I can’t believe it, but I actually bought a full price game – DIGITALLY. Not only that, but I pre-ordered it, and fully intend on playing it at the midnight launch. These are weird times we live in.

I never got too far in the original Dying Light (I believe I played for around 15 hours) but I loved the creepy world, the focus on melee, and of course the online co-op. I got really into Dead Island as well for the exact same reason. To be honest with you, I think since 2010 or so, the zombie thing has been absolutely done to death, at least in terms of shooting zombies and survival-focused games, so parkour-simulator meets zombie basher with upgradable weapons and a cool online community sounded like a home run to me. I also may have had a few adult beverages leading up to my pre-ordering.

It’s been a lot of years since Left 4 Dead, and I’ve definitely taken a long, long break from co-op zombie games and zombie-related media in general, but I’m really excited about this. The game itself was delayed several times, and while I’m utterly terrified of buying anything hot off the press following the disaster that was Cyberpunk 2077, the reviews for Dying Light 2 have been stellar so far, citing the usual open-world jank, but little else in the way of bugs or crashing. The only real complaint is that it doesn’t bring much new to the table, and that the story is a little weak.

To be perfectly honest, I couldn’t care less if the whole story was “there are zombies here, and the zombies want to eat us, but we don’t want to be eaten, so we need to beat up the zombies before they can eat us.” That’s all a zombie game needs. Put yourself in the situation of a zombie apocalypse – isn’t the whole point to just… not die? If living in the zombie apocalypse was an Olympic sport, there would be two tiers of competitors: those who survived to live another day, and a pile of blood and guts on the floor. Merely not dying makes you Grand Champion of the World! And that’s where I will aim to be when Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos team up and deploy their population control zombie army via auto-piloted Teslas and Amazon delivery trucks.

As far as Dying Light 2 not bringing much new to the table, from what I understand, the open world was greatly expanded. In the first installment, tall buildings acted as barriers that you simply could not access. It appears that skyscrapers and generally any building now act like parts to a large playground for you to run around in, and as a fan of the “internet sensation of 2004” known as parkour, I’ve been very impressed by the fluidity of movement demonstrated in the gameplay videos. This is basically a home run for me.

It’s funny to think that, despite the zombie sensation (the other trend alongside parkour) absolutely taking over media for a least a decade, no other title took the reigns when it came to the smooth-world-traversal + zombie hybrid in the same way as Dying Light. That’s what makes the whole game, too – running around, particularly at night, trying to avoid all of the zombies. Sure you could go absolutely nuts and start caving in heads with some buddies, but the focus was and has always been the art of moving around in buttery-smooth perfection. If you’ve played and enjoyed the first game, you know exactly what you’re getting into here.

There’s also the fact that this is going to be running natively on my Playstation 5, and what better game to look pretty than an open world zombie basher with a full weather system and day and night cycles? I’ve barely played any PS5 games to be honest, most of them PS4 – but while they’re all gorgeous, none were actually demanding of the Playstation’s hardware. This may very well be the first where fancy things like lighting will be noticed.

One thing that the original Dying Light did, as I’m sure will be the case with the sequel, is it looked absolutely gorgeous. I played it on a souped-up PC (for the time), and the weather effects were really neat, and things really went off the rails when the night time hit. Everything had a vivid color palette and when things got extremely dangerous at night, oh boy, could you feel it. The eerie vibe of the original will no doubt be present as has been shown in the preview footage, and sneaking around will surely be a necessity to make your life easier.

I could go on, but a video can say a lot more than I can. If you’re not yet convinced to check out Dying Light 2, have a gander at this compilation of all the cool things to know about this title, due out tomorrow (as of this writing), February 4th!