I’m sure everyone knows WB Games, as the publisher has had a great deal of success in both consoles and PC markets the past few years. You might be less inclined to know who Techland is, the developer behind Dying Light, but they have been around for a little bit As well. Techland is best know for the Dead Island series of games, most notably the first game and the cinematic trailer that shook the gaming community for its deception of the walking dead.
Techland hasn’t strayed far from what they know with their latest game Dying Light, even if the team is no longer associated with the Dead Island franchise. Dying Light doesn’t just look and feel a lot like Dead Island, but it nearly outright copies entire chucks of that game. Trust me, if you have played the original Dead Island you’ll be hard pressed to think Dying Light isn’t a direct followup to that title; for better or for worse.
The story is shockingly similar with an outbreak on an island replaced with a isolated city on an island, a dead island if you will. Your basic attack of kicking zombies away is the same. You can craft items that look identical to Dead Island style weapons (I swear some of them are ripped straight from that game) with their elemental attributes. You’ll also be able to activate a drop-in style co-op mode (still as fun as ever with friends) so that you won’t have to tackle the zombie hordes on your own. So much of Dead Island is here that most people won;t know this is an entirely different series.
You will once again find yourself looting crates, boxes, barrels, and other such things to find various parts that can be used throughout the game. Dying Light, like its predecessor is very crafting intensive and because of this encourages you to explore the city you are trapped in. Of course, this wouldn’t be anything special as the zombie genre is (in my opinion) finally losing favor, but your characters motivation keeps you going from mission to mission to see where and what he will do next.
The story follows your character as you are parachuted into the quarantine zone to locate and secure a document that can supposedly lead to eradicating this virus. Unfortunately this document has fallen into less that savory hands when the quarantine was initiated and it is up to you to blend in among the factions to complete your task of recovering it for your employers. Not only will you have to walk the tightrope between the factions at play in the city, but you’ll also have to deal with your bosses that radio in from time to time checking your progress and advancing the core of the story. It’s these radio segments that really make for an interesting experience as you have been hired to complete a task, but your morals keep bubbling up causing friction with your orders. Nothing is ever as simple or straightforward as it first seems.
The zombies in Dying Light serve as more of a constant distraction this time around as the focus really shifts onto the interactions between those that are trying to survive in the quarantine. Sure, there is a lot of zombie killing to be had, but they are mostly there to serve as a means to an end and not your real adversary in terms of the story. The zombies are a constant, but you’ll quickly see them as fodder to a much deeper, serious, and complex story than you did in Dead Island.
Unlike Dead Island you are a trained operative so you won’t be stumbling about and avoiding conflict. The big change is in your ability to parkour all over town in all sort of ways that would make even the Assassins Creed series green with envy. I liken it to how you moved in Mirror’s Edge, but instead of only being able to vault and grab onto certain areas, in Dying Light, if you see it you can vault/grab it. The parkour elements are automatic so you won’t have to learn any convoluted button combination here. All you have to do is point yourself in the direction you want to vault or the ledge you want to grab onto and do it, the game handles the rest.
As a majority of the zombies are slow, lumbering beasts, they won’t be able to follow you up, so your knowledge parkour becomes your most useful ability in Dying Light and really helps make it stand apart from Dead Island. While the game does a good job of introducing new zombie types as it progresses, you are going to mostly see the classic slow zombies as your main source of trouble. Other zombies follow the same kind of styling of games such as Left For Dead so you won;t be running into anything that you probably haven’t already seen before. If you just keep to the roofs you are going to be able to make your way across large swaths of the games open-world in no time at all without much trouble.
The whole experience feels like Techland wanted to really make a Dead Island two, but for whatever reason didn’t, so they instead pulled out Dying Light. Everything about it feels like a sequel, at least more so than Far Cry 2 did from the original Far Cry and that one was official. Weapons last longer which in turn makes killing zombies a much more fun experience than it did in Dead Island. Yes, your weapons will break, but you are going to be able to dole of some serious punishment before then, unlike in Dead Island where it seems like every two or three hits your weapon would shatter. What is fun is that every weapon can be fixed on the fly, but you’ll only be able to fix them a limited amount of times before they are lost forever. This forces you to keep mixing things up as even your favorite weapon will betray you and no longer be usable.
Another major gameplay addition is in the form of a new day and night cycle to the world you inhabit. These cycles will really change the way you play the game and come with their own set of benefits and downfalls. During the day you can see everything and zombies won’t be able to sneak up on you if you are aware of your surrounding and makes exploring fun and easy. The night cycle is a different matter entirely though. Once the sun sets, a different style of zombie will enter play to make your life more difficult. These night zombies are much faster and more powerful than anything you’ll see during the day, so stopping or hiding out on rooftops won’t save you. In return for exploring and risking your life at night you’ll be rewarded with some major XP boosts for as long as you survive.
With regards to XP, Dying Light uses three separate skill tress that you can pick and choose to upgrade throughout the game. You will get a Survival Skill, Agility Skill, and Attack Power Skill all with a number of paths. You won’t actually have to do anything to earn XP, for many of these require just running around and beating down zombies to naturally build them up. Instead of having to do all sorts of special missions to earn various types of XP this automatic style gives the game more purpose. Everything you do from completing missions to just running around exploring will give you XP so you will always feel reward for doing something.
Dying Light sports a large game-world for you to explore and for the most part the engine used handles everything just fine. You will of course see the occasional texture pop-in, but nothing that ever becomes distracting or off-putting. Dead Island had a number of graphical issue so it’s nice to see that Techland has addressed most of them in Dying Light. While my PC defaulted to the highest setting for the game, I toned things down a bit to have a better experience gameplay wise. It should be noted that AMD users have been complaining about a lack of optimization, but I didn’t notice any problems. Hopefully a patch will address any such issues for users soon.
Dying Light offers a lot of content that makes for a very satisfying experience. It’s a fantastic amount of fun that could make the upcoming Dead Island 2 a moot point. The implementation of multiplayer also gives Dying Light a lot of lasting appeal. Playing with others is a lot of fun, but also brings on a bit of competitive fun with bonus objectives that the game throws at the party for some big point bonuses. If you already have played and had your zombie fill with the Dead Island games, then Dying Light isn’t going to blow your mind, but if you haven’t played those games, Dying Light is surly going to impress.
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