have you played Dying Light 1?
I played the shit out of it, plus spent some 8k hours developing custom maps for it. i really loved that game when i played it. not for the crafting, but for the slashing aspect of it. it's very satisfying game to hack and slash zombies, mainly through melee. while there is crafting, it is nowhere near as convoluted to DL2. DL2 it's like they tried to do a Witcher game, with all the stupid potions, rpg elements and million side quests. DL1 is much more of a straight forward slasher game.
like i said, i played the hell out of DL1 and couldn't stand DL2. you should probably switch the DL version, from 2 to 1, on your hard drive! ;)