Dying Light Review

Dead to me?

There’s been real confusion over what the ‘real’ sequel to the uber-popular Dead Island will be. Certainly, the original team at Techland would claim that it’s Dying Light, given the original was their baby. But is that a good or bad thing for this new franchise?

Story:

Dying Light doesn’t really try to riff on the traditional zombie tale, other than the currently en-vogue calling your zombies something else. Here, they’re ‘virulents’, but the concept is just the same. You’re airdropped into a city ravaged by a zombie plague and have to investigate a group of hilariously evil dudes who have no problem shooting or mutilating their own groupies. Rais, your target, even has a comedy outfit and tattoos, just in case you doubted that he wasn’t a very nice person. It’s all inoffensive stuff, but it does feel like Techland have missed a trick.

Gameplay:

Dying Light was positioned a spiritual sequel to Dead Island, but it’s actually really rather direct. It’s the same team working on the game as Dead Island, and most of the gameplay mechanics have also been shamelessly lifted across, for good or for bad.

However, I soon found that it was mostly for the bad. The excellent analogue combat, where you used the right stick to aim and power your attacks has been removed. There still is no option for fast travel whilst the story is still in progress. Weapons still break very easily. On top of that, Dying Light adds in a layer of parkour, which is supposed to make up for the (intentional) removal of the analogue combat. Unfortunately I found it rather lacking. I’ve never been much of a fan of first-person platforming, and whilst this is one of the better implementations, it’s far from perfect. When you’re free running or climbing low-rise buildings, it works fine. But when you’re climbing radio towers or large buildings, and need some finesse, or jump across gaps, or apply some timing, I found everything collapsed, leading to huge frustration.

One of the best additions to the game are the different XP systems, but when you lose a big chunk due to a fall, you’ll want to chuck the controller at the TV.
There’s three different XP types, but it’s not very complicated – there’s general ‘survivor’ XP, then other bars for free-running and another for combat. So you need to do a good mix of all the elements to unlock the different skill trees. There’s loads to do, but it’s just hanging out in the open world that is most fun. The missions suffer from being overly long, not always well checkpointed, and far too difficult in the early game. You almost need to ignore the story for the first few hours after you complete the prologue in order to compete, or go straight into co-op. Dying Light is a big game that you could certainly put dozens of hours into, but I found that it missed some of the novelty of Dead Island, whilst other elements were too samey, which quite quickly led to fatigue and frustration.