Dying Light

A slightly better version of Dead Island in everything but name. [Apr 2015, p.84]

Dying Light is a sum of its inspirational parts. It brings together Techland's previous Dead Island with a bit of Mirror's Edge and Far Cry 3. At its best, leaping across the rooftops with zombies milling about below, it surpasses those titles. At worse, it has mechanics that needlessly pad out the game's running time.

Although a sound game, Dying Light just falls short of greatness.

Quotation forthcoming.

Dying Light features some truly serene moments as you glide from building to building, but once that serenity halts, so does the player’s enjoyment.

If you’re a Dead Island enthusiast, zombie addict, or free running connoisseur, Dying Light is the game for you.

My dearest Dying Light, I am so grateful for your specialness, for it shines through even when I am prepared to damn you to hell.

Dying Light introduces a new way to see the survival horror genre. It combines aspects of other great games and carries its own soul to demonstrate how a real zombie apocalypse would be in an open world game. Great fast-paced action.

Even though its story will leave most players unsatisfied and its open-world design is questionable at best, its phenomenal side stories and often entertaining gameplay will prevent distaste. This isn’t the next The Last of Us, and its narrative comes nowhere close to Telltale’s The Walking Dead, but the framework is in place for a generally good time.

Techland proves with Dying Light that the zombie genre has potential to grow. The parkour system works great, the setting is fresh and killing undead is always good. On the other hand there are cliches, boring missions and stolen inspiration, which are keeping this game from really getting good grades.

Fans of zombie survival, open worlds, and first-person shooters will find things to enjoy in Dying Light, but it’s a rough ride. The contextual movement and realistic time progression suggest that Techland wants to immerse you in Harran’s apocalyptic plight, but the game’s realism takes a hit at almost every turn whether it’s the graphics, the enemy AI, or the mannequin-like demeanor of the souls you’ll attempt to save.

Without such a narrative, Dying Light devolves into almost pure gore. It’s not that the game is inordinately bloody or hard to stomach; it’s that it presents itself like a sadistic RPG, where the main goal isn’t to find the aforementioned file for the GRE, but rather gain as much strength, agility, and weapon modifications as you can so that your zombie skirmishes become more and more ludicrous the deeper you get into the game.

Bad storytelling and mission design that brings mechanical flaws to the forefront, however, and dampens whatever momentum the experience has. If the best time you can have with Dying Light is through avoiding the main content, maybe that says a lot about how you shouldn’t be structuring an open world game.

The sheer "stuff" can keep you occupied for hours upon hours, simply because the mechanics are clean enough and the game world itself is beautiful. When the game is still in its tutorial portions, you'll find yourself on top of a high building. Take a look around from there, and you'll see a detailed and varied city, see plenty in the distance. This is a good-looking game.

It’s a shame those moments aren’t more frequent, though, because I really wanted to like Dying Light more than I did. I still wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it if you’re in need of some schlocky fun, there are just some caveats clutching on to this recommendation that even a bloody hatchet won’t fix.

Dyling Light's problem is that it also brings everything else that comes with open-world games with it, and it's a poor, uninteresting fit with how strong the free-running is.

Don’t let concerns with Techland’s previous Dead Island games stop you from taking on a chance on Dying Light. You have to slog through some really terrible story missions and some very janky combat, but there’s a detailed world to discover, and a lot of fun mechanics to take advantage of.

Dying Light isn't a bad game, it's just one that feels like it goes on a bit too long, and was too invested in the trappings of an "open world" to make itself really stand out.

What’s here works well enough, but it lacks soul, and if there’s any motivation to continue it’s only that you want to see it through - a damning indictment for any game.

The parkour and risk/reward of the day/night cycle are nice features, but they aren’t enough to overcome the abysmal writing or the boring, repetitive fetch quests that unnecessarily bloat this game.

Ultimately it's a game I appreciate for its ideas more so than its execution.

Unless you have better luck acclimating to the traversal mechanics than I did, Dying Light is hard to recommend.

A small improvement on Dead Island, but there’s still barely anything that either works as well as advertised or is isn’t just stolen wholesale from other, better, games.