How Long Is Dying Light 2?

Ahead of Dying Light 2: Stay Human’s launch, developer Techland boasted that the first-person parkour game set in a zombie apocalypse would take players roughly 500 hours to complete. That number indicates how long it will take players to see absolutely everything that Dying Light 2 has to offer, including the outcome of dozens of story choices (requiring multiple playthroughs). So assuming you’re only going to play through Dying Light 2 once, how long is it going to take you?

How long does it take to beat Dying Light 2?

Honestly, it really depends on how much you want to pull out of it. GameSpot guides editor Mark Delaney played through Dying Light 2’s campaign for review, finishing the story in about 48 hours. Though he strayed from the main path in order to complete side quests that he ran across, he didn’t go out of his way to chase everything down–only pursuing whatever happened to catch his fancy.

Mark estimates that, all told, the critical path missions in Dying Light 2 took him 20-25 hours, so you can expect that level of commitment if you only want to play the main campaign. Looking at the map, he predicts he still has a couple dozen hours of content left over, estimating his final playtime would be over 80 hours if he decided to go back and do everything.

To compare that to its predecessor, How Long To Beat lists the original Dying Light’s campaign at 17ish hours. To complete the campaign and do a little extra pushes you closer to 35 hours, and seeing everything the game’s open world has to offer puts you at 55 hours. So Dying Light 2 is a fair bit longer.

In GameSpot’s Dying Light 2: Stay Human review, Mark writes, “Dying Light 2 is a perplexing game. Its story and characters are headache-inducing, and it appears to lack polish in many areas. But even a dozen hours after I rolled credits, I’ve found myself going back to the game to do another parkour challenge, rummage through another abandoned science lab, or just see if I can get from Point A to Point B without ever hitting the ground. It’s rough around the edges and it asks players to invest a lot in its weakest element, but once you realize the story, like gravity, is only going to pull you down, you can begin to defy it and enjoy the things Dying Light 2 actually does well.”