3/5 ★ – TalonJedi's review of Dying Light 2 Stay Human.

I've had this one in my queue for quite some time. Over a year and a half and I finally got around to it and I rather enjoyed my time with it for the most part but I would in no way replay it again unless it was in co-op on a new game plus perhaps. It suffers from the tired sandbox open world Far Cry like motif of checking off boxes to level up your character in the world, etc. Also, there's windmills like radio towers to take over and the fast travel system is terrible. You must pretty much do a quest within each metro station scattered around the open world city and only then can you fast travel to each one of them. Never have I ever quickly decided to skip fast travel in a game until this one and instead slogged around from one end of the map to the next. Traversal is okay but I expected more from a game heavily focused on parkour. They wanted you to spend all the time doing side missions, gathering resources, and what not to upgrade your traversal and paraglider and even then it still feels lacking in regards to getting around the big open world map. Some of the control precision could be a bit more tightened as well as I found myself falling to my death more times than I should have. And the combat had some cool ideas, like parrying and blocking at the right time to traverse over enemies and such, but I felt a lot of the time I was just mashing the right trigger while dodging left/right to kill enemies quicker that way other than the fancy ways they set out in front of me. But those grievances aside, the story was pretty solid about a guy in search of his long lost sister. I played the first Dying light years ago and I think it's the same dude from the first game. I stuck to mainly the story missions too and I'm glad so I didn't lose focus on the tale it was trying to tell. Upgrading the main character too lets you choose which function you favor upgrading, stamina or combat. I stuck with a balance of both but more so favored stamina to get more efficient traversal skills. And you can find special boxes hidden in the map or by progressing through the story to upgrade your health or stamina meter as well. Overall, the story and gore was enough to make me see it through to the end. The parkour was solid enough, albeit minor control issues, that it reminded me of Mirror's Edge from time to time, especially during some climbing missions and I love me some Mirror's Edge like traversal. If you want a new zombie first person action co-op game I will likely hope to suggest Dead Island 2 over this one, which I am about to play next and hear really good things about. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8545514/?ref_=fn_al_tt_4