However this is where Techland have introduced a great risk vs reward system to tempt players into braving the night. The weak willed and the nervous of heart can play the majority of Dying Light by simply sleeping back through to the day, players are giving a heads up about the incoming sunset and the emergence of the volatiles and told to seek out a safe zone to wait out the night. However, playing through the night, all your experience is doubled, everything you climb, leap, hit and is worth twice as much, which means leveling up even faster. If you survive an entire night, you’re given bonus experience points, even more if you’ve managed to survive the night unseen. It’s a simple system that has been implemented incredibly well, tempting players to lay it all on the line to progress faster and it’s great when you start to feel your abilities allowing you to really start owning the night. With each new ability, you’ll start feeling a little bolder, a little more daring until eventually you’re sleeping through to the night time to undertake missions to gain from the double XP it bestows.
At no point of Dying Light do you ever begin to feel overpowered though, you’re merely more competent to deal with the situation. You’ll never be able to wade into a 30 strong horde with a cricket bat and emerge victorious but you’re not going to be ripped to shreds in seconds either. There’s a continual and sustained feeling of threat and tension throughout Dying Light, no matter how powerful you become, fighting still feels ragged and desperate as if you’re swinging like your life depended on it, you could be fully powered up but you’re still going to get blindsided by the dead who lurk out of your immediate view, whereas your parkour endeavors never feel like the carefully planned feats of a professional, just the desperate actions of a person trying to escape by any means they can. Techland have really nailed the hopeless futility and exhaustion that trying to survive in this world might feel like, you’re never truly safe (outside of the zones anyway), just better prepared to deal with it.
While you have access to pistols, shotguns and machine guns in Dying Light, the noise they make and attention they bring are often more hassle than they’re worth and are best used as a last resort. In keeping with their Dead Island template, Dying Light focuses more on brutal hand to hand melee combat. Starting out with pipes and planks of wood that do little more than annoy the undead, you’ll eventually be able to locate hatchets, machetes, sickles, baseball bats and all manner of slicing, dicing and bludgeoning weaponry with which to decimate the undead. Scattered around Harran is lots and lots of collectible salavage as well as blueprints which allows you to combine items and create specialized weapons such as being able to bind a baseball bat with barbed wire and an electrical current or somehow attaching a small flamethrower to a hatchet to see fire to anything it cuts through.
It’s definitely not worth getting attached to any weapons you craft though as keeping in line with the desperation and futility of the world Techland have created, everything dies. Though weapons can be repaired a small number of times, all your weapons wear down and eventually break for good, even that fancy baseball bat that took you ages to put together and helped you take down over 30 zombies, that will break too and have to be thrown away. It’s a bit of an annoying system but it does stop you getting complacent with any one weapon and encourages experimentation and there’s plenty of experimenting to be done in Dying Light.
The first person viewpoint makes combat feel incredibly visceral, you’ll wince at many of the impacts and reel away when a zombie gets right up in your face. Every now and again a charged up hit will introduce a slowed down Mortal Kombat style X-ray attack that shows exactly where you’ve hit and what you’ve done to the area. Don’t be surprised to see heads explode in disgustingly pixel perfect detail, this is a game that almost revels in the macabre.
While not the open world sandbox of games like Grand Theft Auto or Watchdogs, Harran is an explorers paradise that again shares many similarities to Far Cry 4. It’s incredibly rare that you’ll get from A to B without wandering off course, tempted by at least 2 or 3 distractions each time. There are plenty of side missions to get involved in, an area where the side characters and side stories really shine, there’s regular G.R.E supply drops to salvage before gangs do to help your cause, experience challenges, random encounters and survivors to protect, hidden blueprints and weapons to find, there’s even neat little easter eggs covering the likes of The Legend of Zelda and Plants Vs Zombies to The Dark Knight (that I’ve found so far) hidden around for the avid explorer. There’s more than plenty for you to be seeing and doing during your time in Harran.
Dying Light is a great looking game marred by some annoying technical issues. Climbing to the top of a tower block or one of the suspension bridges in Harran and you’ll be awarded with a breathtaking sight of post apocalyptic beauty, the sunset reflecting off of the bay in the distance, plumes of smoke billowing up into the sky and hordes upon hordes of grotesquely detailed corpses shambling around far into the distance. Sadly the game is prone to visuals and textures popping in at random intervals, while walking around the tower block that forms the campaign hub, I was treated to bland faces before their features loaded in while outside it’s not entirely uncommon to see zombies clipping through scenery. Dying Light excels in its sound department though, the groans and moans of a zombie horde as they bear down on you will get under your skin while the screams of a pack of volatiles will chill your blood and and get the heart pounding furiously. As a huge John Carpenter fan, special mention should go to Dying Light‘s score which sounds like vintage John Carpenter scoring the mother of all zombie outbreaks.
Multiplayer fans are well served with a 4 player co-op mode that allows people to team up and venture out into Harran together on mass zombie slaying expeditions or competitive challenges. Dying Light also features a ‘Be The Zombie’ mode which allows you to infect another players game (Think Watchdogs‘ multiplayer) and become a volatile in their world. Playing as a volatile is great fun and soaring across the night sky with zip lining tendrils or summoning a small zombie army never gets old or boring, but be aware that while you have all of their crazy powers, you also inherit their weakness to UV light. It does feel a little overpowered if you’re taking on just one human player as the volatile is ridiculously overpowered and the human will struggle to take down your nests (their objective when you invade their world) before you completely slaughter them. Be The Zombie is more fun when you’re taking on a group of players and are forced into a more tactical approach where victory feels hard won and well earned.
Dying Light builds on the promise that Dead Island hinted at but never fully realized. It takes that game and while not stripping away all of its flaws, definitely taps into the potential it showed, making Dying Light a huge step in the right direction. Sadly a weak story and lead character take the shine of what could have been a truly excellent game, while the opening hours might prove just a bit too tough and grueling for players to really persevere through and stick with. Hopefully next time Techland can match the gameplay with an engaging story and character and then we’re in for something really special. Right now though, Dying Light is infectiously good fun and a great start to 2015.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| + Great fun to play | – Tough and off putting opening hours |
| + Excellent feeling of progression and empowerment | – Weak story and characterization |
| + First person lends a visceral punch | – Lack of fast travel |
| + Looks and sounds great | – Grappling gun overshadows the parkour system |
| + Harran is an explorers paradise |
Rating: 8/10
Reviewed on Playstation 4
Kris Wall
For more games related stuff, follow me on twitter, @KrisWall84
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qqtW2LRPtQY&list=PL18yMRIfoszFJHnpNzqHh6gswQ0Srpi5E
