Dying Light presents a dynamic and frustrating parallel; it’s quick to dazzle its audience with heaping stacks of energetic (if not wholly borrowed) content, but equally capable of coming apart under the burgeoning stress of weaving it all together. A reticence to acknowledge its own pratfalls leaves the responsibility of proper assembly to the player. If you’re up to that particular challenge, Dying Light’s one of the more impressive games of the modern generation.
The near entirety of Dying Light can be reported by talking about other games. It contains most of Mirror’s Edge’s first-person parkour/free-running mechanics, and plenty of complimentary terrain to test them. It challenges the player to climb incredibly tall towers and dispenses a glut of content on the side, not unlike Ubisoft’s more recent Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed games. Scores of mindless zombies match the numbers of Dead Rising, along with more difficult, specialized zombies from Left 4 Dead. Weapon durability, tiered-by-color weapon rarity (itself borrowed from Borderlands and Diablo), and an incredibly useful kick-move are taken straight from Dying Light’s brother-from-another-publisher, Dead Island. Mission acquisition and design, composed entirely of large open maps populated by quasi quest givers, is taken directly from Bethesda’s recent Elder Scrolls and Fallout titles (from which Dying Light’s lock-picking is also directly plucked).
This may seem to leave Dying Light scrambling for identity, but in practice – especially with enough practice – it becomes an experience all its own. The gateway into Dying Light’s brand of open-world zombie mayhem starts, ironically, by waiting until night falls. The mass of shuffling zombies, “Biters,” remain, but are joined by more intelligent and deadly “Volatiles.” If the player wanders into their (admittedly contrived) vision cone, Volatiles will engage pursuit and stop at almost nothing until the player is ripped to shreds or makes it to a designated safe zone.
What makes both Volatiles and night so effective is the implicit risk and reward of venturing out at night. It gets pitch-black dark in Dying Light, reducing visibility to almost nothing and leaving the task of navigation to a crude mini-map. You have a flashlight, a backpack full of weapons, and apparently the world’s finest set of free-running skills – but all could draw attention to your person and inform Volatiles of your position. Venturing out during night doubles experience gains in two of your three distinct skill trees, and makes good on 50 Cent’s legendary adage, Get Rich or Die Tryin’.
Coming to terms with Dying Light’s acrobatic movement is the next step in embracing its hostile disposition. Running down streets, pulling yourself up to higher ground, and hopping across rooftops takes requires a brain prepared to transition from a neat-escape-option to vital-navigation-tool. You can’t take it lightly and just slowly bunny hop over simple rooftops, but rather maintain a breakneck pace across rickety shacks, broken concrete structures, metal wreckage, and the thinnest of railings. Even in leaping to safety, a process Assassin’s Creed has almost automated at this point, requires a bit of precision; cars roofs and giant trash piles are magical safe landings, but require somewhat strict mid-air control to properly embrace.
The potential of movement can’t thoroughly be explored until one gains more than a passing familiarity with Dying Light. Its open-world trappings are actually the exact opposite; it’s not a series of loosely connected levels, but rather an free provocation to test and explore it all will. This is chiefly realized while you’re running for your life from a Volatile in the dark of night with nothing but a flashlight to guide your way. The sheer speed at which you’ll be making snap decisions – ascend a wall, hop from roof to roof, land on some power lines and make an almost impossible leap to a safe zone – relies on complete improvisation. Dying Light ensures you have the skills to make it happen, but making the best of it is up to the player.
Dying Light is a game that puts gameplay well above atmosphere or narrative (an interesting compromise for a horror-styled game, which I’ll get to later), but it doesn’t come at the cost of creating a believable habitat. The fictional city of Harran, itself in the midst of hosting and Olympic-like event, takes inspiration from Turkish architecture, but aesthetically gives few concessions to feeling too videogame-y. Techland’s penchant for wrecked slums was thoroughly explored in Dead Island and further refined in Harran’s open area, but the star of the show is Old Town district, which becomes available toward the second half of the game. With properly aligned buildings, towers that make geographical and architecture sense, and natural vistas, Harran doesn’t “feel” like a videogame. It looks like a real city, albeit under siege of meandering undead.
