YMMV / Dying Light 2 Stay Human

• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • Waltz can be this during his first fight. Despite the previous scenes establishing him as a terrifying Lighting Bruiser stronger than any Volatile he fights in an extremely telegraphed manner and loses his super speed in favor of slowly walking around, letting players get multiple free hits in. Averted when he's fought the second time, however.
  • Waltz’s fourth and final stage counts too. Despite Waltz injecting himself with three inhibitors at once Aiden spends the last part of the final boss in his infected state. Absolutely nothing Waltz does can do anything more than scratch damage and after a brief chase Aiden will pummel him down to zero health with basically no effort.
• Awesome Music:
  • Empowering Yourself plays when you begin to climb up the last of the VNC tower after being told it's impossible. An especially uplifting track that gives you a sense of optimism and "You CAN do it!" as you grapple hook across gaps 50 stories above the ground.
  • The Joy of Parkour starts kicking off when you begin parkouring around, and it even distorts whenever you jump around long distances. Not many things feel quite as satisfying as hearing this play as you wall run, paraglide and jump across rooftops.
• Base-Breaking Character: Lawan is either liked for being a badass Action Girl with Hidden Depths (and Rosario Dawson's voice acting and likeness) or hated for being an abrasive Blood Knight who treats Aiden harshly in quite a lot of interactions between the two (especially in the infamous shoe fetch quest).
• Best Boss Ever: The final boss fight against Waltz. Avoiding the QTE fight Rais had in the last game, Waltz is fought four times in a row, getting stronger each time he's beaten. The stakes are also at their highest with Aiden remembering his previous bond with his assumed torturer and both of them fighting for what they believe in, Waltz in sacrificing the city to save Mia while Aiden fights to save the city even if it means possibly losing his sister.
• Catharsis Factor: Choosing to divert the first water tower to the Peacekeepers over the Survivors results in Aiden eventually killing Barney. After all the trash talking he's done to Aiden, you can finally kick him to the curb and beyond.
• Complete Monster:
  • "Missing Persons" side quest: Cliff is a supplier who works under Dr. Vincent Waltz to bring him children to be experimented on and for Pilgrims to be killed by his group. When Aiden Caldwell investigates the whereabouts of his location by the request of his brother Damien, it’s revealed that Cliff was never under any danger and was using his brother to send victims by putting himself under the guise of him being kidnapped to get his brother to obey, with their bodies being bloodied and beaten to death. Once Damien is shocked over this, Cliff shows no concern over his brother's response, and attempts to kidnap Aiden and bring him to Waltz only to get killed himself, the events of the quest causing Damien to become suicidal, which could lead to him jumping off the top of the bazaar settlement.
  • "Bloody Ties" DLC: Astrid is a disgraced journalist seeking to reclaim her fame after taking over Carnage Hall. Converting the safe competition into slaughterous Gladiator Games, Astrid lures people throughout Villador to compete in Carnage Hall, where hundreds are killed in matches, with non-combatants imprisoned and used as Cannon Fodder for her fighters and zombies. When the fighter Olga disobeys Astrid's orders, Astrid forces Olga to give her one of his sons or she will kill his whole family. Astrid corrupts said son into becoming the bloodthirsty Skullface, while plotting to kill Skullface when Peacekeeper Jack Matt threatens to shut Carnage Hall down because of Skullface's brutality. When Aiden Caldwell tries making a deal with Astrid to ensure his friend Ciro's safety, Astrid arranges for Aiden to fight Ciro to the death. Should Aiden throw the match, Astrid will force Aiden to fight Skullface while imprisoning Ciro. She then goads Skullface to kill his father when he intervenes.
  • Banshee—I Am The Cure prequel comic: General Buran is a Social Darwinist hoping to separate the strong from the weak by any means necessary. When presented with a vaccine to help cure the virus, Buran ignores all the warnings given to him by the doctor and has her test animals killed and research burned so that he can advance his plan. Buran unleashes the unfinished vaccine into the city, getting countless innocents infected and turned into zombies, leading to them being shot dead by his soldiers, all the while holding a shelter for the wealthy to separate them from the average citizen. When confronted by the doctor, Buran has her infected with the gas, mockingly requesting her to hand over the vaccine so he can save the city.
• Designated Hero: The people of the Bazaar are this, as while they are part of the Survivors faction, they still tried to hang Aiden on their first appearance, all while cheering for his demise, then later they also often lie to him due to a lack of trust, and the fact that they also tend to mock Alberto for his speech impediment only make them harder to relate with.
