Who you gonna be when it crashes Find yourself covered in ashes Who you gonna be if its over Sun goes dark and you don’t know if ~
This is the way it begins. This is the apocalypse.
Bythe@delborovic; who has always been nothing but kind and brought me endless joy over the years by how she draws the characters who are important to me. Thank you.
A good game marred by some bad design decisions, Dying Light manages to be an overall enjoyable experience. I am reviewing this game as of March 2016, and therefore basing my critique after the game has had numerous patches, but I am not reviewing any DLC or multiplayer elements.
Full disclosure: I am a huge fan of zombie games. I don’t think I’ll ever get sick of zombies in games like other people may be. That doesn’t mean that all zombie games are good. In fact, a lot of them are pretty bland at best. Dead Island was a game that had a lot of promise, but overall fell flat for me. I never even played Riptide because of it. Dying Light definitely improves upon the Dead Island games greatly, but still falls into some of the same traps.
The main premise of Dying Light is that an outbreak of a Zombie Plague has caused Harran, a small country preparing for an international sports event, to be quarantined. An agent is sent in to recover sensitive information from a rogue operative but finds himself fighting to help the people of Harran survive. The main gameplay involves parkour and zombie fighting with some crafting and scavenging thrown in. A day/night system is in place, where super strong monster patrol the night, requiring you to plan missions/exploration around the time of day. The player learns more skills and crafting recipes as they level up.
Free running around the map is fun, especially when the grappling hook is unlocked. It’s mostly smooth, with some slight clunkiness from time to time. Sometimes the player locks on awkwardly to ledges when climbing. There will be some cheap deaths that result from bad platforming. The combat works pretty well, except when fighting the running zombies, which I will address later. Fighting the undead has a lot more feedback than it did in Dead Island. Zombies react pretty well to blows, and it is fun to devise practical strategies for dispatching them. However, fighting the larger zombies becomes a bit tedious later in the game, and I resorted to just shooting at them with guns from a distance. Another big problem is when the zombies grapple the player. Sometimes it feels really cheap how they just lock on to you from several feet away. While there is a move to dodge them and push them away, I found that it rarely worked.
Whereas Dead Island had two good regions to explore and then several awful ones, Dying Light sticks to two major areas that feel pretty well designed. There’s a minor third region that is only visited briefly, but it is nowhere near as bad as the Jungle and Lab regions of Dead Island. The maps are fun to run around, and they take on an entirely different life after dark. There are plenty of buildings and stores to scavenge through and numerous safe houses to reclaim. A big benefit to the game is all the little details in the environment. Probably my favorite part of the game was running around, killing zombies strategically, and exploring every nook and cranny. Swimming in the game kind of kills any momentum though, and while the maps are interesting to explore, the enemy placement isn’t very dynamic. Zombies will generally be placed in the same area every time. For example, there’s a bridge near the towers where zombies come around the corner at you, in the exact way every time.
Just like in Dead Island, the running zombies are one of my least favorite parts of the game. Whereas at night they make sense and can be run from and avoided with stealth, during the day they seem to always know where you are and pursue you tirelessly, just like in Dead Island. While in Dying Light they are a little easier to fight thanks to better controls, they are still a huge pain because of their tendency to dodge attacks. They get annoying very quickly during the day. Call me a slow zombie purist if you will, but I love Left4Dead. The fast zombies in Dying Light just feel out of place in the daylight. The story of Dying Light was alright. It was kind of similar to the story of a Far Cry game. It’s kind of basic, but at least there were no parts where I felt sexually assaulted like in Far Cry 3. The climax of the story was pretty underwhelming, as the final boss encounter was reduced to a cliché Quick Time Event. I played almost all of the side quests, and I liked most of them. However, some of the side quests were a little mundane, and I eventually found myself skipping the dialog on a couple of them. My favorite side quests involved exploring new areas.
Overall Dying Light was a good game. It felt like what Dead Island should have been, and leaves me wondering how Dead Island 2 is going to keep from being overshadowed. I might pick up the DLC for the game when I feel like revisiting it. I hope they can smooth out the rough edges in future installments.
Score 8/10 Good, but not amazing. Fans of zombies and/or open world games will enjoy it.
