This review is a bit pre-mature as I've yet to finish but here's a few stand outs of the game so far.
Parkour - This a major step up the from Dying Light 1. It takes everything you know and love about Dying Light's parkour and turns it up to 11. This is certainly the best parkour system I've seen in a fist person game.
Environment - While there are a few issues the environment is near perfect, everything has been designed around the parkour element so you'll always find a path on the rooftops of where you need to go.
Graphics - They are a major upgrade from the first game but for a 2022 game it does suffer is some areas. The lighting is not as good as most games nowadays and when you use the flashlight no shadow is cast. But my main issue with the graphics is the NPC's. The faces are very cartoony and the facial animation overall is not acceptable for a game released in 2022. With that said the story is not a major part of the Dying Light franchise so it is not a huge impact on the overall enjoyment of the game.
Performance - This is a bit of a mixed bag, the graphics settings are very limited so it's difficult to tweak it for optimal performance. It's not terrible but it's not great either. With my 1070ti and 9700k with 32gb of ram I was running at about 35-45 fps @1440p on medium to low settings. The game is poorly optimized and mid level systems will struggle to run it. But there is a solution, there is an option to lower the tender resolution then upscale it with post processing.
This takes my fps from about 40 to over 100, the downside is with a lower render resolution textures become blurry.
Combat - Combat has both improved and declined since the release of Dying Light 1. Human vs Human combat has significantly improved since the first game, the flow is much nicer and more defined than before. But Player vs zombie combat has taken a hit, the rag dolls that were in the previous game were pretty incredible. Hit a zombie in the leg and he falls over, kick them and they'll fly backwards and fall on the ground. Kick them into someone spikes and they'll go right through the zombie. Unfortunately with Dying light 2 the rag doll is almost nonexistent. Instead if plays one of several pre-canned animations depending on where you hit a zombie. This is fine at first but becomes very repetitive and apparent it's just repeating the same animations instead of the dynamic rag dolls in Dying Light 1.
Story - I will not be going over this as it's spoiler free and I've yet to finish it.
Conclusion - Overall this is a great sequel and addition to the Dying Light franchise, some of the things that I've mentioned can be fixed post launch and I sincerely hope that Techland does fix them as this has potential to be one of the best games of 2022.
