Dying Light (Video Game)

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Dying LightDeveloped by Techland

Published by WB Interactive Entertainment

Rated M for Mature

Available on PC, PS4 (reviewed), Xbox One


There’s a certain genre of games that sells themselves on scale more than specifics. Vast are their maps and plentiful their content, and after a linear opening the reigns are removed and players are free to walk to the city of their choice and craft daggers until their skill maxes out. These games boil down into two categories: Epic RPGs and Collectathons. Games like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls fall into the first category, with the main distinction being that a character should theoretically look and play distinct throughout, increasing replay value and personality.

In the latter category are games like Far Cry 4 and Grand Theft Auto. While the scope is impressive and the gameplay passable, individual elements don’t hold up to scrutiny. Content is vast, and though you might look on ye many works and despair, they too crumble into the sand under scrutiny. Liberating hostages and driving ambulances might be fun the first few times, but at the moment a quest icon pops up and you roll your eyes knowing that you need to do yet another pointless side mission to unlock a new hat for your shotgun, then the game’s mechanics do not hold up the content.

Dying Light certainly falls into the second category. Yet, after a week of gameplay, completing all but the most bullshit of challenges, I still found myself enjoying just dicking around. Despite the swath of forgettable filler content, the game manages to stay fun largely by virtue of strong core mechanics. Running, jumping, climbing, and most importantly slashing zombies never crosses the line into tedious. Despite the many dozens of hours I sunk, I still managed to enjoy Dying Light rather than resent it. I have a number of nitpick complaints, and worry not, for as a professional picker of nits I will certainly pick away in the coming paragraphs. As a quick takeaway for those who do not care for the more nuanced analysis, Dying Light is a fun and incredibly stupid good time. Buy if you enjoy watching bodies explode.

As the game opens, the first cutscene shows protagonist Kyle Crane being dropped into the fictional city of Harran by an aid organization called the GRE. He is tasked with identifying a target that has gone rogue and retrieving a file containing a faulty cure. If the information goes public, then millions will die from murder-cure. The bad guy has given the file to an associate, so he can’t just jump in and kill the guy and take the files, and instead must try to infiltrate his organization. As he lands, shit goes immediately tits up and he is bitten by a zombie. The protagonist is now infected. You are saved by a character named Jade and a red shirt named Amir who immediately lives up to his role, and somehow make it back to safety after you black out.

The plot then proceeds to go off the rails and forget what it was doing. If you are wondering about some of the immediate plot holes, like for example how exactly people would continue to take a murder cure after they know it just kills you, just get used to it. At numerous points in the game, the focus will change willy nilly. At one moment you are helping the antagonist Rais shake down some villages, and in the next you are blowing up a building that is of inexplicably vital importance. At the game’s halfway point, Rais publishes the file, and you learn that it was a weapon all along and that the faceless government that is willing to sacrifice the lives of all your friends to get their hands on the file are bad guys. Shocker! After this, stuff happens, and it ends on a “to be continued.

I’m not going into depth, and it isn’t because I don’t want to spoil anything. The story is stupid, and there isn’t a lot of substance to it. It flips back and forth between plot threads, and characterization is so brief that it is hard to care about any of the admittedly well modeled characters. It is a bit sad, too, since the character design department seemed to have much higher hopes for the narrative.

For example, we are introduced to a character named Troy later in the game, who is a woman who previously we had only heard on the radio. When we meet her, it is revealed that half of her face is covered in a burn scar. It is never brought up, and the detail is sidelined for stupid conspiracy plot about how the ministry of defence is trying to cover up the survivors in the quarantine zone so that they can firebomb it. This is just an example, but is the tale of the tape for almost every major character of the game. We never really find out motivations or real personality, and for a game with such a needlessly complex plot it is a major oversight.

