You can check out our full Dying Light 2 Review here, where my friend Benny Rose gave it an (A) and said ?So far, I cannot recommend Dying Light 2: Stay Human enough if you haven?t caught on. As someone who put hundreds of hours into the original and considers the DLC to be the best additional game content ever released, this sequel had a lot to live up to.? I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a post-launch PC version of the game for myself, to give it a shot and see how it performs alongside his console experience.
With this being mostly about my impressions of the game on PC, I won?t spend a whole lot of time re-treading the same ground that Benny did in his review. Overall, I will say that Dying Light 2 seems to have taken all of the community feedback around the first game and applied it here. Everything feels like it is an extension of the mechanics that existed before, and it is all enough to get me invested, as someone who never really loved the original game. Although melee combat can feel a bit floaty and weightless, and the lack of firearms is somewhat disappointing (although it is explained both in-game and out), I can definitely say that Dying Light 2 stands above the first game, and has a lot of potential for growth, if they continue to support it in the years to come.
When it comes to the performance of Dying Light 2 on my PC, I was honestly surprised at just how smoothly the game ran. Running in 4K with RayTracing on, and DLSS performance mode netted me a smooth 60+ fps on my 3070. I had to go into the advanced settings and tweak a few things to get it exactly where I wanted it, but the game looks gorgeous when you allocate your resources appropriately. There are some noticeable frame drops when you transition from one area to another, but after a second or two it shoots right back up to where it should be.
As I mentioned, I started playing a post-launch build, and as such, I did not encounter the bugs that many reviewers who had earlier builds seem to have run into. My experience has been an incredibly smooth one, with very few performance issues to speak of after my time with the game. The only issues I had were a few crashes early on while trying to play cooperative with friends, but those issues seem to have been patched out as well, and I did not experience it more than 2 or 3 times.
The cooperative experience is another high point for me. When I want to play with friends, it has an extremely simple drop-in/drop-out system. You can also call for help if you are playing solo and need some extra assistance, or answer calls from other players who are struggling. This enhances the feeling of a shared world experience, while also maintaining its status as a single-player game if you would like it to be. I really enjoyed this hybrid method of allowing for cooperative play, and I hope they keep features like this around for any future titles in the series.
All in all, Dying Light 2 takes the formula that made the original game so successful and expanded on it. They took some things out, added some new things in, and polished the parts that already worked. I am a fan of the direction the series is taking, and I look forward to seeing where Dying Light 2 ends up as the year progresses.
Note: Techland provided us with a Dying Light 2: Stay Human PC code for review purposes