Dying Light 2: Stay Human

Dying Light 2: Stay Human is the follow up to the open-world action-RPG that took its Dead Island roots and pushed them even further. As a wanderer named Aiden, you will mad dash your way through the last human settlement to hopefully save it from the brink of destruction, and beware, the choices you make matter. Utilize some unique melee weapons mixed with parkour to smash the varied enemies populating the world in brutal and creative combat. And with easy coop play, this is a game you can really enjoy with your friends. But, is this a game you should play on the Steam Deck?

The Max Settings

At max settings, Dying Light 2 looks incredible, but it is definitely not sustainable. When left alone, the game sits around 21 FPS with upwards of 80c temps and is highly unstable. There are a ton of settings that we can fiddle with though, and through those, the game is very playable!

Dying Light 2: Stay Optimized

With the settings we have, we were able to get 3 different builds in Dying Light 2, with each one focusing on battery/stability, visual quality, and framerate. I personally preferred the battery/stability as it was 40 FPS 99% of the time and I am a sucker for stability. To achieve this, we had to use FSR 2.0, which Techland has implemented amazingly, and a mix of high and low settings! With these, we were able to keep battery life around 3 hours with sub 70c temps!

I did notice 2 issues with this build though, but they didn't affect my enjoyment of the game. First, there is some ghosting around certain objects. This was most prevalent in cutscenes when an object was being shown, usually something tech-related. I also noticed it in fireflies around the game where they just look a little washed out.

The second issue was smaller, but I noticed when in darker areas, turning the flashlight on or off shows some quick ghosting. When turning it on, this adjusts really quick, but turning it off actually has some lingering effect. This lingering effect does go away too, but it is still worth noting.

If you look towards the bottom of the screen, you can see what looks like dirt on the ground and surrounding the chair. That isn't supposed to be there in Dying Light 2.

With that in mind, our 2 other builds still handle the game extremely well, albeit with a bit more compromise. The visual quality build bumps up most of the settings to high, except for fog quality, and puts the game around a 22W drain at max. This is only recommended if you are plugged in, but with these settings, you will enjoy a stable 30 FPS with a gorgeous looking game.

This was in the midst of messing around with Dying Light 2's settings, but that 27 FPS shot back up to 30. I still liked the image though so I am using it!

Then we have the framerate build! I noticed that 50 FPS felt incredible on the Deck with Dying Light 2. Just enough extra frames without going overboard and draining more battery than needed. We did have to reduce the settings to hit it stable, but god damn it works well!

FSR 1.0 vs 2.0

If you are looking at the settings for Dying Light 2, you will see two different versions of FSR and different presets for them, FSR (1.0) and FSR 2.0. Both of these are AMD's upscaling technique, but use different methods to do it. FSR 1.0 is a more accessible option that can be utilized in every game no matter what because of how it upscales (it is baked into SteamOS), while FSR 2.0 uses something called Temporal upscaling. With this, the game can be upscaled from lower resolutions and look significantly better over 1.0, but it needs to be implemented on the developer side.

This is at the same exact quality settings with the only change being FSR Ultra Quality to FSR 2.0 Quality. Dying Light 2 showcases this difference incredibly!

Conclusion

When the Steam Deck came out, I recall playing Dying Light 2 and needing so many compromises to get it working well. So much so that it wasn't worth it. That completely changed when the developers not only introduced FSR 2.0, but implemented it so well. Now, the game feels premiere on the Steam Deck with how stable it can run and the framerates it can hit. Techland gets a lot of props for their incredible implementation here and I can't wait to kick some zombie ass!

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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