Dying Light - A Turn of Opinion?

Allow me to begin by saying I have, for the most part, grown tired of the zombie genre in the video game industry. These are all the games I've played that sport the zombie trend;

• Resident Evil
• Resident Evil 4
• Resident Evil 5
• House of the Dead
• Dead Rising 1 & 2
• Call of Duty World at War's Nazi Zombies
• Call of Duty Black Ops' Nazi Zombies
• Black Ops II Nazi Zombies
• Sniper Elite Nazi Zombie Army
• Dead Island
• Left 4 Dead 1 & 2
• Zombie Apocalypse 1 & 2
• Plants vs. Zombies (it counts)
• Dead Nation
• Forbidden Siren 1, 2 & Blood Curse
• Silent Hill
• Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare

I'm sure I've missed a small few more. But these are the games I've remembered.

Dead Island was the latest iteration of a zombie survival game I bought and played (back in 2012) where I said "I'm sick of this genre" and traded it in.

Dead Island promotional poster

And I didn't pay much attention to a zombie game since then. The Last of Us is ignorantly and blindly referred to as another zombie game, but it is foreshadowed by three facts;

• It has a fantastic, gripping story
• It has amazing, solid gameplay (thanks again, Naughty Dog!)
• And they aren't technically zombies, they are infected by a virus which actually exists! (only it affects plants in real life, not humans...but What If??, et voilà, The Last of Us)

So I have not included it as a true zombie game which I have played.

I have seen so many zombie games emerge since I switched myself away from the genre, such as

• DayZ (A stand-alone ArmA 3 conversion)
• H1Z1 (An MMO Zombie Survival game)
• TellTale's The Walking Dead (this is prone to be an exception for me as it's not a survival horror in it's true sense, look it up)
• The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct (Was received terribly)
• Deadlight (A side-scrolling zombie title)

These are games I paid little-to-no attention to.

Then Dying Light was released in January of 2015. At first I dismissed it as another zombie game. I was even more switched off at the fact that it was made by the same developers that made Dead Island, and that it played relatively similar, so I didn't care for it.

However, I saw the game being mentioned a few times on forums and I decided to do bits of research. Yeah, it was open-world and it had action mechanics that were almost identical to Dead Island (Customizing your melee weapons) but that was all it seemed to be: another zombie game like Dead Island only set somewhere else. I didn't find anything interesting about it, I also didn't understand why they would make a game that would near-identically resemble another game they already made. So I jumped back on the fence again and leaned away.

Six months later I can't count how many times I heard Dying Light being mention on forums, social media and other websites throughout the first half of the year. I impulsively bought it mid-July (I was so broke at the time I'm still paying money back for the game in installments :P)

So a few hours in and I finally see the difference between Dying Light and Dead Island, and why Dying Light is considered to be miles better than Dead Island as a zombie survival horror.. Because Dying Light is actually a survival horror. Compared to Dead Island, in which just brainlessly hacking at zombies with customized melee weapons was the fun factor (you can still do that in Dying Light, but it's not recommended as much), Dying Light encourages you to SURVIVE! There are some similarities to other games;

• Dead Island is the obvious one, as it implements very similar combat mechanics, with the inclusion of guns (although the guns aren't really handled all that well in the game, and early on they are pretty-much unseen) and the ability to free-roam the environment and craft your own customized weapon.
• Far Cry is also a game that comes to mind when it comes to scaling radio towers and then using the zip-line to get back to ground-level quicker and there are also loads of loot chests that are discovered similarly to Far Cry. Let's not forget there are plants and herbs you can pick throughout the game's world, also a known Far Cry mechanic.
• The parkour free-running was clearly borrowed from Mirror's Edge as I can't think of any other first-person game that implemented the mechanic as famously as that game did.
• And the behaviour of building scaling is similar to Assassin's Creed

Don't allow these similarities to take sway your head away from it, though, as, much to my surprise, this game implements some of the best solid gameplay of any zombie game I have played in the last decade and a half.

Night-Time is a lot more scarier than Day-Time, naturally.