It’s a shame that Techland’s commitment to natural urban spaces is wasted on a contrived and brainless narrative. Set in the aftermath of an ambiguous zombie apocalypse, a (presumably) American operative, Kyle Crane, is dispatched to recover a file for his CIA-like agency. Crane encounters an escalating series of locals that make him reconsider his position, and further force him into combating de-facto warlord. Virtually every action and zombie contrivance is checked with remarkable consistency. Ruggish antihero? Check. Going rogue against a corrupt agency? Check. Coming to terms with the horrors of humanity? Check. Acid-trip dream sequence where Crane come to terms with inevitable fate? Check. There’s absolutely nothing interesting inside Dying Light’s explicit narrative; it’s winding series of queued clichés aching for release. It also doesn’t help that Troy Baker, despite an earnest performance, has earned the title of Generic Videogame Protagonist Numero Uno as Kyle Crane.
Zombie games, either as condition of humanity in ruin or a creepy threat to survival, come loaded with an implied narrative, but Dying Light also discards this notion. Zombies exist to be destroyed; Biters are (relatively) normal shambling corpses, Spitters are projectile specialists, Exploders are suicide bombers, Runners never stop chasing you, and Thugs are super-power mega undead humans. Runners, in particular, exhibit some particularly unnerving traits, speaking intelligible dialogue in brief and haunting returns to humanity, but ultimately remain parts to the machine. In Dying Light, Zombies aren’t cruel reminders of lost mankind, but gameplay-focused adversaries absent of their horrific context.
This is…fine. Games often receive harsh criticism when they nosedive into narrative and discard the obligation of challenging interactivity, but Dying Light’s devotion to being a gameplay-first endeavor is rock solid. It features a considerable amount of story, characters, and cut-scenes, and one could argue all of that is a waste of time, but it’s indifferent to the state of the game. Functionally, Dying Light is a loot driven open-world adventure with a constant demand for movement and combat. Its systems facilitate this philosophy a majority of the time, but not without their respective hang-ups.
There isn’t another game that strives to match combat and movement into symmetrically important mechanics. While Dying Light drops Dead Island’s much-loved but seldom-used analog combat, it retains reasonable accuracy with its melee strikes. Ordinarily I’d consider slicing off arms or kicking down legs to be an excessive ode to cinematic violence, but the sheer practicality of certain weapon abilities tremendously affects personal combat prowess. This is especially helpful when dealing with crowd control, as using a bladed weapon to slice off a ton of limbs certainly has its perks.
Combat perspective shifts entirely when dealing with human adversaries. With a group of zombies I’d go in, swing around until I got tired, and briefly retreat until my strength returned. With human’s I’d use Dying Light’s dedicated jump button as a dodge move, going in for a slice and instantly jumping backward to safety. This became more complicated when several enemies appeared at once, though typically I could backtrack a little ways and fight them one-on-one. When that’s not an option, Dying Light’s escalating series of weapon modifications and blueprints are ready and available.
Like Dead Island before it, Dying Light’s weapon customization options serve as an attractive and endearing hook. The usual suspects – fire, poison, electricity – are widely represented, but fundamentally boost combat options. Crowd control especially sees a benefit, with toxic weapons easily breaking down the shambling hordes of Biters. Weapon durability and finite repair options ensure nothing lasts forever, which I actually found quite refreshing. Rather than find something I liked and stick with it forever, I was constantly shifting weapons around and trying out new weapons and modification blueprints as I picked them up. In this light durability was almost an asset, rather than another barrier to contend with.
What’s notable is the raw physicality at which Dying Light operates. It feels like a comfortable medium between the floaty mash of an Unreal Engine 3 ragdoll demonstration and the plodding Euphoria physics that drove Grand Theft Auto IV and V. Killing someone with a gun only takes a few bullets, hitting a guy in the face with a baseball bat relays an incredible sense of brutality, and kicking someone off the roof (and watching them hit everything on the way down) is weirdly realistic. It’s almost sickening if you’re unable to suspend disbelief.
