Introduction
Dying light is a very well made zombie game that stands out over the rest of the very saturated genre. For basically being a sequel to Dead Island, which at the time was a love or hate game, basically refines aspects of the game while adding a pretty good free running system as well as having a decent crafting system. As someone who was a very big fan of Dead Island, at least until the jungle area, I was really excited to play something similar to it, and seeing what they were doing with the movement just made me more curious, so I got it day one, and it was worth every dollar.
Story
Dying Light takes place in a city called Harran. It is where an infection became out of control very rapidly to the point where they quarantined the city and began air dropping in supplies to people that may still be alive in there, from medical supplies to survival tools, they tried to help them out. Then after it began to start to become out of control, the GRE learns of a stolen document that is needed to be retrieved and is what causes you to go into the city in the first place. From there, you must find out who took the document, as well as help out where you can. And as any story goes, there ends up being some twists so it will keep your attention for a majority of the time, and the voice acting for the most part is pretty good. There are also a ton of side missions, from your basic, "Hey can you get me some (insert typical item)?" to exploring certain places and uncover some side story. As it turns out, some of the side missions had a pretty good story as well as some decent standalone stories in them, as well as recurring NPCs that give out some neat missions. There are also some things you can do around the world with quarantine zones that tell you the initial places of the outbreak, as well as random people you can talk to that tells their own story of what is going on in their heads. There is also a main villain, called Rais who you need to deal with over the course of the game, and sadly that causes the problems I had with the game.
Gameplay
Dying Lights gameplay is the best part of the game. From dealing satisfying blows the the zombies heads, to slow motion occurring when you deal a powerful blow that cuts off their head, or even showing a skeleton frame like in Mortal Kombat, it all feels good. You start off with just some basic things like a pipe or a wrench, and then you go out and explore some more and get much better things like a katana or a powerful meat clever, and then you just tear through the zombies. There are also a decent amount of different enemies. You have the ones hat walk slowly toward you, the crazy fast zombies that tend to constantly avoid your blows to them, ones that spit acid at you, big guys, and basically a tank from Left 4 Dead. Then there are the humans that usually have guns or are really good at blocking your attacks with their melee weapons. By far, fighting the humans quickly became the most frustrating thing about the game. If you are doing the main missions in the story, it quickly becomes you fighting humans, and practically the entire second half of the story focuses on shooting. This wouldn't be that bad, but the shooting feels pretty terrible. Aiming the guns becomes hard as the gun moves super slow and aiming down the sites doesn't help that much. What I ended up doing during these battles was crafting a bunch of med-kits, then finding a machine gun and just kept trying to aim for the head. It works. This also makes me wish I didn't play the story missions, or I just wish they were better. The first few hours of the game were by far the most fun I had in a game in a while. Running away from the zombies, jumping on buildings, activating traps, and fighting when I could was very satisfying, and then they added more things that I don't believe they could pull off.
Running around is basically this games selling factor. You have the free roaming skills relevant to that of Mirrors Edge, and works really well 90% of the time. Then there are times where I became unsure of what I could climb, jump onto, as well as not being able to judge some jumps properly. There were a few cases where I had to redo a few jumps because I couldn't tell where I was supposed to go as the view your character has is rather small, and some ledges seems grab-able when they aren't. But when it comes to it, needing to run away from a group of chasers behind you was very fun, until you decide to just turn around and cut them up with a sword.
There is also Night Time in this game, which is also one of the selling points they made with this game. When it is night, you know it. It is practically pitch black unless you have a flash light out, and there are more enemies that only come out at night that just chases you and can one hit kill you if they get lucky. It is tense, and the first time you have to run away it is actually scary since you are unsure of what to do other than run. Eventually you can try and fight them but eventually you will be outmatched. Then again, you could play it in co-op, which I had only a little time doing, since I didn't think it was fun with random people. You could also have your game open to invasions, which is when another player is in your game and you have to do a certain objective. However, each time this happened to me, it was at a very bad time as I was trying to do some story missions, and all the people that tried to join to help never connected, and I would just quit out of it because it is awful when you try it by yourself.
Conclusion
Looking back at my time with it, I gotta say it was one of the best, if not the best zombie game I have played. Ignoring the fact that fighting human players became very annoying and the final parts of the story missions that you play were bad, I had a lot of fun. I am enjoying going back to level up my character some more, explore some places I haven't seen much of, and finishing some of the side missions that I have missed. If this game had less time fighting humans in the story missions and more time figuring out how to deal with overwhelming odds, it would be a better game, but the times I had running around doing side missions, avoiding the night creatures, to exploring Harran, greatly outweigh the times I became frustrated with certain enemies and humans.