Kris Wall reviews Dying Light…
In Dying Light, you play Kyle Crane, an operative for the Global Relief Effort or G.R.E. Crane is tasked with dropping into the quarantined city of Harran and retrieving a top secret file stolen from them by Kadir Suleiman, a rogue politcian who also happens to be currently ruling over Harran with an iron fist. However, Harran has been affected by a viral outbreak on a massive scale that has turned the majority of its population into ravenous zombies, so there’s also that to deal with. For a government operative, Crane is hopelessly and almost comically unprepared for this mission and mere moments after Crane parachutes in, he’s set up on by thugs and then almost eaten alive by the cannibalistic hordes than roam the streets, luckily being saved at the last minute by a small band of survivors who have barricaded themselves within a tower block.
Things only get worse for Crane when he finds out he’s been infected during the attack and is slowly succumbing to the virus coursing through his veins and is in dire need of an experimental drug called Antizin. The only solution to this is to obviously be taught the art of parkour and be sent out into Harran to work for the survivors as they eke out an existence and negotiate a peaceful relationship with none other than Suleiman, his army and their supply of the Antizin drug. Oh, and there’s still a city full of zombies to think about too, and then there are also the creatures that only come out at night to hunt. Should be a walk in the park for a special government operative like Crane, right?
Let’s get the worst out of the way quickly, story and characters aren’t really Dying Light‘s strong point. The story is B-movie fare played straight throughout but essentially boils down to a succession of ever escalating fetch quests between Breckin’s survivors and Rais’ rogue army, while Crane as a main character has all the depth and range of a walk on extra in one of the Expendables movies, minus all the skills required to survive such a mission. Crane suffers much like Ajay Ghale did in Far Cry 4 from a serious lack of characterization but much like that game if you’re willing to look beyond that and see Crane as merely your eyes to the world of Harran and a vessel for a serious amount of fun, then you’ll be in for a treat throughout it’s roughly 30 hour campaign.
The first few hours of Dying Light are unexpectedly tough and quite grueling, which I can imagine is how life during a zombie apocalypse would be, but it doesn’t really make for fun gaming and at times could even be off putting. Crane is incredibly underpowered, has extremely limited abilities, is easily exhausted after throwing a few hits and can be quickly overwhelmed and ripped to pieces. If you’ve seen any of the trailers which depicts exhilarating feats of parkour that wouldn’t look out of place in the opening sequence of Casino Royale, it can’t help but feel a little bit disappointing as you struggle to clamber over walls, run headlong into dead ends, struggle to fend off the dead, hopelessly miss jump after jump after jump and just end up dying, a lot. However, Dying Light is a game that rewards patience and perseverance and persevere you must because once you progress beyond the first few hours and really start to dig into the experience system, the game really starts to come to life.
Dying Light’s experience system is split into Survivor, Agility and Power skills trees. Survivor points are awarded for story progression and side missions, Agility points are awarded based on traversal of Harran, the more airborne and creative you are, the quicker you’ll rack up the points, while Power points are awarded to fighting off the dead and the gangs that roam the streets. Each skill tree has between 20-25 different skills and once you start levelling up your agility and power and Crane starts to hit harder, run faster, jump higher and climb quicker, the Dying Light we glimpsed in the trailers starts to break through and with it comes a hell of a lot of fun.
There’s a great feeling of personal progression and steady empowerment as you play Dying Light. You’ll always remember how tough your first hour was as you hopelessly swung a rusty pipe at a zombie and had to retreat to a rooftop while your stamina bar replenished after a couple of swings. Outside of the obvious boosts like quicker movement and faster healing you’ll soon be able to mix herbs, Resident Evil style, for a variety of stat boosting effects, you’ll be able to land area effect special moves, drop kick zombies off of ledges (a personal favourite), don zombie camouflage, craft a variety of grenades and throwing items, and even be able to perform takedowns and instant kills later in the game. You’ll need to do a serious amount of experience grinding to unlock everything but the game is fun and compelling enough to ensure that never once feels like a chore.
