The peculiar tightness at which The Bozak Horde operates may be a boon to mechanic-obsessives and speed runners, but it simultaneously precludes other venues of appreciation. Whether it’s viewed as an invitation to tedium and frustration or a competent test of applied skill, The Bozak Horde, at the very least, knows what it’s doing.
The Bozak Horde, the first significant chunk of Dying Light’s paid downloadable content, opens by plucking the player from Harran and dropping them in a brand new environment. Your levels and skills remain, but every acquired weapon is dumped in favor of defining an equal experience. On one hand it’s kind of a letdown to reduce your ability as an indiscriminate killing machine, but, on the other, it’s really the only way to level the playing field of what’s clearly built as a leaderboard-driven experience. The Bozak Horde is all about proficiency.
Upon starting the content (via a poster back at your base in the slums, which took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure out), you find yourself affixed with a bomb and tasked by the god-like voice of Bozak to race to an area that can instantly disarm said bomb. Shortly thereafter, a horde of zombies busts in the not-too-well-lit garage, and all of them must be vanquished to disarm the latest ticking time bomb. These are the trials of Bozak, and there are twenty of them to contend with before victory is earned.
It gets slightly more complicated. The venues shift from a dim parking garage to a platform heavy half-mall thing to an obliterated sports arena, but the general tasks remain the same; kill all the bolters, reach all of these checkpoints, deliver all of these packages, figure out which massive shipping container is housing the right bomb. These trials must be performed in succession, as failing (or dying) more than three times sends you back to the very beginning. By any measure, The Bozak Horde is ruthless in its enforcement of its objectives.
This is either an invitation or a source of frustration. The rigid rules by which The Bozak Horde operates are no doubt in place to tantalize leaderboard compulsives and stream-friendly speed runners. It’s hard to complain, as it’s both virtuous for Techland to cater to an extremely narrow market and a hell of a lot of fun to watch a seasoned Dying Light player blast through The Bozak Horde with a set of skills I’ll never obtain.
Unfortunately I can’t really measure a game’s value as a surrogate experience, and I detested almost every second I spent playing The Bozak Horde. My grip on Dying Light’s mechanics, with a six month layover, was admittedly slipping, but I just couldn’t come to terms with the pace and punishment at which it preferred to operate. I enjoyed Dying Light because of its unnerving atmosphere, night and day dynamic, and its unyielding drive for constant player activity. Enjoying all of its systems as they came together—and at my own pace—was a big part of its appeal, and that’s exactly what’s lost in The Bozak Horde. It’s pure mechanics, and it demands you meet a requisite level of proficiency.
A notable caveat to The Bozak Horde’s preferred means of operation; from the outset, the game implies it’s better played with friends. Being July and given that everyone I know quit playing (after significantly enjoying) Dying Light months ago, I was left without the benefit of additional human reinforcements. The Bozak Horde appears to not scale any of its content to a solo run, which is fine, but it seems to further narrow any applicable appeal. The window just keeps closing.
It also felt like more could have been gleaned from The Bozak Horde’s implied narrative. Techland clearly took inspiration from Saw with a sadistic madman occasionally buzzing in with increasingly tortuous information. How he constantly knew where I was, and how he was doing things like putting giant pillars of light that served as functional checkpoints was never explained. Rather than ignore this and succeed to a predictable resolution, I wish The Bozak Horde would have gone totally crazy and made it a weird fever dream scenario for the player. None of it has any explicit impact on the narrative anyway, so why err toward plausibility for a scene that so clearly isn’t?
In any case, should you manage to clear all twenty trials, you’re rewarded with a stealthy bow and arrow set to use in the proper game. You can also get a host of elementally-affected special arrows for your bow, but picking those up required another vicious assault at the trials, which, no thanks. I didn’t want to do any of that again.
I didn’t want to do any of that again. Isn’t that a terrible thing to say when walking away from a game? There are certainly parts of every game where you’re glad it’s over with, but when it’s the whole thing it’s not a profoundly positive experience. I gained a certain measure of pride after hours of incremental progress and eventual victory, but it felt like little more than a waste of time. The Bozak Horde is certainly accomplished and skillfully designed to meet a very specific demographic, I just couldn’t count myself among its ranks.