• Designated Villain: The Peacekeepers are supposed to be portrayed as fascist-like jerks who rule the City with an iron fist, but not only is their regime Repressive, but Efficient at worst, but their key members are much more likable than those of the Bazaar Survivors, especially Aitor and Rowe. Even some of their idle NPC chatter are much more respectful when addressing Aiden compared to their Survivor counterparts. If the player saves Frank, they even turn against Jack Matt because they refuse to hurt innocents like the army before them.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Wierzbowski, a member of Rowe's team that escorts Aiden in the elevator ride, is liked among the fandom for his Plucky Comic Relief personality in spite of appearing only in one mission (where he is promptly killed off).
  • Rowe himself also has a lot of fans for his A Father to His Men attitude and also for his Heroic Sacrifice. It is all but agreed that he is a good example of not all Peacekeepers being complete assholes to others.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: The ending where the Survivors control Villedor, the Peacekeepers and Renegades are dismantled, and Frank, Lawan and Hakon all survive is treated as the Golden Ending...except that the Survivors have been consistently portrayed as violent, murderous thugs who attacked the Peacekeepers with little to no provocation and have no real way of sustaining life in the city, the Peacekeepers, who were the only one actively trying to restore safety and stability to Villedor are gone, Hakon gets away completely with Lukas' murder and manipulating Aiden for most of the story, and while the Nightrunners reforming is treated as a good thing, the fact that Frank is a perpetually drunk Dirty Coward who abandoned the organization the moment they suffered losses, there's no guarantee it will actually last long. Not to mention that Aiden still suffers from infection, making him losing control of himself and turning on Lawan (or Hakon in the ending where the City is partially destroyed) a terrifying possibility.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation:
  • The reveal that the world apocalypse happened not because of Kyle Crane turning into a Volatile and escaping the quarantine zone at the end of The Following, but because of GRE further experimenting on the Harran virus after managing to beat it the first time, left a very sour taste in many player's mouth. As a result, a lot of players pretend that the bad end of The Following was the true reason of the outbreak. It was only made worse with a tie-in comic called "Banshee: I am the cure", where it was revealed (in a flat-out nonsensical way) that the supposed Harran vaccine had "side effects" and was spread by an insane military general who wanted to benefit from withholding the completed cure and letting the world fall apart.
  • On a similar note, there were quite a few fans who disliked the game's explanation for the lack of firearms in the game. That explanation being that there are simply no bullets left in the entire world. Setting aside the plausibility of the entire world running out of ammunition, the idea that no one has acess to the means to manufacture more bullets, even if industrial-scale manufacture isn't possible anymore, was decried as patently ridiculous. There are still ways of manufacturing bullets that require no electricity or any advanced facilities. Reloaded, the Updated Re Release, mitigated the problem somewhat by bringing back some firearms from the first game.
• Fanon Discontinuity: It's not uncommon to find people who refuse to acknowledge the sequel's existence (at least story-wise) due to cranking up the Happy Ending Override of The Following to truly absurd levels and resulting in a very bleak world that has only a few likeable characters.
• Game-Breaker: Molotov Cocktails. They're just as strong, if not stronger, than they were in the first game, remaining a highly effective means of damage and crowd control all the way through to the end of the game. Most enemies in the game will panic when set ablaze, rendering them unable to attack, while allowing you to easily follow up with attacks of your own.
  • The Korek charm Easter Egg. Obtaining it lets you infinitely repair your weapons at the very small cost of a 400 mutation samples for each repair. So feel free to ditch that Too Awesome to Use mindset regarding that modded artifact weapon you have and go to town hacking zombies apart.
    • It seems Techland thought that infinite repairs was too strong, so this has been changed to a 40% damage boost when a weapon is at 25% durability or less.
  • Aiden’s infected state. It only crops up during specific story moments and shows how absolutely busted Aiden is at peak infection. He can One-Hit Kill enemies, he’s Nigh-Invulnerable, can jump extremely high, is immune to fall damage, and his infection meter will never rise.
  • Co-op mode in general. The enemies are not scaled or programmed to deal with multiple players, so it's extremely easy to take down even bosses by just overwhelming them with attacks from multiple directions.
  • The PK Crossbow is a semi-auto ranged weapon, which can shoot 5 bolts at a time extremely quickly. Combine the fact that these bolts can do various things such as poisoning enemies which stuns them, freezing them solid, or being blown away by sheer impact and you will never have to worry about dealing with Goons, Demolishers, Revenants, Renegades and Bandits in close quarters ever again.
