Dying Light
Producer: WB Interactive
Release Date: January 27, 2015
Platform: PS4, Xbox One, PC
Rating: Mature
Genre: Action Role Playing
Fear of the Dark
Written by Jesse Seilhan
Zombies are this generation’s nazis. They are the default enemy type in what feels like half of the video game market, they have infiltrated all genres, and in some cases, they have literally become nazis in a few World War II games. Some games go the fun and cheesy route, like Lollipop Chainsaw, and for others, it’s all business, like Resident Evil, but developer Techland attempts to blur those lines, with games like 2011’s Dead Island and this year’s Dying Light. With the former, the team introduced survival horror aspects into a semi-over the top environment, but missed the mark mostly due to graphical limitations and a half-baked sandbox to play in. But with Dying Light, Techland has nearly realized the ultimate zombie hybrid they’ve been working toward for half a decade. By all accounts, this is a competent, fun, and sprawling semi-open-world that learns from its predecessor’s mistakes. Ironically, the one piece missing is the thing zombies crave most of all…brains!
Dying Light takes place in a fictional Middle Eastern town of Harran, one that has been overrun with the living dead. Your character, Kyle Crane, is sent in to recover documents from a mad man who has become a bit of a warlord in this despotic city. After your initial crash landing, you’re taken in by the “good” guys, a group of survivors holed up in a skyscraper that start to trust you after you do a million fetch quests for them. Then you go do a ton of fetch quests for the bad guy, and random people, leveling up along the way to turn into a faster, stronger, more elite zombie slayer.
The real joy is the kind you create on your own, as you explore and uncover all the craziness the city has to offer. From safe houses to radio towers, there is plenty to see and do, as long as you don’t mind bashing some skulls on the way there. The skull bashing is a ton of fun, as the variety of weapons and modifications makes for some outstanding combat moments. From decapitations and brutal attacks to elemental traps and thrown objects, the amount of destruction at your fingertips is sometimes overwhelming. Techland balanced that endless joy by giving each weapon its own stamina meter, destroying it after prolong use. Repair kits help restore these items to their full glory, but only for a limited number of times. That’s not too bad, as the game is filled with tons of objects to use and create, but it really sucks when an amazing weapon you’ve grown attached to literally becomes worthless trash after a while. The variety of zombies is typical for this type of game, from the slow shamblers to the big brutes, mixed with super-fast intense undead and long-range spitters; no new ground is being broken on the zombie dichotomy here.
It was a good omen when this game was delayed, because if it launched among the flurry of holiday titles, it would have been passed over and written off as fodder. But with a few more months to bake in the goodness, Dying Light stands out as one of the best new titles of 2015. It’s not perfect, but it’s damn fun and really rewards players for sticking with it. It lifts the “do it and improve it” XP system of games like Fallout and Far Cry, unlocking some awesome skill tree perks for fighting, running, or just plain surviving. This tiered system allows people to really make a personal journey through the broken streets of Harran and come out feeling like a champion, even if the characters they met along the way really didn’t matter. Even with the narrative black hole, the game is built well enough to sustain dozens of hours of gameplay that becomes more fun every time you pick up a controller.