Dying Light

Dying Light wants you to like it. It goes to great lengths to show you all the ways it plays like other games you probably enjoy. Look, it has first person parkour like Mirror's Edge! Look, it has use-based skill trees like Skyrim! Look, it has climbable towers like Far Cry! Dying Light wants very desperately to be these games. Unfortunately, the result of all this imitation is that Dying Light never finds anything particularly unique to call its own, and it ultimately comes across as shallow and vacuous. Like the zombies that inhabit it, Dying Light peaks early, before suffering a long, slow decline until it is nothing more than a shambling, brain-dead mass that goes through the motions of being a better game.

Players take on the role of Kyle Crane, a "Global Relief Effort" operative sent into the zombie-infested hell of Harran City to recover data on a potential cure for the zombie virus. It's possible to explain the plot in more detail, but frankly the story is so paint-by-numbers that if you've seen any zombie movie made in the last 30 years, you can probably guess every plot beat well before it happens; you'll see otherwise intelligent characters do dumb things because The Plot Requires It, the GRE turns out to be an Evil Government Organization, and the main villain is a cheap Vaas knockoff. The story isn't just banal, it's distressingly so, and almost always serves as an unwelcome break from smashing zombie heads.

Of course, a terrible story matter much less if the gameplay is good, and thankfully, Dying Light is stronger in this regard, although it still has its share of problems. Players have three skill trees; one governing parkour and climbing, one governing combat, and one being general experience and crafting. Like Skyrim, you improve in these trees by doing the actions associated with them - climbing up buildings gives you points in agility, killing zombies makes you better at combat and so on. The system generally works well, and the three tree system means that the player is never too far away from a reward in at least one of the three categories.

Unfortunately, the game struggles mightily with balancing this character progression. At the start of the game, your character is almost pathetically weak - you can only manage three or four swings of a weapon or a precious few seconds of sprinting before becoming exhausted and needing to rest. This makes early game movement and combat quite a slog - early game weapons are weak enough that zombies take quite a few hits to kill, and this is exacerbated by needing to wait to recover your stamina every few seconds. Of course, bypassing combat isn't much quicker, as you tire quickly and climb fairly slowly, making movement just as tedious as the combat.

About 6-8 hours into the game, it does hit a sweet spot where you have enough abilities to feel capable while at the same time not being so powerful that the content is trivialized. If there is a point where the game is going to grab you, it's here as you jump seamlessly between rooftops before jumping down to beat the brains out of some unsuspecting zombie. Unfortunately, the game is unable to maintain this momentum - by the time you hit the halfway point of the game you'll likely be so ungodly powerful that most of the content is trivialized and the game quickly becomes tedious again.

Combat mostly revolves around finding whatever post-apocalyptic melee weapons suits your fancy and smashing zombie heads in with it. Enemies die in satisfyingly gory ways, and seeing the game go into slow-mo to highlight a zombies' head crumple like a rotten melon never really gets old. The game includes gunplay too, which is nowhere near as satisfying. In addition to the noise attracting more zombies, the shooting mechanics are clunky and unsatisfying. Thankfully, outside of some rather poorly constructed sequences near the end of the game, you never really feel compelled to use guns and you're safe sticking with melee weapons for the most part.

Layered on top of the combat is a simple crafting system, which allows you to add various upgrades to your weapons, imbuing them with elemental effects like fire or electricity. Although there are a ton of recipes for everything from medkits to exploding throwing stars, I never found it particularly critical to engage with the crafting very much. However, its including is relatively inoffensive and it can be fun to muck about and see what you can create.

More offensive is the weapon degradation system, whereby your weapons are constantly breaking, forcing you to find scrap for repairs and periodically taking a few seconds in combat to fix your weapon. Fair to say, this system just doesn't work. Scrap is never dear enough that you feel frightened of running out, and the actual repair of your weapons is so fast that it never forces you to think about it in combat. Merely taking a few steps backward from a zombie hoard clears enough space to safely repair a weapon, a barring that you can always swap them out on the fly either via the d-pad or going into the menu. Add to this that you will probably find a more powerful weapon by the time the one you are carrying permanently breaks, and you have the makings of an entirely worthless mechanic. The only thing it really serves to do is to break up the flow of combat, which is never a good thing.

