Buy Dying Light

In Dying Light, the city of Harran was hosting an Olympics-style game when an infection spread and turned most of the population into zombies. The city was sealed off, and the survivors were trapped inside. One survivor, Kadir Suleiman, was a criminal who stole a cure for the virus. The cure has the potential to be turned into a weapon, so mercenary Kyle Crane is airdropped by an organization known as the Global Relief Effort (GRE) to recover it before Suleiman can doom the world. Trapped, alone, and without any backup, Crane must depend on the survivors to locate the target and survive the dangerous days ahead.

Dying Light's plot is sort of a bundle of zombie clichés that have been cobbled together. It doesn't contain much in the way of surprises, so you can probably figure out several of the plot twists from the start. It contains some rather likeable characters, although the protagonist is going to be controversial. He's a jerk who occasionally tries to be a good person. The game fully recognizes this hypocrisy and has him bemoaning his actions as he does something terrible, but it can make it difficult to empathize with him, especially as his stake in the matter is largely financial. He develops into someone more amiable, especially as things start to get awful, but it can be awkward. The antagonist is a hilariously cartoonish character but lacks the charisma of a Pagan Min, which makes it difficult to hate or like him. The plot does its job well enough, and there are some legitimately funny or touching moments.

Understandably, most people will make an instant comparison between Dying Light and Techland's previous game, Dead Island. On the surface, they look pretty similar: first-person zombie games set on an infested island with a focus on melee combat. If you've played Dead Island, you have a general idea of what to expect: wandering around, collecting quests, and slamming a sledgehammer into a zombie's skull.

The biggest difference Dying Light has over most zombie games is your mobility. If Dead Island is fight, Dying Light is flight. Like the survivors in the city, your character uses parkour as a way to get around the zombies. This means you can climb darn near anything. Dying Light has a lot in common with Mirror's Edge in that the environments are designed with paths you can follow by jumping and climbing and dropping onto color-coded safe spots. As you progress, you unlock more mobility options. You can vault over zombies or slide into them to break their legs. You can run up walls for extra distance or tuck-and-roll when falling to absorb previously dangerous falls. You start off athletic but quickly become a mix of Ezio and Faith.

Early on, you need to invest significant effort to kill a small number of zombies, and a horde is basically unstoppable. As you progress, you unlock more durable and deadly weapons, special techniques, and so on. You have to get a few levels under your belt before the game lets you attempt a stand-up fight. Gunplay is also strongly discouraged, as guns are limited in ammo, and one shot attracts the infected to you in a heartbeat.

Dying Light doesn't want you to fight head-on. It's an option, but the game doesn't reward this behavior. It's all about using your free-running ability to your advantage. You can generally avoid regular zombies by climbing to rooftops. Once you get improved mobility options, you can avoid any fight that isn't required by a mission. If you do need (or want) to fight, your mobility is also your biggest advantage. You can engage in fights when you have a terrain advantage. You can lure zombies into traps or reach the rooftops and snipe foes from a distance. For instant kills, you can lure zombies to traps, such as spiked walls, and then kick them.

The true king of Dying Light is the grappling hook. Once you hit Survivor level 12 and can purchase the grappling hook, the game changes dramatically and basically turns you into Zombie Batman. Point anywhere within a reasonable distance, hit the button, and you zip right there. You go from scurrying up walls to being the master of the city, and it's amazing. It's so great that it's almost game-breaking, especially since it somewhat devalues the carefully crafted parkour paths. It has a long cooldown timer if overused, so players can't let their free-running skills languish.

Dying Light has an unusual mix of enemies. Zombies and some of the special infected, such as giant zombies with deadly sledgehammers and the puke-spitting infected, add some interesting twists to the game. Others are not fun at all, and the worst of the lot is the exploding zombie. Rather like a Boomer in Left 4 Dead, they are huge monsters that explode if they get too close. They are effectively a one-hit kill, and there's no real good way to deal with them. They can appear suddenly and unfairly for an unavoidable death, and taking them out from a distance alerts all nearby foes.  You must also contend with human enemies, who can use weapons, block attacks, and kick down your shields.

