Dying Light 2 Stay Human

A sequel to Dying Light with a new protagonist, characters, setting, and story that expands the game universe. The original’s celebrated formula of “zombies, parkour, and survival” has been reworked, with many new mechanics added.

Its protracted development left Stay Human feeling like a PS4/XOne-generation game: primitive surface geometry, outdated particle and lighting systems, a lack of variety in plant, zombie, character, and enemy models, and an overall blurry look.

The world survived a disaster that engulfed Harran and its surroundings, and a vaccine was developed to stop further zombie outbreaks. But secret experiments on the Harran virus continued, carried out by scientists and the military. A new strain escaped from yet another laboratory, spread across the planet in no time, and brought human civilization to its knees.

As the world sank into darkness and chaos, order was preserved in Villedor—a fictional city somewhere in Europe. Surrounded by an impassable wall because of its many laboratories, in case of a zombie apocalypse within the city, Villedor was unaffected by the outbreak outside. But that didn’t last long. A vaccine prototype developed by local scientists was dispersed inside the city, turning many residents into zombies and killing off the vegetation.

The events of Stay Human begin 20 years after the outbreak in Harran and 10 years after the fall of Villedor. By then, there isn’t a single place on the planet the damn virus hasn’t reached. The few survivors live in fortified settlements scattered hundreds of kilometers apart. Brave adventurers known as Pilgrims travel between them alone, carrying out assignments and delivering packages. The protagonist, Aiden Caldwell, is one of them. He comes to Villedor in search of his sister.

Stay Human’s seamless open world is twice the size of Harran and consists entirely of urban development, interspersed with cathedrals, hospitals, radio towers, skyscrapers, factories, and other points of interest, all connected by a network of roads, highways, and subway lines. Several layers of verticality and the large number of buildings you can explore inside add even more depth.

Everything is just beginning to fall into disrepair, letting you explore the city’s architecture, run along building facades and rooftops, and stroll through its streets. Villedor is divided into two vast districts that reflect their character: Old Town, with its 18th- and 19th-century courtyards, and Central Loop, with its modern office blocks and apartment buildings. Nature doesn’t wait around: plants take over the city’s rooftops, avoiding the poisoned ground.

The designers built Villedor to make moving around and parkour feel smooth: buildings form a “continuous facade,” while ladders, cables and ropes, bars and trampolines, and grappling hook anchors let you cross open spaces. As you progress, you unlock the paraglider and aerial launchers. It’s a great playground for freerunning.

When the game begins, three major factions are fighting for control of the city: the brutal marauders known as the Renegades, the freedom-loving hippies known as the Survivors, and the heavily armed authoritarians known as the Peacekeepers. Zombies swarm the city, but are more active at night, hiding in the underground and lower floors during the day.

Despite Techland’s efforts and promises, Dying Light 2’s story falls short of the first game: it lacks coherent storytelling and a connection between the story and gameplay, and is riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions. The massive script and thousands of voiced lines, without a clear plan, turned out to be a collection of quests and events. Only a small fraction of them make for an engaging story or evoke any emotion.

There are plenty of characters, but they’re all just passing acquaintances: they tell you about themselves, their lives, and their plans for the future, then disappear once their quest is done. Only the most charismatic friends, with whom Aiden spends a lot of time having heart-to-heart talks, are memorable. The antagonist is a thoroughly clichéd fool, full of contradictions, and the search for Aiden’s sister eventually turns into a soap opera.

The dialogue system doesn’t live up to its potential, offering just a couple of lines and questions, like in Fallout 4 . The promised choices are an illusion: everything either gets back on track or ends up meaning nothing. The ending, the state of the world, and the characters’ fates are determined by a handful of key decisions.

The gang war for Villedor, which Aiden gets caught up in early on, remains somewhere in the background. The factions are stereotypical, lack motivation and any broader goals, and the script immediately spells out who’s good and who’s bad. Interactions with them boil down to handing over important locations, which the hero repairs to unlock parts of the city and complete side quests.

The atmosphere itself has changed. The survivors have gotten used to the risk of turning into zombies at any moment and realized that life goes on after the apocalypse. Campfire get-togethers with a guitar, bars and drinks, life’s simple pleasures, and the warm color palette in Stay Human have replaced the despair, fear, and disaster unfolding before your eyes in Dying Light.

Stay Human’s gameplay is built around the idea of an MMORPG adapted for solo play. Everything involved in gameplay has levels, ranks, or quality grades; the balance is governed by auto-leveling, and possible fights are limited by the hero’s progression (you can’t defeat an enemy of a higher rank).

The protagonist’s progression is split into two branches—combat and parkour—with experience earned through the relevant activities. But you can’t unlock the skills you need without upgrading stamina and health. As a result, the gameplay only opens up in the second half of the game, while combat, with its core actions available from the start, outshines parkour for a long time. Parkour needs perks to feel fluid and connected.

There’s a lot of gear. Weapons, armor, equipment, gadgets, consumables, and tools all have dozens of components (or blueprints for them), and those need to be upgraded too (up to nine times!). The items and armor the hero wears have passive stats that point toward one build or another.

To find high-quality resources and gear, you’ll have to scour every inch of the world. All collected resources go into a bottomless inventory, then get used to craft useful items—but only from recipes. You can buy them from merchants, find them in the open world, and get the most valuable ones by completing main and side quests.

Combat in Stay Human is classic hack-and-slash. No firearms—just slicing, chopping, smashing, pounding, and breaking things. For a change of pace, you can shoot a bow or crossbow, throw Molotovs, and set mines. There’s a huge arsenal, and as you find more powerful weapons, you can enhance them with elemental damage and install several mods. Old and new combat moves, like blocking and parrying attacks, can now be chained into combos, letting you counter an entire crowd of enemies at once.

Parkour has been made more realistic. The hero has weight, actions have momentum, and movement is limited by stamina. All the superhuman abilities—like double jumps, wall runs, and hanging in midair—are explained by the lore. There are also parkour puzzles where you have to run at a certain pace and use the right abilities.

You’ll need combat and parkour constantly in free roam. During the day, human enemies roam the city. They can fight up close, block, parry, and chase you across rooftops. These encounters will put you to the test. At night, the dead crawl out of every nook and cranny. Fights against them are more challenging and varied, especially thanks to new types of zombies. There are now zombie chase levels, a la GTA 5 , and by the third level, the game throws all its most dangerous creatures at you.

There’s no shortage of activities in Dying Light 2: main and side quests, extra tasks, farming missions, night runs for leveling up, challenges, and much more. In terms of gameplay, these are familiar activities: capturing towers, clearing outposts, fetch quests, catch-and-kill missions, collecting and carrying items, fixing the electricity, communications, or water supply, or simply talking to NPCs. The map is dotted with dozens of empty, repetitive quests, making missions with short stories all the more precious.

The game can be made more fun with four-player co-op . The story progresses for the host, while friends just watch. But you can play through everything together, faster and with more intensity, although the difficulty increases in proportion to the number of players. All items you find and your progress are tracked separately and saved for each player.