through small spaces, and another dozen or so to have the full suite of wall-running skills - but by the end you're pouncing from wall to wall like a panther, tying together dazzling runs from rooftop to rooftop. These mad dashes to safety in the midnight hours are where Dying Light 2's systems come into focus, and indeed where Dying Light 2 is at its best. ![]() As soon as it's switched on we'll be testing it and letting you know how we get along. Frustratingly, co-op was disabled pre-release. Underpinning Dying Light 2 is the same heavily pronounced day/night cycle: under sunlight the streets are speckled with the stumbling infected, while building interiors are awash with them by night they come out and those streets are more ferocious still, and mere survival until sunrise becomes your priority, with safe houses and spots doused in UV light acting as respite. Put a lot of that down to the fundamentals of the original, which provide the foundation and are here newly finessed. This is a broad, brutal thing, occasionally rough-edged, yet for all its stumbles it is massively entertaining. Availability: Out February 4th for PC, Xbox One and Series S/X and PlayStation 4/5Ĭoming seven years after the original game and now armed with a new and often outrageous scope, it's a modern blockbuster in more ways than one, complete with a bulging grab bag of systems lifted from triple-A successes of recent years and like too many other modern blockbusters it comes with a turbulent development mired by high profile departures and reports of dire management.It looks and feels like the most ambitious Xbox 360 game ever made, and I'm fairly certain I mean that as high praise. It's light on innovation but Dying Light 2 has the scope and breadth of your modern triple-A, rippling with systems and overwhelming in size. ![]() With its streets lined by crumbled concrete, patrolled by renegades in hockey masks and spiked leather jackets and where the surly survivor's wardrobes seems to come entirely from Wickes, Dying Light 2 has an aesthetic that's straight out of a second tier Xbox 360 game. Taking place some 15 years after Techland's parkour-fuelled 2015 open world original, it's set against a world completely ravaged by the viral outbreak that began back in Harran, where disputes are solved with a rusty iron pipe to the head and the people holed up in the small number of mediaeval settlements barricaded against the breakout are well beyond hope (this is a grimly prescient thing in more ways than one). Techland's vast blockbuster buckles under its own ambition and lacks in innovation, but makes up for it with outstanding parkour and combat.ĭying Light 2 is an ugly game.
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