Dying Light 2 was released last week and quickly became one of the most popular games on Steam, at one point hitting over 240,000 concurrent players. The open-world zombie RPG is the follow-up to the also successful Dying Light, launched back in 2016. And while game critics have had some mixed things to say about Dying Light 2, it seems to have mostly won over Steam players, with a majority of the game’s reviews skewing positive.
Now that Dying Light 2 has been out in the wild for a week, what do players like, love, hate, or just find interesting in this latest AAA zombie adventure? We looked at all the Steam reviews as of February 7 to find out!
Dying Light 2 has already amassed over 27K reviews on Steam, about 81% of which are positive, currently giving the game an overall “Very Positive” status. That can be a tricky thing to obtain these days on Steam, especially for huge games with tons of reviews. The most common complaint from folks in both the glowing reviews and the negative ones is the main story being a bit dull or forgettable. Others complained that nothing much really happened in the core narrative. I had similar complaints about Dying Light 2 in my review. I just found the main questline to be the narrative equivalent of a car, stuck in the mud, spinning its tires for 30 hours or so. And it seems many others on Steam agree.
Negative reviews primarily focus on two issues: the game’s poor performance and its last-minute inclusion of Denuvo DRM. Apparently, many fans are so angry about this terrible DRM software being slid into the game right before launch that they are demanding refunds or the removal of it. Many have long complained that Denuvo DRM (and other similar tech) can cause games to run poorly or lead to bugs and other issues. There are even some who think Dying Light 2’s other major issue, its shoddy performance on some PCs, might be tied to the DRM tech implemented in the game.
As for the game’s performance, I personally didn’t encounter any major issues or crashes and I had a stable framerate, even without using any DLSS-like options. I mainly played with settings turned to “high” and at 1080p. Folks playing on older GPUs or who want to play at higher resolutions are reporting performance problems, like slowdown and even crashes. That’s always frustrating and hopefully, Techland can get around to fixing these problems sooner than later, and while they’re digging around in the game, maybe removing Denuvo too.
Interestingly, I see a lot of reviews from Dying Light 1 fans but they seem to be split, with some loving the changes made in the sequel and others bemoaning the tweaks to the melee combat and parkour system. It should be noted, though, that in almost every positive review (and many of the negative ones too), the parkour system is championed as the star of the show. Once again, I agree with Steam! If you are looking for a great parkour game and have already played far too many hours of Dying Light or Mirror’s Edge, you should probably check out Dying Light 2.
Oh, and nobody has racked up 500 hours yet in-game, mainly because it hasn’t even been 500 hours since Dying Light 2 was released. So I guess nobody has really beat it yet, huh?
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