It's more Dying Light, which is good, but some of this is just abysmal in terms of the choices they've made. Spoilers ahead:
The "oh no, you're turning" sections are just lackluster. I can't fathom how they passed muster. You're just running around with the enemies highlighted, infinite health, and I don't quite understand if there's meant to be a sense of urgency, because there isn't. These sections are bad, and unfortunately, they make multiple appearances in the final chapter of the game, including the final boss.
Dying Light is at its best when you're fighting a horde of enemies and being overwhelmed - y'know, the zombie genre? The final boss fight is a fight against just the one big bad villain from the entire game, who ostensibly has glowy particle magic in his swipes and movements. Not entirely sure what they were smoking.
One thing that makes a comeback from Dying Light 1 is the Skyrim lockpicking, woohoo. Everybody's favorite thing. But, guess what, you can upgrade your lockpicks to force open locked containers. Sounds pretty sweet, right? Unfortunately Techland still insists on trivial annoyances with these instead of just, y'know, letting their player have fun and enjoy the well-earned upgrade. You have to hold an entirely different key to force them open, for up to five seconds, so your muscle memory will betray you often and you'll have to hit escape to then force them open. And you're capped to 99 lockpicks, so you'll find yourself forced to craft more rather often, as forcing open chews through lockpicks.
Also, you will find many safes. These are "puzzles" in the sense that reading the directions for your boxed mac n cheese is a puzzle. All you do is spam Q until you see the gold circle for the nearby note, go and grab it, and it'll be some stupid code like "4-4-4" (real code). The codes also never go higher than the number 14 despite the dial being all the way from 0 to 99, fun fact.
A true sin here is the "Outpost" bounty system, which requires you to open up a companion web page and make a Techland account to select and pursue bounties. Why isn't this in the game itself? Maybe Gazi from Dying Light 1 got promoted to CEO of Techland. No human being on this planet likes this, so I imagine many people don't even bother trying to use it.
Other cons include the grapple system consistently not working like you think it would coming from og Dying Light or even just looking at the zombies for when they're lunging toward you, and certain side quests being just dumb, but that's whatever.
Pros: some of the new mobility is fun. I don't like how they've made so many things into a series of almost arbitrary button presses, but you get used to them.
They removed the modifications system of Dying Light 1 where you just farm for King and put it on your weapon, instead now you earn the max level upgrade as the hard but reliably done part, and then you can craft that upgrade as much as you want. I find this better, means you can experiment with different weapons.
I like this game, but there are some moments where I'm baffled by Techland's seeming commitment to do things that are explicitly not fun or contrary to their own game's design. The focus on player choice and all that ♥♥♥♥, as you may imagine, does not feel especially pertinent. The set of "dimensional rift quests" are not at all worth it, do not play them. The only gleaming part is that one of the annoying brothers from the first game gets murked. If you liked Dying Light, play this. If you haven't played Dying Light, don't play this; play Dying Light and decide if this is worth your time.
