Look, I know this isn’t the first time you’ve ridden the hype express for a game, but the latest gameplay demo for Dying Light 2 is something incredible. The 26 minute clip is from the footage shown at Gamescom and E3, and it improves with double the parkour moves and a play area four times greater than the original. Of course, it doesn’t matter if you have a giant sandbox of boring, but I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.
The mission is to convince The Colonel to turn on the water. People are barely scraping by and being thirsty is a problem no one can afford. As you might expect, things go badly, and protagonist, Aiden Caldwell, takes a trip to the Colonel in person. It’s not a direct route, and that leads to a lot of the amazing you saw in the headline. No clickbait here, my good sir or madam.
The city has grown up a lot. It’s denser, but contains so much more verticality. The buildings you see are crawling with whatever the game calls zombies, and there are multiple floors with multiple entrances. This creates many paths to reach an objective, and the demo is a showcase for some of the different moves you can use. The grappling hook can help you swing like Indiana Jones or reach another area. The locomotion is so much more dynamic and fluid than the first game.
Modded weapons return in the sequel, and combat seems to receive some new moves as well. Along with your block, you have different moves, but the connecting hit seems solid. And gory. You are hacking off limbs and heads easily, but not every enemy will part with them quickly.
Meaningful player choices were the other thing that was amazing to me. In the demo, you have several binary choices at key junctions during the quest. Even though we only see the consequences for one of them at a time, each impacts the narrative in the game and direction of the quest. The developer lets you know that, if you made one choice, completing a certain task in your current quest would be more difficult. If you made another, perhaps someone might live or die. I’m hoping this is as deep as it appears in the final game.
Dying Light 2 is coming spring 2020. I know you’ve been bedazzled by games and disappointed in the past, but Dying Light 2 seems to be the real deal. Check out the gameplay video, and see if you think so too.
