Charlie Hall|4 week ago
Meanwhile, multiplayer is still a work-in-progress
Everything that happens in Techland’s Dying Light 2 happens incredibly fast. Watching the first-person parkour game played well — which I was able to do at this year’s E3 — is like watching an action movie from the first-person perspective. It can be dizzying at times, with the main character leaping from rooftop to rooftop, then grappling with enemies at close range. At other times it can be downright frightening, with tense standoffs against the undead deep inside dark, cavernous buildings. But binding it all together is some very skillful world building, and a storyline that tends to reveal itself only when things go terribly wrong. Set sometime in humanity’s future, civilization has entered a new dark age brought on by an infection that turns people into flesh-eating zombies. Forced inside the walls of a single, pan-European city, small enclaves of survivors have sprung up in bastions on top of tall buildings. Only by staying in the sunlight, or huddled around special ultraviolet bulbs at night, can they hope to keep the undead at bay.
The environment of the city is built up in layers. Its highest points are recently-built, improvised wooden structures. Immediately below that are the remnants of high-rise penthouses and office buildings. During the demo the main character, named Aiden Caldwell, was able to leap and swing from point to point, at times with the help of a small glider and a grappling hook. Moving quickly, he passed through tiny living spaces, scattering pots and pans and startling civilians. Inside some of those buildings were drowsy packs of undead, mute and shuffling in the shadows.
Below that uppermost level of the city, things begin to get progressively more dim. Packs of zombies appear more frequently, but are still manageable. Aiden is able to cut through one or two in a pack of half a dozen, then exit the room quickly before escaping to the next rooftop. At one point in the demo, Techland even showed how by wrestling with a zombie, and then pushing it out a window, Aiden can use the undead to break his fall. Traversal is fluid, and rewards creativity and improvisation.
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