With Dying Light's solid weapon combat comes a feature many may have seen in plenty of open world games these days, and that's the day/night cycle. But as many games have this, most of them don't provide much difference as to how you play the game. And that's where this game sets itself apart from it's genre peers. By day, zombies will aimlessly wander the game's world, attacking you on site as you can expect. But by night, the game becomes more challenging. The world will be infested by unique types of zombies that only appear after dusk, and come equipped by a field-of-view cone in the mini-map, similar to what you see in Metal Gear Solid and the Driver series. The game's world is essentially more dangerous, and encourages you to walk on eggshells around enemies. With this, the game also ups the ante by giving you double the XP when night-time occurs, giving you more incentive to play the game in the dark more often, whilst making it extra challenging. This is very dynamic, and a welcome feature, as it will force you to change up your approach, and adjust your tactics as the pace of the game will differ, completely.

With all these good points come the bad. And this game has a few of them, but are more directed towards the game's narrative, rather than the gameplay, as from what I've played, the gameplay seems fairly solid.

The game's story is heavily clichéd. You can see a few scenes coming as you watch the game's point-of-view cutscenes and afterwards you shout "I knew that was going to happen!". Dying Light also suffers from one of the most horrible type of missions you can think of - fetch quests, and there are plenty of fetch quests. Even the main protagonist gets impatient, as if the voice-actor knew the frustration of it when he lent his voice. The characters are somewhat forgettable, save for two or three of them.

And, although by this blog I'm barely past the halfway stage, the characters in the game almost behave as if the zombies are an afterthought. It's as if they aren't aware that they exist. There have been a few characters that have referenced certain types of zombies that you encounter - one set of missions will focus on finding out the identity of particular zombie but as far as I've seen, that's all that has happened. You're doing missions for people that don't seem to give two shits about whether you live or die, they just want the jobs done. But like I said, I haven't seen enough of the game's story to have that as a final opinion, so call it a preliminary opinion as of this point.

If you're buying this game just for the story, or to see characters develop, you won't find it here. This game obviously focuses on the gameplay, first and foremost.

Multiplayer is ever-so-present in this game as well. It doesn't force you into it, but it has been regarded as the mass-preferred way to play, as you can team up with 3 other players to play the same game as you, or join other players' games and tackle the campaign with them. You can pretty much do what you like, but I would say if multiplayer is your thing, play it with friends. It would seem more fun that way than playing with random strangers. Personally, I don't particularly care for the multiplayer - I do fine on my own and I don't really have any friends that actively play the same games as me. Boo hoo :'(

As far as technical jargon goes, the game holds a pretty solid 30 frames-per-second on the Xbox One version, save for a few instances where the frames drop during intense action (personally, frames don't bother me) and there have been a few cases of screen tear, but only if you look for it. Otherwise it's pretty unnoticeable. Graphically, the game looks gorgeous. Although I've recently developed a dislike for motion blurring and film-grain, and all those other camera-lens effects, and this game has them heavily embedded into the console version. It would be nice to have the option to remove those effects but I can deal with it if I have no choice in the matter (my PC wouldn't be able to handle this game for now). Since playing Dying Light, I have had one or two sensations of nausea while playing but it goes away quick. The game's highly detailed graphics, plus the 30 frames, plus the slightly zoomed-in field of view, and the fast movement that you will be frequently doing during free-running, is enough to cause anyone that suffers motion sickness easily to feel ill. But they have disclaimers on each console for that kind of thing, including photosensitive epilepsy so I'm not going to develop excuses. It is a bit nauseating to play if you haven't played any game like this before or you're just flat-out sensitive to it, but I digress.

Whether it's on your own or with others, this game is a blast to play. It's a lot better than I thought and it certainly is a very creepy game. It's the first time in a long time where I've been scared of a zombie in a video game. It's fun, disturbing, scary, solid and challenging.

Any zombie fans out there will obviously buy this - it's a no-brainer. But for anyone on the fence about the zombie genre, or are like me and got sick of it, I encourage you to get this game. It redeemed my opinion, anyway.

If I was to give this a score I would give it an 7/10, with the only cons being the story and the repetitive missions. The gameplay is enough to make it a must-buy. So go out and buy it!

Good Night
Good Luck

-David 'Gamer Bhoy' Cameron.