In a market that is saturated with zombie games, Dying Light stands out as one of the better ones in the genre. Between the great movement and controls, satisfying combat, and a story that is both believable and engaging, Dying Light is the first great game of 2015.
If you had any experience with Dead Island, you may notice some similarity between that and Dying Light. That is because Techland developed both games, and you can see the influence from Dead Island in the new game. There are many borrowed mechanics, like weapon degradation, weapon crafting, plenty of looting, and extreme violence when taking out enemies (think exploding heads when hit with a hammer).
But Dying Light is a much more enjoyable experience than Dead Island. The main difference is in the player movement. Instead of taking place on what is essentially a flat island, Dying Light is set in the fictional city of Haran, which seems to have an eastern European feel to it, maybe even venturing into Turkey. The city setting means there are plenty of tall buildings in your way, allowing Techland to add parkour running to the game with the new found verticality. The parkour is probably my favorite aspect of the game. You can traverse the map incredibly fast. The parkour feels fluid and natural. To grab onto ledges, you hold the right bumper on the Xbox One controller while looking at the ledge you want to grab. The system works really well, and seems to be pretty lenient at times. But the leniency doesn’t subtract from the experience, it only makes it better.
As the player, you control Kyle Crane, a member of the GRE, which is essentially a human rights group that has Crane parachuted into the middle of Haran to find the man responsible for stealing information that could be used to pretty much hold the world hostage. As the plot unravels, you learn a lot about the GRE, and it makes you question your motives, and the motives of the group. For a zombie game, I was pretty surprised with the story in Dying Light. I actually cared about it, and I wanted to see what would happen next. It is rare for me to care about the story in a zombie game, but Dying Light’s story was a nice surprise.
Weapons in Dying Light are very similar to those in Dead Island. There are plenty of melee weapons, some being blunt, while others having a sharp edge. You’ll also come across guns in the game, which are effective, but they can attract the strong Viral enemies, so I mainly relied on melee weapons. I really enjoyed using the blade type melee weapons. As sadistic as it sounds, there is something really satisfying decapitating a zombie in slow motion.
You will come across a variety of enemies in the game. There are your standard Biters, which are the slow walkers, Virals which are recently turned humans that can move fast and scale buildings while dealing a lot of damage, large monsters that take a lot of damage, spitters, and so on. The most disturbing enemy type is arguably the Virals. Since they are recently turned, they still have human attributes. Sometimes when you’re in the middle of fighting one, you’ll hear a Viral say, perfectly clear, things like “please stop,” or “help.” It is a nice touch to remind the player that the zombies you are attacking were once human.
In addition to zombies, there is another faction in Haran that Crane will have to deal with. The human enemies are a real nuisance by dodging your attacks and being a real threat in combat. Once you start to acquire guns, you can threaten human enemies with the guns to intimidate them an send them running off. In the game, every day or so a plane will drop supplies somewhere within in the city. If you’re quick enough, you can get there before other humans do, and turn in the supplies for experience points. But if you don’t get to the airdrop quick enough, the other faction will be there loading up on supplies. One of my favorite things to do in the game was run up on an airdrop with an assault rifle out, and aim it at the human enemies. They would put their hands up and back away from the loot while I took it. After I had taken everything, I would run away with them in pursuit. The first time it happened I was pleasantly surprised that the mechanic was in the game. After that I abused it with every chance I had.
The name Dying Light is more than just a metaphor for the bleak situation that the player finds themselves in. The game features a day/night cycle, and the more dangerous enemies, called Volatiles, appear at night. While taking on Biters is usually pretty manageable, Volatiles are extremely fast and strong. It is better to just run from one than try to fight them head on. Luckily you are able to essentially tag Volatiles at night, making it easier to keep tabs on them.
I spent a majority of my time playing the game during the day, but the option to try to survive the night is there as well. Running around the world at night does come with its rewards. You gain double XP for both combat and agility at night, giving the player an incentive to survive the night. There are some missions that require the player to complete them at night, so the night time gameplay is not 100% avoidable.
Speaking of XP, similar to other action-RPG games, you gain experience points for performing certain actions. The more you parkour through a level, the more agility points you’ll earn. Likewise, the more you are in combat with zombies, the more combat XP you’ll gain. The third area you upgrade over time is the survivor skill, and you earn experience points for that through completing missions. All three of the systems work well together, and you can become quite the zombie killing machine throughout the duration of the game.
Onto the technical aspects of the game, both the visual and audio design is top notch. The game runs very well on my five year old gaming PC and is really beautiful, with some fantastic art. The zombies are all menacing and rather disgusting to look at, which is what you want from zombies. I was really impressed with the audio in the game also. The music fits the tone, and the voice acting is way better than I was expecting. Where the audio really stands out is with the depiction of the zombies. You get chills when you hear zombies in the area, especially Virals. At night, the game is almost pitch black if you don’t have your flashlight on, and you can hear the zombies hissing and wandering around without seeing them. It sends shivers up my spine.
Dying Light was a huge surprise to me. Leading up to launch, all of the footage shown off looked great, but going off of Techland’s previous work on Dead Island, I was still pretty skeptical. However, the game turned out to be a fantastic package. The amount of glitches I experienced were minimal for such a huge game, and with the amount of stuff to do, you’ll hardly be bored. Dying Light is by far one of the more enjoyable experiences I’ve had with a zombie game.
Score 9/10
Dying Light was developed by Techland and published by WB Games for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on January 27th. A retail copy of the PC version was provided to us by WB Games for reviewing purposes.
