The surreal tone of Dying Light 2: Stay Human combines a serious end-of-the-world theme with absurd characters and mini-games where you smack zombies off skyscrapers with a cricket bat. It’s bizarre, but somehow, it works remarkably well. This zombie-slaying action game offers a strong post-apocalyptic adventure with top-tier parkour movement, an expansive open world, and plenty of great characters.
What doesn’t work as well is the combination of an array of bugs and a story that revolves around a protagonist so bland, he feels almost undead from the start.
Before we dive in, it’s worth noting that I wouldn’t recommend jumping into Dying Light 2 on day one if you’re sensitive to technical issues. While I managed to complete the game, I only barely made it through.
Leading up to launch, the game was plagued by a host of debilitating technical problems, including crashes, cutscenes where all dialogue stopped, audio being replaced by a terrifying buzzing noise, getting locked out of quests, uneven framerates, and much more. Some glitches are minor annoyances or even amusing moments of weirdness, but others are far more severe. One IGN editor playing on PS5 had his entire save file corrupted, leaving him stuck on a never-ending loading screen until a future patch was released. These issues are particularly frustrating because Dying Light 2 can be a lot of fun when it’s functioning properly.
Following the blueprint set by its surprise-hit predecessor from 2015, Dying Light 2 is set in a massive, highly explorable city. The rooftops are filled with eccentric survivors who have mastered parkour, scavenging, and chopping off zombie heads with various sporting goods. By day, the zombies hide in buildings, away from the sun, and at night, they flood the streets in massive hordes. The real tension, though, comes from managing your own transformation into a mindless zombie.
Like nearly everyone else, your character is infected with the zombie virus, and the only thing keeping you from becoming one of them is staying in near-constant contact with UV light. The game adds a fantastic sense of urgency with a transformation meter that depletes rapidly when you’re inside a building, away from UV light. It’s a brilliant feature that constantly keeps the pressure on as you explore. During the night, you must be extremely deliberate in your actions, constantly balancing looting, exploration, and completing objectives while trying to make it back to a UV-lit safe zone. It’s like managing your oxygen supply while underwater—decisions about when to risk exploring or sprinting through a mission area become critical.
The biggest highlight of Dying Light 2 by far is its liberating, smooth parkour system, which takes the first game’s already impressive mechanics and makes them even better. You’ll leap from building to building, scale skyscrapers, and swing from rooftops with a grappling hook—all with intuitive ease. As the city streets are flooded with zombies at night and hostile bandits by day, sticking to the rooftops becomes the most thrilling and high-stakes game of The Floor is Lava you’ve ever played. It’s consistently entertaining, even when you’re just running from one point to another.
Combat against both humans and zombies is also a blast. You can dropkick enemies, dodge and parry attacks, and slice off arms, legs, and heads. While the human enemies are a bit lacking in variety, the game offers so many creative ways to wipe out entire rooms of bandits or zombies that combat never becomes tedious. Throwing exploding gas tanks, setting zombies on fire with Molotov cocktails, or simply dropkicking them out of windows are just a few of the ways you can deal with unwanted undead or enemy humans. The fun doesn’t diminish, even when you become overpowered and the difficulty starts to drop, or when you realize the human AI is about as sharp as a boot full of mayonnaise.
After spending around 80 hours chasing story threads, I was ultimately deflated by how weak the main plot felt, despite an embarrassment of great characters. Rosario Dawson’s Luan, for example, is a fantastic anti-hero—a brooding figure who’s fun to spend time with as she drinks, kills indiscriminately with a crossbow, and delivers great lines. There’s also Frank, the washed-up former hero, Hakann, the charming ladies’ man, and many others who provide memorable and dramatic moments.
The problem is that Dying Light 2 has you bouncing from character to character without any coherent story connecting them, mostly because of the disappointing protagonist you spend the most time with: Aiden Caldwell.
Honestly, I was starting to like Aiden at first, but then I realized he’s basically a cardboard cutout of a generic protagonist. His revenge-driven quest is cliché, confusing, and borders on nonsensical by the end. He’s the kind of character you’d get if you ordered a generic hero off Amazon, only to receive a cheap knockoff version instead.
Without delving into spoilers, the flashbacks to Aiden’s mysterious and tragedy-filled backstory scattered throughout the campaign had me waiting for the other shoe to drop. But it never did. It’s especially frustrating because there are so many interesting stories and well-written characters throughout the game, yet for some reason, your own character is one of the dullest, caught up in one of the most uneventful adventures among them.
Another disappointment is that most of the major decisions I made had little impact on the overall course of the story, despite Dying Light 2 going out of its way to make it seem like your choices would carry weight. For instance, I actively antagonized one of the city’s most powerful factions, even going as far as assassinating several of their leaders. I was expecting some serious consequences, but by the end of the story, I still found myself working alongside them—just moments after betraying them for the third time. Sure, they gave me a stern talking-to, but none of it really affected where I ended up. While my actions did change a few character opinions and altered some story quests, I ultimately still ended up completing all the same major missions, regardless of what I did.
The ending, too, felt like an inevitability, with only minor details shifting based on the choices I made. Even when I went back to see what might have changed, the overall outcome was the same.
Dying Light 2 does feature a drop-in co-op mode, where up to four players can explore the city together, taking on everything from story missions to parkour mini-games and boss fights. It’s impressive that so much of the campaign can be enjoyed cooperatively, and the game includes just about every feature you could ask for from a modern co-op experience. There’s difficulty scaling to account for more players, player-specific loot so you don’t have to fight over weapon drops, and most importantly, all progress, XP, and story decisions carry over to your save file, whether you’re the host or a guest.
Ultimately, Dying Light 2: Stay Human is another in a long line of big, ambitious games whose potential greatness is held back by technical issues. It could very well evolve into the stellar zombie survival adventure it aspires to be, but for now, it’s best left on your backlog—unless you’re willing to overlook the crashes and bugs in favor of the game’s excellent parkour system. When everything works, the parkour is an unforgettable way to explore the last city’s open world and dive into its many bizarre, unique stories.
No patch can fix the forgettable main plot or the protagonist I couldn’t pick out of a police lineup even after 80 hours in his shoes, but the streets of Dying Light 2 manage to tell their own stories.