Dying Light

Let’s be honest; Dead Island was one janky game. The ‘charm’ of said jankiness could only last for so long, and certainly its finale and memorably bad final boss was not worth slogging through the combat that consisted mainly of the player character waving their noodle arm all over the place. Obvious hesitation came when Dying Light was released, but word of the fun parkour and no goofy combat slowly sold me on making the purchase. The big question on my mind as the game played through the opening cinematic was “Did Techland improve upon their earlier mistakes in Dead Island?” The answer at first was generally yes, but three quarters of my way into it, I began to regret my full price purchase.

The big selling points of Dying Light are the improved combat, parkour and partial RPG system. When I say ‘improved’, I mean you no longer have to aim your weapon swings in the cardinal directions, simply attacking in left and right arcs gets the job done just fine. This may sound minor, but good lord when you have a mob of the undead shambling towards you, being able to do wide swings back and forth to remove heads and send zombies tumbling makes things far more manageable, and there’s no danger of ruining it with an accidental uppercut.Marching down a street while severing limbs and decapitating zombies is now far more enjoyable and oddly therapeutic, but about three or so hours into the game, I realized that the combat is perhaps too improved to the point I seldom had to repair weapons or cycle them out once I had a nice enough weapon that had been modified. Blueprints for weapon modifications return from Dead Island, and they’re the expected fare: Flaming, explosive, toxic and so on, with the added oddities of elemental improvised explosive traps and shields that can repel frontal assault. This is all well and nice for giving you choices for taking on zombies and humans alike, but once you find a strong enough weapon from a shop or chest, modifications feel like a moot point since three or four swings will drop most enemies unless they’re a mini-boss. Despite the game telling the player that combat can be avoided, it eventually loses all its strategic elements and any requirements for brains once you find a powerful enough hammer to cave in skulls left and right as you march down the street, being halted by the occasional special zombie types (for example, the speedy Infected from Dead Island make a return now known as Virals who are thankfully more manageable, but they still become quite an annoyance later in the game).

While the combat is improved yet ultimately brainless, the addition of parkour helps keep the game (literally) moving and provides legitimate fun in hopping across rooftops and using the environment as an escape or to your advantage in combat. Kyle Crane (the protagonist) at first can hardly pull himself over a fence without sounding like he needs a breather, but once enough skill points are gained, moving around the city can be more fun than bopping zombies. Why risk being surrounded when you can climb onto an awning, leap to a balcony then climb onto a roof where you can use a gun or throwing knives? Even still, why not just use your elevated position to skip all that nonsense and just roof run your way to your destination? Once you understand Kyle’s movements and limitations, controlling him in such dexterous ways feels rewarding and exciting,especially once you obtain the grappling hook way later in the agility skill tree… The only immediate problems is when you first start the game and Kyle feels sluggish, and the times when movement commands outright fail. While rare in occurrence, I’ve had instances where Kyleshould grab a ledge to pull himself up but decides not to only to plummet fifty feet and become a pancake, or taking hold of a pipe or ladder is ignored to again fall a frightening distance and lose precious experience because of it. This makes some of the climbing puzzles more hazardous than they’re worth, because if one hiccup occurs when trying to scale a structure, Kyle goes for a swan dive to solid ground with little chance of recovery.

The RPG system is threefold: Agility experience, combat experience and survivor experience which is gained from rescuing people, completing quests, completing mini-encounters that randomly pop up like delivering a supply drop and etc. Agility and combat is obvious in what they entail; agility gives Kyle better mobility, evasion and stamina, while combat gives him more maneuvers, options in fights and higher health. Survivor experience nets the player discounts at stores, better crafting options, more traps and tools and so on. Gaining the former two types of experience is as easy as doing those actions in the game world. Climb a fence? Get some exp! Decapitate a foe? Get exp! Scale a building? Get a lot of exp! While this does mean you can level grind relatively easily, the fact that the player doesn’t have to consciously be aware of their experience gain makes gaining a level a pleasant surprise that is bound to occur as they wander around and get into random fights. Extra experience can be awarded from finding flags on top of challenging structures or completing mini-games revolving around agility or combat, the difficulty of which lies not within the challenge, but the lack of a quick restart option if you fail. Instead you’re loaded back into the main world to be berated (which cannot be skipped, what luck!) before you can accept the mini-game again to be loaded back into that instance. Leveling becomes even easier when night falls, as exploring under the cover of darkness merits vastly improved experience gain, though there are the incredibly dangerous Volatiles creeping about that can and will wreck you in a heartbeat. These zombies will give intense chase once alerted, and fighting them toe to toe is a major challenge unless the environment and your tools are used effectively… Oh, and their leaping tackle which can result in an instant death is broken. The range it has is unfairly deceiving, and Kyle can get pinned despite clearly standing out of the way. What is fair however is that during quests that have you going to locations or gathering items at night, Volatile spawn rates decrease to manageable levels to avoid a panicked rush to safety because a Volatile decided to turn around at the silliest possible time.

So far Dying Light sounds quite alright on the outside, but the thing that cripples it to the point of a legitimate desire to quit is its story, or I should say its attempts to have a story. Organization that comes off as good but ends up backstabbing Kyle and is actually super evil? Check. Criminal mastermind who spouts intellectual bullshit and is horribly hypocritical? Check. Characters that end up dying yet you have no emotional attachment to due to being poorly fleshed out and at times highly unlikable? Check. A story arc surrounding the disease which caused the undead outbreak in the first place ends up being trivialized and is apparently cured by macguffin documents? Check! A final boss which ends up being just a godforsaken quick time event which brings practically no closure when it’s time for the credits to roll? Sigh. Any emotional investment became lost as the story devolved into a hole-ridden, effortless mess, and I began to wish eternal destruction upon who/whatever else would cause the story to become derailed with another unexpected development. At one point Kyle has to set off a controlled explosion to signal the outside world that the citizens aren’t all zombies. Literally seconds later, a series of jets destroy the building to put a giant middle finger in your face for no reason other than to piss you off, and render all the work you just did setting it up for naught. There’s also a dream-like sequence that feels so out of place and poorly executed that it felt like a prank, one that fails so badly that it’s offensive. So many tropes and shortcuts are used to communicate the plot that I didn’t hate the antagonists for being bad, but because I had already seen these archetypes before and done better. It doesn’t help when progressing through the game is hampered by bloody Bomber zombies (who self-destruct in close proximity, often resulting in a one-hit death) who are deviously positioned around corners or in unfair angles to kill you and swipe precious experience in the process.

Once the credits ended for Dying Light, the bitter conclusion that was beyond disappointing left me with no desire to dabble in any of the multiplayer components, let alone play the game ever again. While it’s certainly an improvement over Dead Island, the lack of balance and pacing to combat progression and the utterly awful storyline eventually makes getting to the conclusion of Dying Light feel like a chore, one which is by no means worth it. I cannot recommend Dying Light to anyone other than those who want more Dead Island but want it to control and play better. Beyond that, this poorly written experience is one that can be skipped.