I finished DL2 yesterday at midnight. 86 hours in total, doing every sidequest/sideactivity I found. Overall, I liked the game a ton - in some ways it is a significant step up from DL1, in other a minor regression. I would say I still liked first game a bit more somehow, but it is close. You can see that they rewrote and redone a lot of it over the course of development, some seams are visible, sometimes quest log is not actually 100% reflective of what happened, a dialogue from time to time does not make sense, consistency-wise.
I did everything right to have the best possible ending, and then came the last choice in the game, where
I chose to try to save Lawan (naively assuming I would either sacrifice myself to stop the bombs, or manage to save us both AND defuse the bombs somehow). Then I saved Lawan and could only watch the missiles fly (thinking to myself, watching them in the air, ānow would be a good time to detonate themā) only for half the Villedor to get razed, apparently.
Oh well, at least Lawan lives, Mia maybe lives, and I got to leave the city with Hakon to learn surfing, as we made a deal at the start of the game. Plus X13, with its megatons of supplies and food is intact, possibly providing a base to build from.
If I had chosen to not try to save Lawan, I would have gotten the ābestā ending - Villedor would not get hit, Frank, survivors and Nightrunners would take control of the city and I would have left accompanied by Lawan, who got saved by Hakon.
I appreciate the inclusion of interactive dialogue and branching choices in this game - in any game - but I do wish the choices were less obfuscated and unclear. Sometimes I made a choice and Aiden said/did something completely different than I assumed/anticipated.
Absolutely love the soundtrack in this. Olivier Deriviere did another outstanding work.
It seemed like the zombies didnāt play that much of a role in my game. Outdoors by day you could just trot past them, and indoors by night you could creep past them. Fighting them was pretty optional. For most of my night-time runs at street level I had a bow that would one-shot howlers, so I was spared a few chases.
The chases I did start made me panic so much I never had the chance to enjoy what was happening :) I wonder if day-time chases would have been cooler to watch, or whether darkness was hiding some less persuasive āchase AIāā¦
I also had no problem with āslow unlocksā in the combat and parkour trees, as mentioned in various previews. In fact I never got on top of the different kicks and jumps, and used the basic moveset, plus the dropkick all the way through I think. Everything else seemed too fidgety to pull off at speed, and I fumbled most of what I tried, so I didnāt bother. Didnāt detract at all :)
I finally fired up the game, yay! So Aiden has the same voice actor as Cane from DL? Thatāsā¦ weird. I like his voice a lot but it feels like Iām Cane again.
In my 50+ hours, I died twice to zombies. Once during a night chase that I screwed up by catching myself in a dead end, and once during a boss fight when one of the additional volatiles grabbed me. The zombies are barely a threat this time around. Iām fine with that. After two decades of zombies, youād figure that the survivors wouldāve learned to deal with the undead. (In fact, itās almost unbelievable that they havenāt cleared the whole city out by now, but zombie apocalypse gonna zombie apocalypse.) Iāve died way more from falling which should be the likely outcome for someone running goofball errands and side missions while parkouring around rooftops.
I finally got to Central Loop and am pretty underwhelmed by how the game changed from parkour to paragliding. I havenāt visited the other regions yet, but I hope theyāre not like this.
I kind of miss the original gameās city. There it felt like a place people had lived, with more of a sense of varied, semi-realistic geography that I wanted to explore, rather than a bunch of puzzle set-ups.
Hereās an annoyance: Iām exclusively using an Xbox controller but the game continues to present menus and instructions in keyboard. Iām left having to guess/Google search how to do these.
Andā¦done. Clocking in around 80 hours. I have very mixed feelings about the game. While the controls were a bit too button mashy for my taste, I thought the combat and parkour elements were excellent. Night time exploration was tense and rewarding and largely stress free once I had the proper gear and pumped myself full of inhibitors. And while I initially found navigating through the central loop a bit frustrating at first, it became easier once I focused on paragliding and grappling my way around obstacles.
But the story dragged the whole experience down for me and I was absolutely annoyed by the ending. All in all, it wasā¦OKā¦ I guess. It just feels like an opportunity missed.
Finished this up a few days ago. 59 hours to completion.
Echoing some of the mixed thoughts above. The parkour was excellent. The combat was functional (and not bad by any stretch). The story was even keeping me engaged for the most part. The early stages were janky, and felt like somebody had shoehorned in a (very) extended story and game tutorial without having the time to make it all fit together, but it got stronger in the second area once Lawan, Frank, and Jack Matt were introduced.
Story spoilers for the first area: The first area wrapped up with so much potential. In my game, I took the side of the Apocalypse Hippies instead of the Apocalypse Fascists. Being trapped in the tunnel with a very uncomfortable ally seemed like the perfect setup for some tough choices-and-consequences moments. Then the new area felt so large and grand, and the gliding felt like such a natural addition, even if it was overpowered much the way the original gameās grappling hook had been. It felt great being able to travel so quickly, to scale buildings that were taller than two or three stories, to feel like this was how we could thrive after the collapse.
And then, spoilers for the final stretchā¦ The story ended. I was shocked when I learned that chasing the truck would be the point of no return. That final mission felt like watching Falloutās endgame slides spread out into a handful of perfunctory story beats. We had to wrap up no fewer than seven storylines: meeting the renegades by sneaking into their base, wrapping up the attempted murder mystery with Frank, getting dumped into a dark zone (I think this also happened to be my first time meeting a volatile outside of a cutscene!), the āIām a zombie, I guessā thing, the fulfillment of Hakonās redemption arc, the fulfillment of Lawanās romance arc, the fulfillment of Waltzās āIām a good dad!ā arc, and the missile crisis.
Am I mistaken in recalling seeing the infiltration mission as a āmid-gameā moment from a preview video? The Renegades seemed like they should have been a faction that you could work with, especially once it was revealed that the ābadā Renegades were from Waltzās splinter faction. I understand not having the time to flesh them out, but folding so much into that final mission felt rushed. Especially after climbing the tower to turn on the transmitter ā now that was a great mission!
Did we ever get an explanation for why Aiden had false memories? I mean, memories are funny things, but I never mistook another kid for my sister.
At the end, Waltz kept insisting that there was no other way to save Mia ā but I got the sense that he was launching the missile strike at Villedor out of revenge. Did anybody else find his motivations confusing?
Iām not sure I find it very touching that I saved Mia from an instantaneous death for a slow smothering death.
I actually loved the idea of daytime dark zones thanks to the missile strikes. Those areas were dangerous, hard to navigate because all the parkour spots had been knocked down, and opened up an āundergroundā layer that would have been cool to explore more.
Given what we saw of the infected and the many ways people had to combat them, there is no way humanity wouldnāt have reclaimed Villedor by now.
No, they have shown that mission almost three years ago in a 26 minute long 4K gameplay trailer. It is very obvious that this was supposed to be a midgame mission, but they werenāt able to execute the original full vision and rewrote the whole thing.
