Maybe open world games were the real walking dead all along
Consider the many strengths of the first Dying Light, specifically the ones outside of the core melee combat and parkour gameplay. The setting, a quarantined city brought to its knees by a zombie virus as the rest of the world goes on as normal. The stories of the Tower's residents, who found themselves in Harran for one reason or another at the worst possible time, and now must grapple with the reality that they have nowhere to go. Those quiet moments of gazing past the walls and seeing city lights, knowing that the nightmare you're trapped in has not taken over the entire world, it's just here, and feeling the weight of that realization on your shoulders. The horror of night time, that pitch black darkness that sees the most dangerous creatures clawing their way out of hiding to prey on those still wandering the streets. Throughout all of it, occasional glimmers of hope and camaraderie as everyone tries their best to get by.
Consider a sequel that does away with these things in favor of endless content grind, an overabundance of mechanics, and some of the most unlikable stories and characters in recent memory, then stop considering because you've already given Dying Light 2 enough of your time.
This is a game driven by hour count, in large part because many players found the first one to be eminently likable, such that they kept returning to Harran again and again in spite of the fact that it wasn't designed to be a Forever Game. Dying Light 2 swings so hard for this to happen again that the ridiculous tweet in January about 500 hours of gameplay feels more like a warning now than a bit of marketing. Of course, fine print was quickly introduced stating that you could get through all of the main story and side quests in about 80 hours, or, if you really wanted to just hammer through the main story, you could see credits in about 20.
The problem is that Dying Light 2 does not feel built to satisfy tighter, more focused playthroughs, because the progression moves at such a glacial pace, and its map is filled with so many question marks and icons and dark zones and forsaken stores and anomalies and quarantine zones and windmills and power plants and whos-its and whats-its that if you choose to skip these opportunities to farm and grind away at the hapless infected, and to collect the silly "Inhibitors" which unlock the outer reaches of the skill trees, it'll end up taking forever to unlock the game's most exciting (and to be honest, rather fundamental) abilities. Because for some reason, despite living in the zombie apocalypse for over a decade, protagonist Aiden needs to inject himself with loads of medical inhibitors before he can learn how to deliver a dropkick to a shambling corpse.
If you were to accept this reality of a slowed progression in favor of just hitting the story beats, my goodness. This story. So the main plot of the first Dying Light certainly wasn't some sort of Oscar-worthy narrative masterpiece, but it had enough likable, just-believable-enough characters, and plenty of the side stories were actually solid. I also liked going into the quarantine zones and finding out what happened there, like the hotel where a bunch of Olympic athletes were staying when they got infected. Remember how your room in the Tower would get decorated as you progressed through the story, and how the children would leave crayon drawings for you? Let's not forget the nonsensical adventures of Fatin and Tolga, or the intrepid spirit of Rahim, or the father who made a desperate gamble to smuggle his son to a safer place and paid for it with his life.
Dying Light 2 so desperately lacks these moments and characters, or if they exist, they're buried far too deep in the experience to matter. There are three factions at play, though only two of them factor into the story, with the third just being a group of deranged psychos who would likely feel more at home in a Borderlands game. You're supposed to side with either the Survivors of the Peacekeepers at various moments in the game, though it's extremely difficult to care about either one because your introduction to them is so awful. The Survivors upon meeting you immediately go crazy and try to hang you because you don't have a magic wristband, and the Peacekeepers are exactly the kind of power-tripping rent-a-cops you would expect them to be. They love following the chain of command and arresting people. Almost in acknowledgment of how irredeemable everyone is in this story, the game, whenever you need to assign a power plant or water tower to one of the two factions, just straight up spells out the gameplay benefits you will receive from the choice you make.
This gets into a larger issue that Dying Light 2 has with not trusting the player to figure anything out on their own. The first many hours of the game feature what feels like dozens of tutorial pop-ups explaining in exact detail what certain buildings and mechanics are all about. It then proceeds to assign icons to these things throughout the world, so that you never ever have to investigate anything on your own. What's this building I'm coming up on? Oh, I don't need to find out for myself because the game popped up a message in the middle of the screen telling me its a Forsaken Store, it has valuable loot, and I should only go in there at night time. It's a far more "video gamey" experience than the first one, and I found the overabundance of mechanics that needed to be explained to me to be tiresome pretty quickly. In the first game, I explored because I either felt drawn to a place or because I was scavenging for resources and braving whatever creatures were out there. In Dying Light 2, everything is just another item on the checklist.
The night time experience has also been overhauled, but not for the better. For one, it's far less dark than in the first game, though part of that is going to depend on where you set your brightness. In the middle/default setting, many of the streets are pretty well-lit by the full moon above, with some areas shrouded in the kind of darkness you'd expect from Dying Light. But whenever I lowered the gamma setting a couple notches to try to blacken the scenery a bit more, it created this issue where cutscenes became impossible to see unless they occurred out in daylight. The balance feels totally off. And in terms of gameplay, the nights are just not frightening anymore. Volatiles are practically out of the picture, instead replaced with howlers who will trigger a chase sequence if you get too close (as to be expected, the game flashes up a big ol' CHASE meter when this happens, in case you didn't realize what was up with all the zombies coming after you). Escaping from these chases is as easy as just running across the rooftops until you get to a UV light at a safehouse, which are pretty common throughout the map. The nights in general are just more, for lack of a better phrase, "video gamey" this time around, with several activities straight-up labeled as "Night Time Activity," in case you had any thoughts about doing them on your own terms.
The strengths of Dying Light 2's parkour and combat cannot be ignored, however bland the rest of the experience is. Though I found Aiden to be a bit slippery at first, I quickly "got my footing" and was able to start bounding across rooftops and over fences with ease. I like how magnetic Aiden is, able to complete jumps that he was definitely coming up short on but that the game deemed "good enough." Works for me. The combat is significantly more visceral in this one, with some of the splashiest and squishiest sounding gore you're likely to hear in a game. There are lots of ways to modify weapons with different elements like fire and electricity, though I found myself not bothering to build or upgrade any mods because I was often short on one or two required resources, and I'm not interested in farming zombies for materials.
Two other things worth mentioning: first, this game looks terrific. I've been running it on an RTX 2080 Super and it's just a great-looking game. Second, I really dig the music here from Olivier Deriviere and how dynamic it feels. I was hoping that this sequel would meet the bar set by the first game's soundtrack and it definitely does.
I just wish Dying Light 2 was shorter. I wish it had a tighter narrative, with more believable characters and better story beats. I wish its map wasn't littered with icons and repeatable activities, and that the progression didn't feel like it was pushing me to do content I just didn't want to do. The first Dying Light was so good that you could conceivably feel inspired to put a hundred hours into it across multiple playthroughs or in co-op. Dying Light 2 feels so obsessed with chasing this target that it ends up feeling unsure of itself, like someone who absolutely has what it takes but still feels like they're punching above their weight. The first game feels like an exception to so many of the rules of modern open world game design. The sequel feels like it's just accepted these rules and taken a seat, and I think the series is worse off for it.