Okay, Yahtzee, exam time: please recount as much of the plot of Dying Light 1 as you can remember without looking it up. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh… oh sorry I thought you said “mimic the sound of a cycling refrigerator.” Yes, Dying Light 1, generic video game protagonist man with very generic video game protagonist name, parachutes into city full of zombies, uh, humans were the real monsters? And I think the main villain had a ‘tache. What do I win? You win the sequel, Dying Light 2! In which you play all new generic video game protagonist man Aiden – which is peak generic video game protagonist name if you ask me, second only to “Alex” for screaming “I’m a white dude with short brown hair who sounds like a chain smoker reading aloud a list of trite movie quotes” – going to a city full of zombies and discovering that humans are the real monsters in all new exciting ways. In Dying Light 1 it was just the one city that was fucked, and apparently they didn’t quarantine the fuckedness well enough because now the whole world has fallen to the fuckdemic. Aiden is a wandering vagabond searching for the evil scientist who did experiments on him as a kid that gave him superhuman endurance and parkour powers, and we’re looking for him so we can, what, give him a thank you present and a little kiss on the cheek?
Oh but wait sometimes after a mission Aiden makes grunting noises for a bit and his vision goes wibbly wobbly so fair enough, our life is tragedy and pain, let’s murder the cunt. Aiden soon finds himself caught between two factions, one orderly but fascistic, the other liberated but chaotic, and he teams up at one point with a badass independent action lady in a belly shirt who don’t need no man except when she does. This is an almost aggressively generic triple-A open world game. It feels like a fucking litmus test. Like the industry is carefully watching to see if this zombie apocalypse choices matter fascists versus nutters jiminy cockthroat overly seasoned greasy soup of loosely connected game mechanics makes its money back and if it does they’re going to shelve all the halfway innovative projects for another year or two. It’s probably just the parkour mechanics that lend it anything approaching a unique selling point, and while it can be satisfying to pull off a nice wall run jump sommersault perfect one foot landing on the little umbrella in someone’s margarita, the first person perspective still makes the climbing and platforming very awkward.
You can’t see what your limbs are doing, can you, so whenever you jump at a ledge there’s always that little awkward pause while the camera jiggles and the game figures out if Aiden’s hands are poised to grab it or were engaged with picking his underpants out of his bum. Nevertheless, whenever the game asks if you want to upgrade your combat power or your parkour power, the smart choice is parkour every time. When asked if you want to raise health or stamina, always pick stamina, ‘cos stamina is used in combat as well, and when you’re close to death the game has a very itchy finger on the “regenerate your last bit of health” trigger, so I hardly ever died in battle and having more maximum health was as helpful as having the biggest scrotum at a pissing contest. Alright, fine, upgrade your combat ability just enough to unlock the two footed dropkick, which breaks enemy defense as well as their skeletons and the game’s entire combat system. Sorry, Dying Light 2, were you using that? See, the reason why I prefer games that focus on doing one thing really well over jiminy cockthroat game mechanic stew is that the latter is a whole reliant on many separate pieces and if you urinate on one carrot it’s going to make your dinner guests very hesitant about all the adjoining parsnips as well.
The point is, melee combat is a big branch of the game design tree with lots of little twigs coming off it. The game patiently trains you in skillful parrying, perishable melee weapons are offered as a reward for exploring, and the upgrades you can craft for them are one of the motives for endlessly rubbing our face on crates and shelving units snorting crafting materials up our nostrils, but once I had the two footed dropkick which breaks defense in the sense that a cricket bat breaks the defense of an unguarded nose, and kinda makes parrying obsolete as whether or not you dropkicked just before the enemy attack doesn’t matter so much when a moment later the enemy in question is hurtling skyward like a Roman soldier in an Asterix book, that’s a lot of little branches falling off the tree and a lot of disappointed sparrows. I was throwing melee weapons away faster than they were breaking on me. Partly because I was doing my overworked game reviewer asshole thing and sticking to the critical path so the game was throwing powerful new weapons at me at the end of every plot mission lest I be too underpowered for the next bit because gotta let me play MY way, god forbid I feel obliged to engage with a game’s content or be faced with any challenge I couldn’t beat by batting the controller with a spade.
Speaking of trees, remember this is a choices matter open world game with branching story paths, meaning it’s yet another theatre in the eternal war between fascists and nutters. And because this is a litmus test game throwing in every idea that’s so much as stood next to an open world game at a bus stop, you can also do missions that liberate sections of the map and then pick which faction takes it over. Obviously there’s a lengthy debate to be had over what kind of balance of order and personal freedom is necessary for a healthy society to function, but here’s my quick summary of the main points: never side with the fascists you fucking twat. Not in video games, at any rate. Because it’s almost never the narratively satisfying path. There’s a reason why you rarely see a TV or movie story arc in which the protagonist realises that rigidly following the rules at all times and never questioning authority is really smart and always the best thing to do. Moot point, anyway, because this choice has a gameplay effect. Siding with the fascists adds stuff to the open world to help with combat while the nutters add stuff to help with parkour.
So it didn’t matter what role I wanted to play or if I agreed with the philosophical stance of the nutters – I sided with them because I wanted to play on their trampolines. My philosophical stance is knees tucked to the chin about fifteen feet off the ground. I didn’t see much reason to engage in combat in the open world, all fascist poohpoohing aside. There were times while pursuing the critical path I could almost forget I was playing a zombie game at all, they’re so easy to escape from. I seem to remember the zombies in the previous game coming across as a lot more threatening if you were caught far from a safe zone at night in only your flip-flops, but when you can leg it to the nearest vent and hang glide your way to safety on its copious machine farts at a moment’s notice this omnipresent undead threat isn’t much more than dropkick practise. The rewards for braving their nests at night are small potatoes when the critical path quests keep handing the same stuff out for free, which is just another facet of Dying Light 2’s overall problem – that in the simmering system soup where no one flavour can be permitted to stand out the end result is gonna need a fucking nice piece of bread to make up for it. And Dying Light 2’s is a little overproved and hardly upper crust. Oh stop trying to sound clever, Yahtz. FINE. IT WAS COVERED IN SPUNK.