The whole flip flopping spy narrative is a confusing choice, since there already is a built in plot. There are zombies. Try to survive. Society devolves, warlord becomes all murdery, save the day. I don’t see why they had to shoehorn in this spy narrative that just creates holes and asks questions that never get answered. Early in the game, there’s a medical crisis where the good guys have run out of anti-zombie juice. Shit goes down and eventually you get 5 vials, which is only enough for a few days. The matter is never brought up again. It is the main driving force of the plot for the first 25% of the game, and somehow isn’t important enough to resolve? Techland, it is your stupid spy plot, none of us asked for it, so at least make it a good one.

I should mention that the developers Techland are also guilty of Dead Island, a criminally over-hyped game that failed to deliver at almost every level. They also had a needlessly stupid spy plot, so I guess that the writing department just really wants to live the life of a zombified Tom Clancy. I don’t really want to argue about Dead Island, because Dying Light is just a better version in every way. Gone are the distracting health bars and needlessly tedious to kill boss monsters, and in are the parkours and grappling hooks. I cannot think of a single game that has ever suffered from the inclusion of a grappling hook.

Terrible plot aside, I found Dead Island: Parkour Edition to be very compelling. Games always have to find something to make the player want to keep playing, and for Dying Light the physicality of the movement and combat kept me interested. While not all the side-quests were interesting, with the worst of them being random spawn “find the item” bullshit, getting from place to place and killing zombies was always fun enough that I wanted to see it through.

Platforming in general is difficult in an FPS, since it is hard to gauge your positioning and jump distance with the restrictive camera view. You can’t look forward and know if you are at the exact edge of a platform at the same time, because that’s not how eyes work. Still, Dying Light manages to do an admirable job. By holding the jump button, the player can grab onto ledges and ascend the surroundings. It isn’t Assassin’s creed style “hold button to fly up the wall”, and environments take a bit of thought to traverse. The most difficult to reach spots usually reward you with some kind of collectible, but the actual challenge of ascending the building was pleasing enough to compel me to explore.

The world is built with this verticality in mind, so the environments are uniquely varied in elevation. The world isn’t flat like in most games, and jumping from a bridge to a warehouse to a train car while the hordes shamble below feels like living a zombie survival fantasy. Large drops can be cushioned by trash piles or cars, and the world does a good enough job leading you along logical paths that you can almost always find a quick way down. There are some confusing environments, and it can be difficult to climb into a window rather than over it, but usually when there’s a movement challenge it is intentional rather than poor design.

Combat is satisfying in a similar way, with limbs flying willy-nilly and bones crunching in an almost erotic fashion. The player starts with basic bludgeoning instruments, which do a satisfying job of cracking skulls and breaking arms, and eventually graduates to long swords and fire axes. Weapons come in a variety of quality levels ranging from normal to Super Saiyan, and can be upgraded with buffs and crafted into a more badass form. Recipies are generally either found in the environment or as rewards for quests, and crafting can be done on the fly as long as you have the materials. You cannot craft weapons out of scratch, so all of the weapon recipes are more like modifications to weapons you find or buy. My personal favorite combination was the fire and lightning broadsword, but I can also see the appeal of the poison and fire hatchet or the bleeding and knock-back hammer. Keep in mind that items do have finite use, so don’t grow too attached to any particular implement of destruction.

Unfortunately, the general fluidity of combat makes the more restrictive challenges totally uninteresting. Gunplay is easily the worst part of the game, and is incredibly slow and clunky compared to the fast paced melee and free-running. So when the game handed me a gun and asked me to get 30 head-shots in 2 minutes, I could not be fucked to care. They tried to have this whacky side plot about a movie producer, but as I mentioned, it is the gameplay that is compelling in Dying Light. With no investment in the characters or happenings, even the more interesting content that brings some levity to the overly serious man story doesn’t really draw you in. Still, the bullshit portions are a small enough percentage that it doesn’t ruin the overall experience.

