Dying Light (Game Review)

The zombies are back, or rather, they never really left 'cause of the whole 'undead' thing. Anyway, you know a really good way of dealing with zombies? Apparently parkour is excellent for escaping the undead hoards. If you currently aren't in the middle of a zombie apocalypse nor have the agility to learn parkour, then Dying Light is for you!

He just wants a hug, but give him one and his heart will pop!

As an agent for a government agency called the GRE (I never actually learnt what that stood for) you play Kyle Crane, a somewhat competent agent who is sent into the zombie infested city of Harran to recover a stolen file which contains something sensitive about the virus and/or cure which is being held by a vicious dictator. Minutes after being deployed, Kyle fucks up royally and is saved by the local survivors and scavengers. The entire premise is rather long-winded and most of what happens is simply a staging point for the actual story which a much more interesting man-o vs man-o war of personalities. When I say more interesting, I mean slightly less stereo-typical than its starting ideas.

For once, it's nice to play a character that has clear morals and intentions, who isn’t a two dimensional canvas for you to project yourself on. Kyle has real and well expressed emotions and reacts to situations like a 'normal' person. He scoffs at stupid fetch side quests, mocks idiots and has compassion for those who are suffering. It's been quite a while since I've seen such a well-developed character as the player character. The rest of the cast is nowhere near as developed, almost as if Kyle Crane got all his personality by sucking it out of everyone else like some hipster vampire. Everyone is replaceable and stock standard, even the main villain. The story and characters were predictable and the ending was rather lacklustre, though gratifying. I was climbing the ladder to meet the villain in a final showdown and I openly said "I feel a quick-time event waiting at the top of this ladder". I was right, which was disappointing.

But who cares about the story when there's a city full of zombies to chop into pieces? The game, made by the Dead Island developers, features their signature combat style of 'aim and swing'. You can take to the undead with a variety of clubs, hatchets, axes and swords, all can be upgraded with a variety of 'blueprints' that add extra effects to weapons. These are made by collecting crafting pieces in the environment and can increase a weapon's durability, handling or power while others add fire or electricity damage. While it is extremely satisfying to make a poisoned weapon make those annoying human enemies vomit their guts up, it's not all that realistic and did make it feel more of an arcade game. Over time, you learn a range of new skills that makes dispatching zombies easier, but that is where I found a problem with the difficulty curve. The game is brutal hard early game as you lack the abilities to deal with enemies fast before they overwhelm you, but once you get those skills then the game gets far easier. The introduction of other zombie types shakes things up, but not in any new or interesting ways. Perhaps the most unique feature is the day/night cycle and the nasties that come out at night. Initially, these zombies are fast and dangerous, but they lose all their thrill once you gain parkour skills. It feels wrong that a game simply gets easier as you play through. There are firearms, but they don't play a major feature until nearly all human enemies start to use them. Dying Light is a bad shooter. I don't even want to talk about how bad guns are.

The feature point of Dying Light is the parkour system. First-person free-running hasn't really been tried since Mirror's Edge and Dying Light certainly makes big steps in the right direction. It's still horrible trying to navigate a climbing section in a first-person camera, but it is satisfying enough to make it a lot of fun. Again, levelling up skills makes using the parkour even easier. It really feels like you become a hero among the mere mortals as you become so overpowered that it becomes borderline boring to play. Oh, and then you get the Batman grapple gun. Yeah. I feel that a lot of the skills are interesting to use once or twice, but you'll always revert to your simple ones. Being able to make shields, boosters and throwing weapons never felt necessary, and in fact, I never used them. I think it got to the point where they were adding skills to pad the oversized skills tree.

In the end, I found Dying Light a lot of fun to play. Not for the story, but because running around being the equivalent of Batman in a zombie game is bloody awesome. I didn't feel a sense of completion when the story ended, I just wanted to kill more zombies, which I did for a few days and then finally got bored with no missions to do. I honestly feel like I could single-handedly just kill every zombie in Hassan and end the whole disaster. I tried to do that too, but then night time came and I fucked up all the mutant zombies. I looked over the square full of body parts and thought about what I was doing. "Screw this, just nuke it" I said, and quit.

Note from Editor: I couldn't review the multiplayer content at the time of writing, but Dying Light also supports a coop system and an online player vs zombie player mode.

(Reviewed on PS4)