The game handles really well and the first person perspective gives everything a visceral punch that ensures you feel the thrill of every single move you make, every finger grasping leap for a ledge, every impact of every blow that you give or take, the exhilarating rush of a well planned streak of smartly linked moves, the breath snatching risk of jumping off a bridge aiming for a soft landing far below or the sheer dread of making your way through a horde of zombies, their arms outstretched to tear your skin from bone. Without throwing too much hyperbole around, it just makes it all feel tangible, Crane may not be a great character but he is an avatar for your presence in Harran and you’ll feel just as exhausted as if you were there for real, running for your life across the rooftops.
Eventually you’ll start playing Dying Light the way it was meant to be played. Harran is a labyrinth of steel and concrete and I regularly found myself in a bad situation because I was thinking moment to moment, flailing blindly and ploughing headlong into dead ends and it begins to feel futile and tiring. Then you start to get better and gain more experience and then when you start planning two or three moves in advance, Dying Light just clicks. Soon you’ll see a ramp but you’re already thinking way beyond that, from the ramp to that bus over there then the gratings on the side of a building and from there on to an overpass and then way down into a pile of rubbish for a soft landing and then using the head of a zombie to boost over a wall and so on and so forth until every time you leave a safe zone it becomes one smooth, continual motion from point to point with the occasional zombie bashing on the way.
All the parkour elements are mapped to the R1 button which is initially jarring but becomes second nature in no time at all, tapping R1 makes Crane jump while holding R1 down will make him grab on to anything in his eyeline that his hands can grasp while climbing is all handled directionally, where you look you go. It’s a very simple system but one that takes a little time to master and perfect but as I mentioned previous, once it comes together it completely changes the game. Later on the game introduces a grappling gun which allows you to zip across most of the map in minutes, sadly it almost completely overshadows and renders the parkour system pointless, and given the parkour element is the unique selling point of the game, it’s a strange inclusion, though you obviously don’t have to use it. the game also eschews the use of fast travelling to get around the map which is another strange omission but if anything shows how confident Techland are in the traversal system they’ve built here, and they would be be right, given how much fun it is to get around the lack of a fast travel option is nothing more than a gripe.
A few hours in and Dying Light‘s radical game changer comes into effect. In most open world games, a dynamic day to night cycle is pretty much par for the course and nothing to really get excited about, in Dying Light it forces you to completely change how you approach and play the game. By day, zombies are slow and docile and only pose a threat in great numbers where you can be quickly overwhelmed. There’s a variety of advanced zombie types such as ‘virals’ who are attracted to noise and are the equivalent of the fast runners seen in the Dawn of the Dead remake, there’s also self destructing bomber types that explode in a shower of blood and guts, spitters that regurgitate burning toxic gunk all over you and massive hulks that swing giant weapons around.
By night everything changes, the pace slows down and the game becomes a sort of survival horror based Metal Gear Solid where you need to carefully plan your movements as night time brings out the ‘volatiles’,incredibly fast moving undead hybrid creatures that will tear you limb from limb if they catch sight of you. You’ll be able to use your radar to see where they’re looking and maybe you’ll be able to sneak by unseen and unheard, but like some sort of zombie Liam Neeson, they will find you, and when they do they let at an ungodly shriek which lures every volatile in the area to your location, then they will kill you. So begins a breathlessly tense race as you frantically scramble across Harran to one of the many safe zones you can liberate during the day (or night if you’re feeling bold). Once you get to one of these safe zones you can then choose to sleep through to the day and avoid all the terrors that come with the night. You don’t have many defenses against the volatiles either, outside of the safe zones you have a UV torch which stuns them for a bit and can build UV flares to place temporary safe zones for a brief relief and at some point you can even turn the tables and kills them but it’s an almighty struggle to put them down, you might as well forget it if there’s more than one of them though.