Gunplay feels quite awkward since you have relatively limited options for what to do about a gun-toting human foe. The main story missions are the biggest offenders in this regard, and that's unfortunate. I would often put off story missions as long as I could so I could avoid going into a closed-off corridor where fighting was the only option.

This brings us to Dying Light's titular feature, a semi-realistic day/night structure. Some missions lock the game to a certain time, but otherwise, time passes as you adventure. Things are mostly safe during the day. The zombies are relatively docile, but bandits and looters are more plentiful. If you die during the day, you lose a trivial amount of survivor experience. During the night, everything changes. Zombies become more aggressive, and several of the special nightmare zombies come out. They hit like tanks and can't be easily killed, and they wander the map looking for victims. You can sneak around by avoiding their vision cones or escaping to a safe zone. Why go out at night? All your experience point gains are doubled, and there is no punishment for death. In addition, if you survive an entire night outside, you get a huge amount of bonus experience. Things might be harder, but you get more out of it.

The zombie chases and increased danger really give the game a tremendous sense of tension that isn't present otherwise. Some of the tension is drained as you level up and get stronger, but the game tries to scale to keep things exciting. It doesn't make much sense to be punished for dying during the day, but the night gameplay is so fun that I can't really complain about it. The rewards are icing on the cake.

The game is designed with a free and open mission structure. You have main plot missions to follow and can get side-quests from various characters. The missions are straightforward and are generally, "Go here, kill this, and collect that." Most of the missions are associated with wacky people and dialogue. The missions are worth doing for the experience, money and rare blueprints. The more complex side-quests can involve clearing out zombie-infested dead zones to recover air drops before other survivors do.

Blueprints and money are used to upgrade weapons. Dying Light features a breakable weapon system, but it's far less punishing than expected. Each weapon has a certain number of uses, and then it has to be repaired. Each weapon also has a limited number of repairs before it's permanently broken. Using items you collect in the environment, you can craft powerful weapons. There's an RPG-style loot tier system where stronger weapons can be repaired more often than normal ones. I crafted a hatchet that caused a bewildering amount of fire damage, cleaved zombies in a single blow, and could fight an entire horde without needing repairs. Once you get into crafting, you'll find that a handful of weapons have an amazing shelf life.

The game also offers multiplayer. In addition to a fun cooperative mode where up to four players take on the story together, there's also a competitive mode called Be The Zombie, where one player takes control of an infected super-zombie and tries to kill other survivors. You invade another player's game and attempt to take them down. It's a neat concept that feels a touch underbalanced. The zombie is relatively weak until it get some levels, but the player base has generated powerful weapons that limit a zombie's growth potential. It's trying to match the feel of a Dark Souls-style experience but never quite achieves it. It's also tough to find a game, since many people disconnect as soon as you log in. It's still plenty of fun to play when it works, but it probably won't have a long-lasting community.

Dying Light is a good-looking game, though there are some weak spots. Some zombies look really good, and others look poorly textured and ugly. The environments range from the ugly (a dull shanty town) to the awesome (an open old-style city), and it can vary based on where you are in the story. It's not a bad-looking game, but it is disappointingly inconsistent. Similarly, the voice acting is all over the place. There is some solid acting mixed with ridiculous over-the-top accents and poor half-hearted voice work. Roger Craig Smith does a good job as Crane, and several of the other core actors are quite good. It's mostly the side characters who sound ridiculous.

Dying Light is easy to write off as a Dead Island knockoff, but it is anything but. It has a completely different feel, with intense mobility and speed mixing with far more deadly enemies. It's also more tightly designed and more fun to play and is an overall improvement over Dead Island in almost every way. It still has its flaws, and it doesn't reinvent the genre, but it's just fun. The poor mission structure and occasionally bad zombie design can lead to frustration, but the satisfaction of dropping onto a zombie's head wrench-first makes it all worth the trouble.

Score: 8.0/10