  • Max level Regenerator Boosters, Toughness Boosters and Muscle Boosters combined basically turns you into an invincible juggernaut that can slash apart anything in record time. Even multiple Volatiles attacking you at once will fail to stagger you due to the Toughness Booster softening blows. Any damage inflicted on you is instantly healed by the Regenerator Booster's 5% max health per second heal (later nerfed to 3%), and properly modded, you can deal over 1k damage per hit with the 50% damage buff the Muscle Booster provides. Once you unlock the Plague Witch's shop, crafting these boosters becomes trivial and cheap.
    • The firearms update increased the amount of rooftop gardens with poppies growing nearby, meaning you can start stockpiling them early in the game, no Plague Witch necessary.
• He Really Can Act: Even harsher critics would admit that one of the game's highlights was Jonah Scott's praiseworthy performance as Aiden, mainly since he was still a relatively unknown voice actor with one prominent role under his belt at the time of development.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: The general opinion on Bloody Ties DLC is that it's just too short to be fleshed out properly and offers very little beside gladiator style fights.
• Narm: Several major battles start with Aiden getting sucker punched or shoved over by his foes, and when he glances back up they're instantly in their battle-ready poses with weapons drawn in the span of a second. Combine that with every case having even infected enemies just standing there until the gameplay fully shifts over, and it almost entirely deflates the tension of the scenes as if everyone's waiting for Aiden to have his turn come up in an RPG.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • At some point in the game, using Inhibitors to increase your health or stamina will give Aiden an increasingly higher chance of getting a seizure and it gets harder to watch each time.
  • Veronika's death, which is made even worse by Aiden going berserk due to his infection and pouncing on her and thrashing her around like a wild animal before brutally mauling her (thankfully with a discretion shot). Oh, and you get to see all that from Aiden's own point of view.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Many players tend to be more favorable toward the advanced gameplay features rather than the cliché-filled plot with the supposedly "sympathetic" Bazaar characters being presented as psychotic, trigger-happy jerks, while the other factions commit even more questionable actions, leaving little room to root for anyone.
• Rooting for the Empire: While the Peacekeepers are largely portrayed as the "bad" faction to side with due to their authoritarian mindset, many players have decided to side with them purely out of spite given just how unlikeable the Survivors, particularly the ones that live in the Bazaar, are. See the Unintentionally Unsympathetic section below for why. In addition, whether you find their perks more useful or not, siding with them gives the player the crossbow, the only semi-auto firearm in the entire game.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The "True Friends" sidequest ending has a really sad ending to it, if you are a dog lover. The quest involves you hunting down two boys and a dog after the boys mother asks you for your help getting them back and it turns out they were hunting down their friends dog to give to their mom as a meal When you find them, the older of the two boys barely manages to get out of a Dark Zone while the younger one is trapped inside with the dog. When you get to them, the boy is safe albeit terrified but the dog is less intact as it got wounded protecting the kids. Ultimately you will have to either leave the dog to die alone or put it out of its misery. To make things worse, when you get back to the Bazaar, you have to break the news to the dogs owner, who solemnly and silently storms off.
  • The "End of the World" party shown at the very beginning of the game gives an incredibly somber yet peaceful atmosphere as you explore the ruins of a mansion while a modified version of "New Beginnings" plays. Seeing the remains of the people who committed suicide a decade ago is heartwrenching.
• That One Attack: Higher level Virals have a pounce attack that they love to use when attacking the player. It takes off a hefty chunk of health, knocks the player over, cannot be blocked, is tricky to dodge and given the nature of Virals attacking in groups and from all directions, very difficult to see coming. Worse still, Volatiles also have this attack and in their hands it becomes a One-Hit Kill on any player who hasn't invested in health upgrades.
• That One Level: The quest "Something Big Has Been Here - Part V" requires you to hunt down 10 element-infused Demolishers around Downtown. Problem is, their locations are unmarked, and cross-referencing guide locations is difficult since the map is 3D, making the locations harder to narrow down. Expect this list to stay in your log for a while.
• The Scrappy: Barney, who has been likened to the first game’s Rahim. He’s a Jerkass Axe-Crazy Ungrateful Bastard who makes a horrible first impression on the player and continues to be a raving Psychopathic Manchild for most of the first area’s questline. He does lighten up if the player chooses to side with the Survivors, but for many it came across as shallow and too little too late. He’s earned so much ire in the fanbase that it’s to the point where he is commonly cited as a reason why people side with The Peacekeepers over the Survivors.
