Plenty of people claim that zombies are a tired excuse for an enemy type in video games, yet we always crave a bloody time with these mindless freaks. Dying Light offers a more engaging experience when it comes to the classic zombie formula with innovated game play concepts and design. Techland, who brought us the slightly disappointing Dead Island series, takes another stab at the genre and hope to inject some innovation into their latest title. Does it work, or is this just another Dead Island cash in? Let’s see.
Dying Light offers a new perceptive on mechanics in zombies games, as opposed to an original narrative. Another story of a zombie infested city under quarantine and you playing as the guy stuck within its walls. Playing as Kyle Crane, your mission is to recover an important document for a secret government service. It’s a slightly flat and uninspiring set of events that play out like every other zombie story that has existed. With lots of typical plot points involving finding medicine for sick people, betrayal by close friends and nothing that really makes the plot diverse from the genre.
The intro sums up Dying Light‘s approach to a plot, as we’re introduced to our main character, love interest, zombies and enemy human faction all within two minutes. There’s no room for subtle pacing here. There are a number of different side quests and main missions as well, which don’t make a lot of sense and lack any real substance. One man claims to be turning into a werewolf and must eat some cinnamon and herbs to avoid becoming a beast. I don’t get it, is it making fun of the film Underworld? Because that’s not dated at all. Others could work but their structure often irritates rather than entertains, such as collect an item, go back to NPC and collect three more of the same random item and repeat several times over. Very tedious and fairly annoying when the pay off is so weak.
There’s nothing really rewarding about the story other than some good voice acting, but behind that they lack any real depth just like the story. Story isn’t everything, however, and gameplay is where Dying Light truly shines.
The game’s three types of gameplay – free-running, survival RPG mechanics, and dynamic day night cycles – are its most attractive aspects. Free-running works in a similarly to Mirror’s Edge, in that you can run, sprint, and climb a majority of surfaces while the game’s progression system unlocks new abilities and attributes such as agility and the like. It’s a great means of traversal and one that works well for the genre, making the task of avoiding your brain dead foes more dynamic. The controls are easy to learn, even if they’re slightly clunky at first, and because the game lacks any fast travel, being able to run across roof tops and vault over walls is handy for traveling from point A to B quickly.
Dying Light delivers a vastly open and beautiful world to explore in order to produce an impressive survival experience. The City of Harran is truly organic with a tremendous amount of emphasis on its open world aspects, making survival aspects of game play much stronger. A large number of structures can be explored for vital resources, survivors and hidden rewards. Along with structures, there are hidden trunks scattered within the world for all important materials and weapons. You can search bins, boxes, bags, cupboards, trunks of cars and vans to find loot. This is truly where other games can look to when thinking of ways to hone the perfect survival game.
Besides searching for goods, Harran also holds safe houses to unlock, random encounters with survivors, and air drops to pick up, which can be stolen by enemy factions. There’s plenty to take part in, and all of them bring the city of Harran to a life-like level of interaction.
Vital skills can be learned and crafting is essential. It’s easy to learn how to craft items for use and is important, if your far away from safe haven. You level up with three different attributes and build up your survivor ranking, allowing more skills to be learnt. I found the survivor ranking to be something that actually put down the experience slightly. The main aspect of the survivor rank allows you to unlock the use and purchasing of certain weapons. To be able to use a baseball bat lets say, you need to be rank 3 or higher. It doesn’t make a lot of sense seeing as your character is a military operative, who I’m sure can use a bat. He can craft an electrocuting shovel, but can’t master swinging a bat?
Now, onto combat! The lineup of zombies types is highly unoriginal and again lets down the experience slightly. It takes the ideas seen in Left 4 Dead and Dead Island, giving us zombies who spit, explode, scream and jump on you from a mile away. At times, the game’s difficulty spikes to ridiculously unfair levels, bringing a hoard of all the strongest enemies onto you at once just because you blew your nose. Moments like these can be rather relentless and too punishing if you’re just taking a walk down the road for a side quest. What’s more annoying is how you can lose your XP gained in between checkpoints when you die. I didn’t know this game was Dark Souls all of a sudden.
I understand it’s a survival game, and the idea of making too much noise will bring in more enemies, which is fine. But the game goes to that ridiculous level that only Dead Rising could pull off. As Crane, you can only swing a weapon three or four times before running out of stamina, making it difficult to control the situation, and even running away at times is too difficult to pull off.
One thing I did like was the zombies’ more simplistic design – some run and climb, but as part of a creepily brilliant feature, they begin to cry and speak like a human. This could’ve been better exploited in favor of more interesting enemy types a little less like Left for Dead and Dead Island and more Day of the Dead.
Killing zombies is pretty fun and your weapons have an impact that feels organic. When kicking, hitting and punching your foes, you feel every impact made as they will react in such great detail where they’re being hit. The gore system is nothing exciting, but how the enemy AI moves in tandem with your attacks is brilliantly animated.
Dying Light‘s day/night cycle, as you expect, has the game turn day into night. Not a new and exciting concept and typically in other games too, your enemies become stronger when the sun goes down. In Dying Light, night is on a whole other level. It’s a spectacular nightmare to traverse through and extremely punishing, but unbelievably exciting.
One great feature is where XP earned is double while exploring the city, completing tasks or evading the stronger enemies who will relentlessly chase you. Its a delicate situation of reward versus danger, one that will leave many deciding whether to brave the city’s darkness, or stay in bed, crying yourself to sleep, and praying for morning.
I know the difficulty sounds bad, but here it seems more balanced – and of course you expect it to be fairly manic, pressuring and stressful. But booby traps in the game can help eliminate your pursuing foes. Plus, if you can’t handle it, then you can go to bed and wake up at sunrise.
To be the zombie is nothing new either like in Left 4 Dead, but Dying Light gives an opportunity for a group of friends to be the nasties of the night, hunting down human NPCs or other players while keeping from getting killed themselves. You rank up as you would with your human character and gain new and devastating skills to become a more aggressive hunter. The multi-player is fun for its co-op and taking on the hordes of Harran with three friends, but more could have been done.
Dying Light may not grab you with its generic narrative or plot twists, but delivers on engaging gameplay that works beautifully with the zombie genre. The nighttime exploration only heightens the tension and makes zombies scary once again. Its free-running and survival mechanics strengthens the game and with added co-op, you and your friends will have a hell of a time in Harran. Dying Light is a gripping new take on zombie video games and the horror-genre itself as a bigger, better, and refreshingly different experience from Dead Island.