Still going to have narrative limitations and swimming based stamina (I assume there are some progress gates with that). But holy crap the number of times I tried to enjoy Dying Light 2 and just hated that I couldn’t scale a wall or even effectively run away at night.
Totally agreed. Kyle Crane is pretty forgettable, I had to look his name up, in fact I had to look both the protagonists names up.
The funny thing about the Kyle Crane stuff is that for anyone with even a passing interest in media other than video games… you’ve heard Roger Craig Smith’s voice everywhere for over a decade now! He’s one of the most prolific and easily forgettable voice actors there is! Not only was he the voice for Sonic the Hedgehog in a litany of cartoon and video game iterations, but he’s just in nearly anything you can think of that requires voice acting. He literally was in 122 episodes of Cartoon Network’s Regular Show playing about 170 different characters, including Thomas, a character whose entire arc is based on a joke about how shows add new characters and then focusing on them so they constantly avoid focus on Thomas and make him ridiculously boring! In fact, episodes where he played Thomas were airing during the time that Dying Light released.
I don’t know how they ever thought Roger Craig Smith was going to be remembered as the action hero everyone loved. I mean, I love me some Roger Craig Smith, but way more for being a fucking goofball than being a gritty action hero.
Credit where it’s due, around the time Dying Light 1 came out, Roger Craig Smith was lending his voice to Chris Redfield, one of the more iconic zombie guys from Resident Evil.
My favorite Redfield moment was when, without a shred of irony, he talks smack about the villain acting like a comic book villain. Then in the same breath, he punches a six-ton boulder into submission.
Dying Light also really kinda shook up the zombie slaying dynamic with parkour. It seems like a fairly minor thing now, but that freedom of movement was a pretty big deal at the time, even if it was pretty janky.
Narratively, I agree that Crane isn’t a very strong character. He’s a dime-a-dozen government goon turned idealist. I don’t even remember how the story ends, or even most of the major beats except for a couple of major characters.
But at the time, to kick zombie butt while scooting around the rooftops and listening to Chris Redfield quip one-liners: those were special times even if it was a decade ago. They’re probably trying to recapture that magic, but I don’t know. It was lightning in a bottle and you can’t always get that back
DL1 spoilers, I guess
spoiler
You are a super secret agent for FEMA or something and are going after a rogue agent named Rais who I guess has secrets that show the zombie outbreak is at least partially UNATCO’s fault? You meet sexy olympian parkour lady named Jade and hang out with her parkour friends. Then you get Jade’s little brother killed so she is pissed at you but also you want her to step on you. Then the government agency you work for wants you to team up with Rais or some shit but you say no and betray them and decide to hang out with your cool parkour friends. Jade gets killed but you kill Rais and then you say some nonsense to the CDC. Then we have the DLC where everyone is out of water and zombrex so you go outside to drive dune buggies with a vaguely racist pseudo-african tribe (right outside generic Middle East city). You get double infected and turn into a super infected and every one of your parkour friends in the city die from lack of supplies.
The story was ridiculously forgettable but the gameplay was REAL good. It was everything we wanted out of Dead Island (except for the ridiculously emotional beats) but also actually fun to play. And REAL good grappling hook.