Player progression is reasonably smooth, but not without a few bumps in the road. Three different skill trees feed off three different means of acquiring experience points. Performing well in combat boosts the Combat tree, free-running on rooftops and other active actions boosts Fitness, and completing quest and raw survival boosts Survival. Interestingly, you actually lose survival points every time you die, and not a paltry amount. Toward the end of the game I was dropping 2400 every time (out of the 60k or so necessary to get another level), ensuring that Dying Light always played for keeps.
Dying Light’s greatest struggles are in its pacing and process. For every story mission, there are three or four equally long side missions instantly available. Side-quests actually feel almost as fleshed out as the main game, with the concession that they often make use of existing geography (campaign quests, by comparison, tend to break out into their own one-off levels). I’ve stolen batteries from busses, invaded dangerous chemical-filled warehouses, discovered the horror of a mass suicide, helped a pyromaniac light gas lines, converse with men who think I’m a brainless sycophant, and aid in a surprise pregnancy that was really a company of drunks.
Everyone in Harran has a problem and Crane is seemingly always ready and willing to oblige. On top of it all are safe zones that can be cleared and used to sleep through the night (or day), a ton of different collectables, a constant deployment of rapidly unavailable airdrops, blocked-off areas for an extra challenge, and seemingly endless specific-loot collection quests. Technically most of this stuff boils down to a stigmatized fetch quest, but isn’t everything? Dying Light doesn’t necessarily have the context to differentiate one quest from another, but the content and length of its quests tries to cover whatever ground it may have lost in that process.
After thirty hours, I got tired of playing Dying Light. Side-missions, which I had been completing in an obsessive manner, became less important. I had gotten all I wanted out of my Fitness and Combat skill trees, and especially cherished the former because it eventually allowed me to bail out of the latter. Rather than fight everything, I could jump over their heads, shove them out of the way, and engage a quick release if they grabbed onto me. With the base level of opposition shooting through the roof (Runners and Thugs around every corner), I just didn’t care anymore and wanted to finish the game. Dying Light’s movement and combat mechanics aren’t exactly shallow, but there’s still too much game to spread them out over.
It’s easy to see Dying Light getting thrown off balance by the glut of content surrounding it. Play it the wrong way – “wrong” in this scenario being against whatever your gaming sensibilities usually dictate – and it can easily feel like a merciless slog through a mass and mess of content. When Dying Light’s firing on all cylinders it’s nearly unstoppable, but there’s just so many qualifiers that may knock it off its perch. If you can’t get over weapon degradation, or can’t come to terms with its movement mechanics, or can’t quite get over the fact that you’re not supposed to stop and kill everything, or if you never get a handle on night time navigation, Dying Light may never get off the ground.
There’s one slight demographic that I’ve ignored; operating Dying Light as a ceaseless loot grind. A ton of high level weaponry exists to explore and exploit, and while it’s not as meticulously diverse or attractive as something like Borderlands, it’s still leagues above most other open-world games. Dying Light is also playable and considerably more insane as a four player cooperative (and occasionally competitive) experience. On a personal level, my slow and methodical style of play doesn’t mesh well with a roving band of loot-hungry personnel, but I can see the appeal if you’re into that. Somewhere out there there’s probably another 2000 word review extoling the virtues of cooperative play.
Arguably more interesting is Dying Light’s competitive mode, Be the Zombie. This accepts and further refines Dying Light’s commitment to enormous content diversity, outfitting “invading” players with brand new mechanics. As Night Hunters, you’re permitted to swing around the world with a grappling-hook like tentacle, which is easily the most fulfilling form of navigation in the game. Night Hunters hunt humans and humans hunt Night Hunter nests in a deathmatch/tower defense mash-up. I don’t know if Be the Zombie necessarily has the longevity to stick around past one or two nights of fun, but I had a blast with what I played.
Dying Light’s lasting definition is whatever you’re prepared to give it. I think its functions best not solely through its combat, but in conjunction with the improvisation allowed by its fluid movement mechanics. A lot of other games do what Dying Light does, but none with the exact working combination of mechanics and challenges designed to test those mechanics. With that in mind, that same volatile formula applied to different tastes and skillsets might explode on contact.