• Take That, Scrappy!: If the player sides with the Peacekeepers, they will get to fight Barney and defeat him. Afterwards, he will be arrested and implied to be executed for his misdeeds, alongside other Bazaar Survivors.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The changes to the parkour system haven't been well received by all, due to many of the basic skills such as wall running and jumping off enemies being locked behind a skill tree. Furthermore, the sprint button has been replaced by gaining speed via chaining different parkour moves, which all consume stamina and can only be performed in small bursts initially.
  • The firearms update removed stamina consumption reductions from berserker gear, upsetting many a player that had a good two-handed weapon setup.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Despite being Aiden’s main goal for the entire game, Mia has basically no character of her own. Aside from flashbacks at the beginning she doesn’t show up or receive characterization up until the very end where the stakes are so hectic that she’s almost a footnote. Even if the player saves her over Lawan she simply gets Killed Offscreen with the player never seeing Aiden interact or say goodbye to her.
  • The Colonel got a fair share of focus in both E3 demo of the game and the lore information, yet in the final product he is reduced to a one-mission character who has only a couple of dialogues with Aiden before disappearing from his headquarters alongside his crew altogether if Aiden chooses to side with him.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The original E3 demo had no mention of Waltz or the GRE experiments altogether and had instead a very realistic problem of the water supply of Villedor running out, and Aiden would have to turn on the water pumps in the Colonel's headquarters with or without his permission. And even though said mission was promised to take place halfway through the game, come the final product, it becomes the Point of No Return of the whole game once Aiden reaches the truck depot.
  • At the time of the game's development, Chris Avellone was initially a contributor upon the game's story. However, due to a controversy surrounding Avellone at the time (which had been recently resolved), all of what he contributed was said to have been scrapped by game's developer. And although Techland assured consumers that his contributions were nothing major, how much his writing contributed to the game's intended story is uncertain. Some fans have speculated that over half of the game's story may have been completely re-written if not just cut wholesale.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: A common complaint about the game's story is that there's virtually no one worth rooting for. Aiden is a jackass who openly admits to seeing everyone else as either obstacles or tools to use to achieve his goal, Hakon is a traitor, Lawan is a violent, bloodthirsty sociopath, Frank is a drunken coward who abandoned his people to die the moment the going got tough, the Survivors are a bunch of murderous, selfish thugs and bullies, the Peacekeepers are borderline fascist, and the Renegades (with the possible exception of the Colonel himself) are basically bandits in all but name.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • The game frames the Bazaar Survivors as the de-facto “good” faction in contrast to the Peacekeepers and Renegades. However:
    • They make a horrible first impression when, upon seeing a recently infected Aiden, they immediately decide to lynch him with, several sounding outright Ax-Crazy and gleeful to watch him die. While some try to justify it as I Did What I Had to Do, it doesn’t explain their bloodthirsty eagerness or the fact that they do deliberately spiteful things like turning off the UV lights and leaving both Hakon and Aiden to be killed by the Infected because the latter has no biomarker despite UV lights stopping infection.
    • It only worsens as the first area goes on as several are completely unapologetic about nearly hanging Aiden and the player is forced to put up with Barney being a psychotic, ungrateful, and Entitled Bastard who complains that Aiden could’ve done more to help. Despite giving him no reason to care about a group that almost killed him just days prior. Or the fact that they will attack Aiden under assumptions of him being a Peacekeeper spy if the player chooses to help them.
    • Not only do the Bazaar survivors act rude and ungrateful towards Aiden, but they also bully Alberto for his speech impediment and clearly take pleasure in it, despite Alberto being one of their few Craftmasters. It takes Alberto having to sacrifice his life to destroy the Peacekeepers' main windmill for the other Survivors to actually respect and treat him better.
    • In almost every main quest and side quest with the Bazaar, the Survivor giving the quest is almost never fully honest with Aiden, either leaving out key details or just outright lying to him. Which, in far too many cases, puts him in dangerous situations that almost get him killed. It makes it very difficult to trust them as a faction when they don't show any trust towards the player. This makes Aiden's speech, where he provides a counterpoint to Waltz' harsh statement towards the Bazaar survivors (by telling him that there are good people within the group), ring hollow making the latter's criticism towards the Bazaar Survivors more valid.
  • The game treats sparing Hakon as the good choice with Aiden and others arguing to Lawan that Vengeance Feels Empty with Hakon rejoining the Night Runners afterwards. Except regardless of his reasons he killed the Peacekeeper’s commander then framed the Survivors for it, leading to one faction being wiped out in a completely needless war that caused multiple deaths on both sides. Sparing him (which is necessary for achieving the Golden Ending) could be considered making him a Karma Houdini.