I’ve never played a game that felt as much like doing work as Dying Light 2. Starting this thing up feels like clocking in to a nine-to-five shift at the asbestos mine. Now, a reasonable person would have stopped playing after an hour or so – but you didn’t come here to read reviews written by a reasonable person. If you want someone to baby-bird milquetoast opinions down your throat, hop on over to IGN[1]. They and their lukewarm takes would love to have you. But I digress…

            Here are some things I vaguely remember liking about the first Dying Light:

            -Cool parkour mechanics; you could pull off some fun, impressive-looking moves after just a little bit of gameplay.

            -The combat felt physical, and the game had great gore effects and a wide variety of weapons with crazy modifications.

            -The villain, like almost all video game bad guys of the mid-2010’s, was a Vaas-from-Far-Cry-3-knockoff, but there are worse baddies to mimic.

            -The nighttime gameplay was shit-your-chinos scary. Thinking about sprinting through the nighttime in Harran, looking frantically for the purple UV glow of the nearest safe zone, still makes my asshole pucker.

            …And here are some things I thought were less than stellar about Dying Light 2 (observant readers may notice a pattern):

            -Mediocre parkour mechanics. Your character starts off with the breathing capacity of someone with a stoma and ends with the endurance of an octogenarian with emphysema. This is not to mention the fact that you have to wade through hours of bullshit side quests to unlock things like the ability to sprint.

            – The combat consists of whacking zombies and people who act like zombies with heavy sticks, over and over again. Every enemy stumbles the exact same way when you hit them, and, although there’s some good gore, gore alone does not maketh a combat system. If I wanted to spend all day smacking around a dead-eyed horde with a broomstick I’d get a job as a janitor at the painkiller factory.

            -The villain is, as far as I could tell, some dude named Waltz, who…has superpowers, I guess? And at some point he gave your character, the iconically[2] named “Aiden,” superpowers, too, although yours only come out during limited plot-appropriate moments? Fuck it, who cares. I’m pretty sure I only saw the bad guy twice, and one of those instances was the final boss fight, where he epically glitched into a wall mid-monologue.

            -The nighttime gameplay is about as scary as Forrest Gump. And I’m not talking about the Vietnam scenes.

            Now, before I conclude, I feel that I should reiterate that I quite enjoyed the first Dying Light. I’m sure that the developers are lovely people, unless one of them is some sort of evil magician, which I don’t think is the case. That said: Fuck this game. I’d rather cut off a finger[3] than replay this software-shaped turd.

Score: 3/10 (+3/-1)

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[1] And while you’re at it, tell them to publish my articles at some point. I’ve been sending them for years.

[2] I’ll Venmo $10 to the first person who points out why I used “iconically” here. Hint: the reason is pretty dumb.

[3] Specifically, my left pinkie. Haven’t gotten much use out of that one since I left the Way of the Blade.