Dying Light. I never knew that I needed and wanted parkour with my zombie survival, but holy shit do I love it. Pretty much everything about the game tickles my jimmies.
The location being this beautiful non-descript "middle eastern" city, the lighting painting the light brown walls of the city, painting the city in this golden amber color right at dusk. The ambient music, with it's focus on the vocal ululations more common in that generic "middle eastern" style of music, that give the entire setting this other worldly feel. The dead silent city, bathed in gold, with this male vocalist, letting out this droning croon of melancholy, punctuated by the growls of the sea of the dead below you. The whistle of the wind as you watch day fade to night, it's just, a fantastic bit of visual atmospheric storytelling. Gorgeous and captivating.
The fact that they actually make day/night matter, and that it's a thing you have to consider as you go out. The night is SUUUUPER dangerous, especially at low level, as you can't see shit without using artificial light (which draws zombie attention), and all the really dangerous zombies come out at night, and they do NOT play around. BUT, all XP rewards at night, are worth double, plus, night time is often when the supply air drops show up, so do you risk the dangers for increased rewards and supplies? Or play it safe and wait till dawn, and lose out on the supplies entirely?
How making noise is just a Bad Idea, any time of day, as it draws the fast moving zombies at you during the day and...well everything else even worse at night. So stealth and speed are your best weapons. Get good at parkour, learn to leap between the elevated building portions, and you are relatively safe. You can even see the places the other runner teams have paved an elevated road for other teams, to facilitate staying off the ground.
The crafting system is compelling, if a bit tedious as it has weapon durability, but it's nowhere near as bad as Breath of the Wild. Eventually it's not much of an issue, as you get upgrades to weapons that make them last WAAY longer, and you can repair them to extend their life.
The story is a bit thin and cliche, and the antagonist feels very much like a Vass (Farcry 3) Lite. He's nowhere near as compelling as Vass, but he's not terrible. He's just...not great. He's serviceable for the most part.
The rest of the supporting cast are fun characters that I really liked, in particular Jade and her brother. I wish they'd been utilized more, and that certain choices had been different when it comes to them but, they were fun characters.
The game mixes the serious main plot with a lot of hilariously goofy side missions, which is fun for breaking up the oppressive feel of the setting. They are very good about it though, keeping the comedy in the side missions that you don't really have to do, but damn if they aren't fun to do.
It's one of those games I've played multiple times on the single player, because it's just damn fun. The DLC expansion campaign is good, with a lot of interesting elements to it. Not as solid as the main game in my opinion, but still an enjoyable addition to the game.
Yeah, there's very little I dislike about the game at all really, other than the "I wish they'd done something different with some of the supporting cast, and I wish the villain was better"
Dying Light 2 is one of the few games I've been genuinely eager for when I heard it was in production.