Consumables like throwing weapons and medkits can be crafted out of supplies you find scavenging the environment. While the system can be a bit tedious to navigate through when you have a upwards of a bazillion recipes, the materials are plentiful enough and recipes varied enough to give you a good basket of toys to play around with. Usually crafting yields multiple of an item, with the number increasing as you level up, which cuts down on a lot of the tedium of navigating the menu. Still, there are certain items like lockpicks that seemed unnecessary. I ended the game with 58 lockpicks and 375 scrap metal. It takes one scrap to craft lockpicks, and each crafting yields 5. While I needed to craft it a couple of times at the beginning, I’d rather them just take the scrap out of my inventory automatically.

Similar to Dead Island, you can break arms and legs to incapacitate your foes, and a kick button can knock them back momentarily to buy you some space. Unlike Dead Island, there is far less of an emphasis on disabling limbs. While cutting off legs still slows enemies down and breaking their arms still causes them to drop weapons, the enemies are far more numerous and less individually deadly, making the combat more about inflicting mass destruction than calculated amputation. It is a way more fitting style for a zombie game, and the focus on massive hordes makes the sparse rooftops a more interesting contrast.

Accompanying the generic infected are a series of special infected that serve to mix up the gameplay. There isn’t anything too creative here, but they get the job done. Spitting zombies provide a ranged threat, big hammer zombies are like mini-bosses, and exploding zombies provide bullshit. Seriously, fuck those things. Whoever decided that having a zombie that explodes and takes you from full to dead whose only distinguishing feature is a puffy chest in a melee game where half the zombies look like they’re falling apart anyways is a basic bitch. At one point I was securing a safe house, and after barricading the entrance and turning on the power, one of those motherfuckers pops out of the closet and instantly kills me. Oh, I guess I’m just fucking myself today then, thanks for putting that on my agenda Mr. Zombie.

The game is split up into a day and night cycle, with nighttime zombies being all crazy fast and deadly. If they see you, the goal is to run and try to evade them like a GTA police chase. If you make it to a safe house, you can call “base” and they fuck off, but you get bonus points for time spent outside at night. Though you do get powerful in the game, you never really get so powerful that you can just murder all of the split jawed vampires from Blade 2, so the game manages to offer a tense challenge throughout.

Oddly enough, there are also a number of quirky secrets to find in the game. If you find a certain flower in a remote area of the game, you will be transported to a Plants vs. Zombies knockoff level. While randomly exploring, I found a hidden cave that told jokes as I killed waves of zombies. None of these areas offer substantial reward, but made me smile and are silly enough make me want to check all the little nooks and crannies.

What is going to be a divisive issue in the game is the plot not reflecting the gameplay. As a game with a day and night cycle and your progressive zombification being a key element, you would assume some kind of time crunch similar to Dead Rising. This is not the case. When the plot says “you have 6 hours before we bomb the city,” it is only talking about magic plot time where things progress only when you do story missions. Personally, I liked this. It allowed me to enjoy the game at my own pace without rushing. Still, it feels very dissonant, and I can see how it would upset people who are boring and lame.

Something I usually don’t mention in games is the sound design. Sound is an integral part to how I personally enjoy games, but it generally plays a backseat role to solid combat or interesting plot. While it adds to the experience, it just usually isn’t worth talking about. Dying Light manages to hit a sweet spot, with a retro synth track that makes me feel like I’m in a classic horror film. Zombies make zombie noises, with the fast zombies making a distinctive bashing and shattering as they pop out of doors. Groans grow loud like whispers in your ear when they lunge, and the game does a great job of cueing you in audibly to what is going on around you. This is really important in a fast game like this, since I don’t have time to check all my corners while zipping around avoiding a horde.

There is plenty more more I could get into about Dying Light, but at that point I’d just be picking nits off of my pet nit. The game is stupidly fun, and only gets better as it goes on. You start off stumbling and working hard to kill a handful of zombies, and end shooting across the rooftops and cleaving hordes in twain. It is brutal, fun, packed with content, and dumb enough to be enjoyed drunk. It loses a point for the loose plot and handful of bullshit challenges. It isn’t going to keep you thinking about the characters or the societal ramifications of the collapse of society, but it doesn’t need to. Turn your brain off, and bash in a zombie’s.

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User Rating 3.33 (15 votes)
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