Dying Interest
Three and a half years ago, an unproven developer by the name of Techland unleashed a fun but ultimately buggy co-operative zombie game that was more about campy fun than the grim realities of a world ravaged by the undead. Dead Island was a different game than its initial trailer had indicated, depicting a family turned infected menace in reverse. The morose nature of that trailer is ultimately what the developer's new game, Dying Light, is trying to accomplish here. And while Techland achieves the dramatic aesthetic here, with far less bugs, the end result is a predictable tale that shows its fatigue well before the end credits roll.
The story of Dying Light follows Kyle Crane, a reluctant spy of a nefarious company called the GRE. His goal is to infiltrate the city of Harran and bring back a file which is being held captive by the generic warlord Rais, a dead ringer for Far Cry's antagonist. The comparison is apt, since Dying Light plays and acts like all of the great modern open-world games: its post-society world mirrors the decay and desperation of the Fallout series, and the new "parkour" mechanic is nipped right out of Assassin's Creed or Shadow of Mordor. But mainly this is all window dressing to the loop of game play Dying Light asks of you for thirty hours or so - to find a quest and then complete it in the same series of mundane ways.
It must be said though, the first person climbing, while shaky at first, ultimately becomes second-nature once the game gets going. After an awkward tutorial that doesn't really convey the mechanic all that well, Crane is able to run and jump from rooftop to rooftop, balcony to window, pipe to ladder, with relative ease. The use of the R1 trigger as your means of jumping and attaching are puzzling considering the game's use of the X button (an object marker), but it works fine nonetheless.
The game's other key addition is in direct reference to the title - night time is a whole different game in Dying Light. Daytime means slow walker zombies and at worst the Virals (think 28 Days Later), while the evening holds the danger of the Volatiles. The Volatiles, in addition to the pitch black the night offers, turns Dying Light into a stealth driven affair, where being seen means a run for your life to the nearest safe house. It is invariably a game changer, turning the game into a tense, stealth adventure in which crouching is preferable to recklessly shambling above houses. Only certain missions are available during the night, though none of them required for Clear Path campaign play. Begging the question "why would I play this during the incredibly more difficult night time," Dying Light rewards the risky endeavor by giving the player double the experience during the witching hours.
Like Dead Island, weapons are frail but can be easily repaired through the use of metal objects. Fun blueprints like Spiked Collar turn a wooden baseball bat into a nail bed of doom for your adversaries. Elemental effects can be added too, such as electricity or freeze. The melee combat is clunky and at first difficult considering your lack of weaponry, but given enough time becomes satisfying as slow motion kills really hone in on the brutality of it all. Guns are brought in later on, but don't ever confuse this game for a shooter. Rifles and pistols are used only as last resort when you're outnumbered in close quarters.
Continuing with the comparisons to Bethesda games, doing certain activities means leveling up the same activities. Skill tries comprise of power, agility, and survivor, with power leveling in accordance with combat, agility with running and climbing, and survivor for completing missions. And as mentioned earlier, the game performs admirably in comparison to the previous Techland game, although there are a few moments in which the framerate cannot handle all the onscreen chaos. One particular story mission involving mass amounts of fire, human enemies and zombies slowed the experience down to a pitiful chug.
Boring isn't the right word, but Dying Light does inevitably wear out its welcome well before the end of the game. There's plenty of side missions to do in between the story, but all of it requires nothing more than running errands for all the citizens of Harran. Switching up what time of day you play does significantly alter the experience, but ultimately rewards little payoff other than more experience. And this is a long game, clocking in at around 20-25 hours if you do the bare minimum of side content. The camp of Dead Island may be gone, and even replaced with a more playable game with a few new tricks, but sometimes the serious and the mundane just isn't fit for video games.