Outside of combat, the central highlight of the gameplay is also its greatest strength, namely its first-person parkour system. The number of climbable surfaces is actually quite surprising, and the chances are pretty good that if you can see it, you can climb it. Overall, the game manages to impart a wonderful sense of momentum as you climb, particularly after you manage to unlock the grappling hook and are able to instantly swing up to a rooftop. The sway the game imparts to the camera when you are standing on a narrow ledge also adds nicely to the sense of danger, particularly when you are climbing up the sphincter-clenching heights of a tall radio tower. For the most part it works really well, although there are a couple of nagging issues that drag it down. For one, there is no easy way of climbing down a surface, which can lead to you needing to do an awkward fall/jump down a structure and hope you don't take too much damage. Additionally, you will occasionally fail to grab a ledge you otherwise should be able to, which sometimes results in you taking unnecessary fall damage. This seems to be a particular problem when using the grappling hook, and I suffered several deaths when my character refused to grab onto the ledge I had grappled up to.

In addition to the parkour, the other major gameplay conceit is the day/night cycle. During the day, enemies are mostly limited to shambling, clumsy, George Romero-style zombies that serve more as navigation hazards than a true threat. Come night-time however, they mutate into much faster 28 Days Later-style zombies called Volatiles that react aggressively to the player's presence. Unlike the daylight zombies, these foes are fast and agile, fully capable of keeping up with the player even while climbing tall obstacles. Wandering into their line of sight for too long results in a frantic chase sequence in which you must furiously try to reach on the safe zones dotted about the map before you get your head bitten off. However, to discourage players from merely bunkering in a safe house until dawn, all experience earned at night is doubled, leading to some careful weighing of the risks and rewards of staying out at night.

Overall, the day-night cycle is a much less successful mechanic than the parkour. While I'll admit that the first few times getting chased through the night were damn scary, once you get a handle on the mechanics, nighttime isn't really any more dangerous than during the day - it's just more tedious to get places. This is the result of a couple of design issues. First, the Volatiles are given Metal Gear-style sight cones at night. This makes them easy to avoid, particularly once you realize they are just as easily distracted by loud noises as the standard shamblers are. The second issue relates to the previously mentioned godlike power the player will eventually acquire. No matter how fast or powerful they are, once you can chop the head off a Volatile in a singe swing, they become a lot less frightening. Perhaps if the vision cones had been removed, allowing for truly unexpected encounters, or had the Volatiles been a guaranteed one-hit kill on the player, some of the wonderful early game tension could have been maintained. As it is though, the night cycle feels like a missed opportunity.

The game itself is surprisingly long, with my playthough clocking in at just under 30 hours. There are two sprawling maps to explore, each containing a bevy of side quests, quarantine zones, hidden collectables, and timed combat and agility challenges to undertake. Unfortunately, a lot of this content is notably repetitious. Almost all of the side quests are of the "go here and fetch this" variety and although they are perhaps better disguised than in most games, they still get tedious. Particularly once you have enough parkour skills to avoid almost all of the combat encounters, the side quests mostly amount to running across the map for five minutes, pressing X to pick up an item, and then running another five minutes back to the starting point.

On the positive side, it should be noted that the game looks pretty good, at least on the PS4. The lighting in particular looks nice, with a lot of good sunsets and soft-lighting effects. The game is also refreshingly bug-free, and ran at a consistent 30fps the entire way through. Perhaps it's a sad commentary on the current state of AAA game development that this bears mention at all, but it's a welcome respite after a horrible 2014 that saw several major releases barely functional at launch.

Overall, I enjoyed bits and pieces of my time with Dying Light, and there are good mechanics at work here. However, it's hard to escape the feeling that it could have been more, had the developers taken the time to chart their own path as opposed to mashing together disparate mechanics from so many different games. If you were someone who couldn't get enough of Dead Island or who somehow hasn't had your fill of zombies in video games, there's probably enough here to warrant a purchase. For everyone else however, this game is probably best experiences as a rental.

Score: 3/5*

* The "Fun Curve" above is my attempt to visually represent my entire time with the game. As opposed to a numeric score, which only captures my final verdict on a game, the Fun Curve tries to show the specific points at which I enjoyed or didn't enjoy a game in a way that might be difficult to capture in text. In the case of Dying Light, I felt the game peaked early, and as I played it more I enjoyed it less and less until by the end I wasn't enjoying it very much at all.

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Played On: PS4

Time Spent: ~ 30 hours

Trophies Earned: 55%

Notable Bugs/Performance Issues: None