Dying Light Review

It’s common knowledge by now, but it’s a point worth reiterating: the best zombie stories aren’t those that deal with the struggle against the undead horde, but rather those that focus on the struggles between the survivors that inhabit a dead world. The tales (in whatever form they come) that find the most success are those that provide a human story in a wholly inhuman environment. The Last of Us, The Walking Dead and City of Horror (look it up) are a few prime examples. While playing Techland’s most recent zombie survival horror Dying Light, it’s clear that the zombie veterans know this. Yet while there’s a clear attempt here to create a vaguely interesting human story of loyalty and camaraderie, it never really hits the mark.

This is a shame really, as the core gameplay of Dying Light hits the mark over and over again with a pipe. The satisfying mechanics that worked superbly in Dead Island are replicated and improved to create one of the most enjoyable combat experiences out there right now. The fighting is chunky, gory and every blow, be it on you or your opponents, feels like it hurts. It sounds simple, but playing Dying Light only highlights how toned down many games are when it comes to replicating the physical trauma of hand-to-hand combat. Even the ranged weapons have an unusual amount of gusto, and while fighting with guns is certainly less fun than running around with a super-sharp axe, Techland rarely forces you to pick up a rifle in place of a melee weapon.

But then, Dead Island already featured a very similar, and still fantastic, combat system. Dying Light ups the ante with the new free-running focus that allows the player to duck and dive through, under and over the zombie hordes. The way traversal works isn’t especially different from Dead Island but Harran, the city in which the entire game takes place, has been very carefully engineered to make it enjoyable for those on the go. You just hold down the right bumper button and aim to where you want to climb/jump and your character moves smoothly from point to point. It’s a very simple traversal mechanic, but there’s enough difficulty in accurately analysing your surroundings to make it enjoyable. Highly enjoyable in fact. The traversal system is one of the game’s best features, which is great considering you’ll be using it throughout your time with the game.

Helping the free-running remain interesting is a well-crafted RPG-esque levelling system. In fact, it’s a system that also benefits both the combat mechanic and the game at large. It’s nothing groundbreaking, with three different unlock trees that are tethered to different aspects of the game: free-running, combat and survival (which essentially relates to completing missions and quests). Compared to the complex and diverse levelling system of something like Skyrim it’s obviously inferior, but in many ways it feels like the perfect fit for a game like Dying Light. An intuitive UI makes it easy to keep track of your levelling, although it helps that the abilities you unlock are almost all great additions to the game. There aren’t many minor additions like +10% to your strength or something similar, leaving upgrades that actually provide significant gameplay changes.

It’s a point that can’t be underestimated; the new abilities that you’ll gain through your journey in Dying Light have a dramatic effect on the game. Case in point: you’ll probably spend a lot of time in the game without the use of the grappling hook, instead using the climbing mechanic to free-run between buildings. This is because the hook doesn’t become available to unlock until your free-running ability is up to level 12. When you finally equip it, the whole game world becomes a different place and your well-practiced methods of traversal get a new lease on life. There are plenty more examples of this which you should discover for yourself; it’s enough to keep the game interesting even after extended play, and a great reason to keep moving, fighting and completing quests.

Interestingly, the levelling system also ties into the game’s calling card: the day/night system. As the title suggests, Dying Light places a lot of focus on how the city of Harran changes dramatically when night falls. While traversing the open-world during the day means lots of slow, stupid shamblers (so long as you don’t make any noise), night is a totally different experience. To put it simply, things get scary. For one thing, it obviously gets dark, and although you’re permanently armed with a handy torch, the suffocating darkness can be a terrifying prospect filled with more vicious zombie hordes. The darkness also sees incredibly powerful zombies inhabiting the streets of Harran. ‘Volatiles’ are fast, strong and horribly persistent infected that are best avoided, although so long as you keep an eye on your minimap, they’re reasonably easy to skirt around.

In fact, that’s one issue with Dying Light that proves difficult to avoid. There’s often so much to collect, see, avoid and do that you’ll spend a rather sizeable chunk of time looking at your minimap and just moving from place to place without much thought towards the actual landscape you’re traversing. It’s gamification at its most obvious as almost every aspect of the game becomes a challenge, often to the detriment of the overall experience. Yes, there are examples of this working well, like with the aforementioned skill ranking system, but it’s difficult to deny that the number of flashing indicators and player aids that the game defaults to can become a little too much, taking away from the ‘survival’ aspect of Dying Light. Even during the night it’s difficult to feel vulnerable or like a true survivor when you’ve got so much on-screen to help you out.

It’s likely that this is the ghost of Dead Island’s less serious tone, and that’s a ghost that haunts Dying Light up until the final moments. The game’s narrative in particular never seems to shake free from the tongue-in-cheek nature of Dead Island despite an attempt at a much more serious tone, creating a rather awkward mix of styles that doesn’t feel right at all. What’s more, the game features some incredibly average writing that fails to give the characters any believable emotions, thereby making them all very boring. There are also a frustrating number of in-game accomplices, which could mean you’ll find yourself struggling to identify one character from another. The core narrative itself is a classic story of an infected town quarantined and slowly disintegrating, with the survivors fighting it out amongst themselves. Although in the end this largely boils down to nothing more than a zombie-infested turf war rather than a true tale of survival. It’s hugely disappointing, and by far Dying Light’s greatest flaw.

Yet the gameplay does salvage a lot of what the story gets wrong. What’s more, there is a hell of lot to do in Dying Light. The main story alone would probably take over 15 hours if you concentrated on that alone, but there are also a plethora of side quests and challenges to distract you, not to mention the now-obligatory random events that occur as you travel around Harran. There are some rather dull quests, but there are a pleasant number of unusual tasks that make for good distractions from the core missions. Those story missions, by the way, are still mostly great despite the poor story supporting them. Even the boring fetch quests can be fun considering the consistently enjoyable gameplay - the often amusing rewards for completing these helps matters.

All of this content is supported by a brand new game engine that looks beautiful in action, even if PC seems to be suffering from some optimisation issues during the launch period. Not to mention some great sound design that is pleasantly happy to let silence be the most audible feature at the right times. In short, the modern open-world frills are all in place, even including a great co-op mode that allows friends to share a world, complete challenges and just have a laugh. You’ve also got an alternate game mode in the form of Be a Zombie which lets you invade other player’s worlds, so that’ll keep you distracted for an hour or so. All of this just adds up to a rather huge game that’s certainly worth the price tag.

Dying Light was supposed to be an evolution of the Dead Island formula - Techland never said it, but it often seemed like a more fitting response to that fantastic original Dead Island trailer from years back. It is more serious, and efforts have been made to develop a classic survival story, but it’s on these two calling cards that the game falls flat. Thankfully, just about every other element of the game is there to pick things back up. Satisfying gameplay mechanics, an often exciting day/night system, perfectly balanced and designed levelling and well-rounded presentation that ties all of these things together nicely. There’s a lot to like about Techland’s latest; if you’re looking for a great zombie survival story then you’re better off looking elsewhere. Need a well-crafted open-world filled with fun things to do though and you’re unlikely to do much better than Dying Light this half of 2015.