So, how bout that Dying Light 2, huh? After a marketing campaign that saw developer Techland boasting about a 500-hour playtime (that wasn’t really 500 hours), the game launched last week to decidedly uneven fanfare.
Indeed, to look at MetaCritic, the critical and user consensus on Dying Light 2 is split almost perfectly down the middle.
The critical score across the PlayStation 5 hit a 77, just enough to tip it over into the green “generally favourable” category, with 34 reviews considered positive, 14 considered middling, and one negative review from The Guardian. Of the 34 positive reviews, 24 of them are scored well under a 90.
Many of the reviews hit similar critiques: the game’s opening is very slow, and it heavily progress-gates even its most basic moves and abilities. Most felt the game iterated on its celebrated parkour mechanic in ways that feel great, and that its renewed focus on exploration and discovery yielded solid results.
The user score is much more cleanly split between positive and negative takes, however, I don’t advise taking that feedback as a true marker of quality. Of the 897 user reviews filed at the time of writing, 507 were positive, and 330 were negative, with only 60 in the Mixed category. The reason we can’t put much stock in this review breakdown is that a large number of the negative submissions come from Italian players review-bombing the game, protesting the lack of a localised dub. Many of the positive reviews appear to come from gleeful trolls attempting to counter the review-bombing with anti-Italian rhetoric, for reasons passing understanding.
For me, I was only able to put four or five hours into the game over the weekend, and certainly felt the sluggish pacing of the opening sections. The parkour seems like great fun, but it feels bizarre that so many basic moves are progress gated. It was about thirty minutes of running around in the wilderness, learning parkour before the game inexplicably gave me the high jump ability. My question is: why even have that moment at all? Why not just let me jump that high to begin with? Explain that holding the button makes me move a little farther and we’re done. My experience so far has been brushing up against a lot of small, strange decisions like that.
But what do you think? Did you get into Dying Light 2 over the weekend? Did it meet your expectations, or did it fall short? Do you agree with the critical consensus or do you have critiques of your own? Sound off in the comments and let us know what you thought.
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