Dying Light Review

Some of these missions must be run at night, when Dying Light becomes a far more punishing experience. The game does a good job of informing you when night is coming and appropriately warns of its difficulty as you’ll hear people telling you to get to safety. Once the night comes, the more powerful Volatile zombies come out. These zombies are always marked on your radar, but if they spot you, there’s no fighting them. There’s not a ton of Dying Light’s missions that require you to be active at night, but when the game does force you out after dark it’s a nerve-wracking experience.

After completing these day and night missions, players will receive rewards - usually monetary - and experience. XP is used to level up your characters and pick new skills from the survivor, agility, and power trees. These skills can help with things like bartering, combat, parkour, consumables, health, and throwable objects. While some of these abilities are useful, they don’t always seem necessary and certain skills went unused by me. For instance, players can level up their bartering skills with shop owners, but I never found myself hurting for cash so what does it matter if I get better rates? Many combat upgrades which would have been helpful early on against human enemies (like a stealth-kill attack) are rendered useless once guns are introduced. When I finally would get a good skill (like the ability to crush zombies’ heads) it was so powerful it only highlighted how worthless the other skills are. With certain skills being unnecessary and others being so powerful, there are never any hard choices to make when leveling up. Numerous times I would unlock abilities and forget they were even there until the game reminded me.

There’s a fair amount of gameplay available in Dying Light’s single-player - nearly 30 hours - but if you want more you can play around in the multiplayer as well. Much like Techland’s Dead Island, Dying Light offers cooperative multiplayer throughout most of its campaign. While there are plenty of people who likely enjoy having friends around when slaughtering the undead, Dying Light does not lend itself well to the multiplayer experience. So much of the game is based on the fast-paced parkour, having to wait for a friend who falls behind can kill the game’s exciting rhythm. Furthermore, the game’s balance feels off with two people playing together. Zombies are never especially hard to kill and with two people, any feeling of helplessness is removed. This is even further exacerbated when playing with four participates; as it's just more people to wait for, who will want to explore different things. There’s no incentive to work together and even if there was, there’s not enough ways four people could really contribute to a single objective. A lot of what makes Dying Light great is the freedom to churn through the city, leaping building to building in search of safe houses to clear or missions to run. Having someone tagging along, who can easily be separated by a missed jump or a sudden fight can kill that freedom for you. Also, when you are dropped from a game, any progress made on a mission is lost as you are reverted to the single-player experience. There are challenges which allow you to compete against friends, but they feel like just another distraction from actually getting anything done in the campaign.

There is another way to play multiplayer in Dying Light. Be the Zombie mode allows one player to play as the Night Hunter and hunt a human player who is trying to clear their nests. Playing as the Night Hunter is a great time. While the zombie handles similar to the parkour nature of the human characters, there is the slightest difference in weight and movement which sets it apart. The Night Hunter also has a tendril ability which acts as the grappling hook (similar to Spider-Man’s web slinging abilities) which is a fun way to zip around the city. Night Hunters can also pounce on their human prey, an unstoppable attack which spells instant death for the human. The awesomeness of the Night Hunters is the entire problem with Be the Zombie mode. While it might be tons of fun to be the predator and flip the tables on the gameplay, this multiplayer mode is furiously aggravating for the human as the Night Hunter barely needs to get you in sight before it can pounce and instantly kill. This monumental imbalance seems to have chased players away from the mode as I found the matchmaking to take a long time.

Visually, the golden-hued city of Harran is a nice setting for Dying Light; its Middle East influence is a nice change of pace compared to most traditional video game locales - especially for zombie games. From the castle-like walls of Old Town to the iky interiors of The Slums, Dying Light’s environments look fantastic. While the setting is gorgeous and impressive, the character models are not. Many of the characters have a silicon look to them and many of the animations are stiffly robotic. What’s even more frustrating is the game's instability. It crashed a handful of times - two of which lost my save data and forced me to replay a couple hours of the game.

Dying Light’s parkour gameplay is definitely the highlight of the game. Its fast-paced traversal is a breathless joy which will make you fear zombies again. The game’s vertical level design is a smart way to differentiate itself from the many zombie games which came before and will likely come after. The game’s day/night cycle also helps keeps players on edge and conscious of where their closest safe house is.

Beneath Dying Light’s larger concepts lie many of the same old ideas that have been done in zombie games for years. The resource management, the ability trees, crafting and multiplayer modes have not only been done in other games, but have been done better. These elements all feel a bit superfluous and poorly balanced. It never felt like I had to make tough choices with my resources or my skill points, it felt like I could have put them just about anywhere and been okay. For those who are well versed in these zombie game tropes, the elements don’t ruin the experience, but they certainly don’t add to it. It feels like these mechanics were designed to pad out the game, but all they do is distract from what makes Dying Light unique.