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Dying Light 2: Stay Human is a lovingly crafted open-world game that pits you against zombies and morally ambiguous human factions in a gigantic post-apocalyptic city. It's a polished, exquisite experience with huge maps and lots of content. Best of all, its 4-player coop mode makes it ideal to play with a group of friends.
Dying Light 2: Stay Human is an open-world action game published on PC and modern consoles. While the first-person viewpoint helps separate it from other titles, it's reminiscent of games like Assassin's Creed in terms of basic gameplay. In addition to progressing through a story, you get to explore a massive city. As you explore the city, you'll encounter buildings like towers, windmills, and metro stations that you can approach and interact with to change the surrounding area and make the city easier to traverse. As you progress through the story, you'll unlock more and more parkour skills and tools like ziplines and hang gliders that allow you to move even faster from place to place.
The events of Dying Light 2 are set 15 years after a zombie apocalypse. This means that the game has a very different feel than other zombie-infested survival games. Instead of zombies being a new and scary threat, the people in Dying Light 2 treat them as a persistent problem that they've been dealing with all of their lives. This isn't to say that the zombies aren't dangerous - you can definitely die to them, especially the mutated variants- but that destroying zombies has become almost routine to the humans of Villedor. Not only are the factions in the game well-equipped to help you fight zombies, but they've fortified the city in ways that make dealing with the infected a bit easier.
One of the best qualities of Dying Light 2 is how well-built the world map is. Level designers have carefully put in lots of details and little touches that help tell the story of Villedor and its residents. It's great fun to ask yourself questions like "where do these humans get their food?" and simply look around for clues. In most cases, the environment will tell the story.
Dying Light 2 features a robust 4-player cooperative game mode that's a major highlight. No matter how many friends you have, the fact that you can just drop into a coop game is a big plus that will make the game even more fun. You can casually explore together when you have time or even set up your characters to complement each other and work well together in combat, helping you to get through some of the game's challenging combat encounters versus hostile humans.
In Dying Light 2, there aren't a lot of guns. Instead, there are a lot of RPG elements. You get lots of gear slots, supernatural upgrades for your character, and a clear level progression that allows you to become much stronger over time. As you play through the game, you can choose gear that emphasizes your playstyle, giving you big advantages that you can leverage in combat.
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Exploring Villedor in Dying Light 2 is fantastically fun. That said, you might want to hold off on some of your exploration until you've progressed fairly far in the story. Unlike in most games, the tools that you use to get around the city are locked behind story progression. You don't get key upgrades like the grappling hook or the hang glider until fairly late. Not only do these tools help you move around faster, they're actually necessary to access certain areas of the city. This means that if you do all of your exploring early, you'll have to backtrack each time you get a new tool, which can be quite time-consuming.
You should, however, try to unlock metro stations as soon as you find them. These serve as the game's fast travel system, enabling you to quickly traverse the massive city. Each metro station has the same layout, allowing you to very quickly complete the mini-mission necessary to unlock the station for use.
While there aren't guns in Dying Light 2, there are ranged weapons. These ranged weapons are fantastically powerful in Dying Light 2's melee-focused combat system. You probably won't need to use these against normal zombies, but against human enemies, you'll want to use your ranged weapon of choice. Human enemies tend to be fantastically good at dodging, which doesn't rule out melee completely but does change the way you play significantly.
Regarding playstyle, the exact thing you do in Dying Light 2 is less important than the concept of specializing. With lots of gear slots and relevant stats on gear, it's important to choose a thing that you enjoy doing and try to cram as many bonuses for that thing onto your character as you can. The Medic gear set, for example, helps boost your parkour attacks, while the Brawler gear set boosts your one-handed swings. Dabbling in both is usually far less effective than diving all the way into one, as the bonuses compound with each other and enable you to focus on one strategy in combat for maximum efficiency.
There are a handful of things you can do in the game that the game doesn't seem keen on telling you. For starters, you can feint your attacks, which is invaluable if you want to get past an enemy's dodging tendencies with a big, heavy weapon. You can bash open some locked doors, too, which can save you a boatload of time. Many of the game's actions can be combined, like swapping weapons and shooting or sliding and jumping. The second one allows you to transverse a number of gaps that the game's designers might not have intended you to jump across, giving you great routes across the city. Finally, as an alternate way to open up a blocking enemy, try kicking. This somewhat overshadowed option tends to give you an immediate opening, allowing you to quickly dispatch a troublesome enemy without wasting any time.
Have you played Dying Light 2: Stay Human? What were your favorite parts of the game? Let us know your favorite story sections, which factions you sided with, and the playstyle you went with in the comments below. We'd also love to hear any tips and tricks we missed!
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