Undying Light

Dying Light is easily the best open-world zombie game I have ever played and easily the best game in the genre. Below I will illustrate why the game is so enjoyable while also mentioning some of it's negatives as well.


Story

Before delving into the gameplay mechanics and smart design choices that make Dying Light a great game, let’s first address the elephant in the room, the dull and uninspired plot. It’s undoubtedly the weakest aspect of the game, but not dreadful enough to detract from the overall experience. You assume the role of Kyle Crane, an undercover operative of the Global Relief Effort (GRE) sent to infiltrate the quarantine zone inside the fictional city of Harran, based on ancient Turkey, to recover a file stolen by Kahir “Rais” Sulieman, a political figure gone rogue that’s using it as leverage to blackmail the GRE. Ultimately, Kyle Crane must choose between completing his mission for the GRE, or helping the survivors of Harran. It is typical zombie film plot, and that would’ve been acceptable if the rest of the world Techland built wasn’t so engaging.

Nevertheless, while the plot does fall short, the side quests and NPC dialogue do a considerable amount to flesh out the world. There’s a sense of dread that fills every character you come across. For instance, multiple NPCs scattered throughout Harran, usually posted on top of buildings or in barricaded rooms, exist solely to enhance the atmosphere by providing snippets of dialogue related to the outbreak’s effect on their lives. These small touches go a long way in making the city feel real and lived in; for every piece of NPC dialogue, environmental decoration, or safe zone set up by survivors, there’s a story behind it if you so choose to pursue it.
The side quests, more intricate than simple A to B fetch quests, are also excellent in that regard, and tell better stories than the main plot. Dying Light does a great job of using these quests to explore many of the interiors throughout Harran; they give the buildings a purpose beyond being illusory establishments. Some of the areas you’ll scavenge through are police stations, hotels, and hospitals, each one painstakingly detailed with its own atmosphere. You won’t come across most of these areas during the story missions, so they will still feel fresh, tense, and exciting.

Besides the story missions and side quests, there are plenty of other challenges to be found and completed in Harran. Of course, these are just more excuses to play around in the world, which you’ll crave after you beat the main story missions and side quests. The challenges range from taking down hordes of zombies in a set amount of time, running from point A to B, delivering medicine to drop boxes around the city, etc. Basically, each challenge isolates a different part of the gameplay and forces you to use what you’ve learned. The reason why these challenges, along with the main story missions and side quests, are so much fun to play through is because the core gameplay works so well.

Gameplay & Mechanics

In a city filled with the undead, Mr. Crane’s best friends are his hand-to-hand combat ability and his impressive parkour skills. As you progress through the game you’ll slowly unlock upgrades to Crane’s arsenal of skills, turning him into an even more lethal killer. The process of unlocking new skills it built on top of an experience system in which every little thing that you do contributes to that particular skill level. Smacking a zombie in the head with a pipe adds to your fighting experience while clambering up the side of a building adds to your parkour experience. Later upgrades, like a running drop-kick or the ability to vault off of zombies, remove a lot of the difficulty that Dying Light has towards the beginning of the game, but that makes it even more enjoyable.

However, everything changes at night…
Dying Light features a day/night cycle that is a key gameplay feature. It drastically changes the way you need to play the game and changes the experience that you gain through actions. During the day, Crane is basically a walking tank. You can take on multiple zombies at once while still escaping unscathed if you play your cards right. When the sun is out the zombies are slow and almost groggy making running from them an easy task. Everything changes at night. Once the sun falls below the horizon, everything that you learned about the game changes. Instead of being a one-man wrecking crew, the zombies are now the more powerful creatures.  Zombies becoming the dominant creatures at night isn’t the only change which hides in the dark. It is during the night that Dying Light becomes a fantastic game. At night a new breed of zombies comes out from hiding. These new, even more powerful and aggressive zombies will actively seek you out, and once they find you it means almost certain death. These new zombies can climb and run just as fast as you so staying out of their line of sight, which you can see via the minimap, is of utmost importance. Yet, don’t be discouraged, you can survive during the night if you play stealthily. Sneaking around the city, trying to elude the over-powered zombies all the while gaining extra experience because of the increased difficulty in the dark is when Dying Light becomes a fantastic game. Dying Light shines at its darkest, but it also becomes incredibly scary, and you should be prepared for that.

The gameplay of Dying Light is good enough to support the entirety of the game’s mediocrity. The second-by-second gameplay of running over rooftops to slicing through a zombie with an electric blade kept me engaged throughout my time with the game.

Returning from Techland’s Dead Island series, you’ll be able to create ultimate tools for dealing out destruction to the undead. By finding blueprints that are hidden throughout the world you’ll be able to create devastatingly powerful weapons that are, for the vast majority of them, a blast to use. Some will even feature elemental modifiers like electricity or fire, but be careful as those effects can hurt you as well if you decide to walk over a zombie who is on fire or electrocuted. While the weapons are rather imaginative, don’t expect the same level of outrageousness as you saw in Dead Island. The weapons in Dying Light have a bit more believability to them, and that's a good thing.

Visuals & Audio

Though the setting of the game might be far from reality, the world that Techland has built looks very real and graphically the game still looks really good to this day. The city of Harran is crafted so meticulously and believably that I really felt as if I was running through a once-thriving city. Each building, street, block that I ran across showed signs of a once populated area that was home to many people. Clothes left on the beds, toys sprawled out on the carpet, dinner left on the tables; there are signs all over the place to show this was a home to many, many people. Each building, though assets are repeated, feels personal and unique unto itself.

Dying Light’s strongest part is arguably its audio quality. From character voices, to zombie grunts, to the sound of electricity, and even the wildlife Dying Light’s arsenal of sound and music really helps create a believable world, pulling you more into its grasp. There is nothing like hearing a zombie grunt behind you, then in a split second hear the hissing of your electrocuted knife dig into its dead skin.
Character voices, for the most part, are acted out mostly well giving the otherwise boring characters a hint of humanity. Just listening to the tone of a person’s voice will give you empathy for them, feeling their fear and dread of the world they now live in. Each voice carries a weight of depression within them making it almost impossible for you to not feel some form of connection to these citizens of Harran.
In one of the very beginning missions you’ll learn that making particularly loud noises will attract certain zombies that are faster, can climb, and are overall more deadly. So, making loud noises such as explosions or gunfire will quickly draw these creatures in resulting in your death. While that aspect of sound isn’t anything new for video games, that same principle also teaches you about sound at night. The lessons that you learned during the daytime in regards to sound are exponentially higher at night.Night, as I mentioned, turns Dying Light into a stealth game, and just as any stealth game, noise is bad. The penalty of creating loud noises at night is far greater than during the day due to the zombies that only come out to play at night making the task of staying quiet ever-more important.

Online/Co-op

Except for the beginning thirty to forty minutes of Dying Light, you can play through the entire game with up to three friends. Progression is saved only for the person who is hosting the game, but everyone will be able to take part regardless of their progress in their own game. Connecting to someone else’s game in quite easy, and while playing with a friend and random people, I rarely experienced any issues. The game loaded quickly, and there wasn’t any lag noticeable. There is also a competitive mode that allows you to play as a zombie and invade another player’s game. In “Be The Zombie” mode you take on the role of a crazy powerful zombie with the only real objective being annoying or killing the other player. This mode is quite fun in offering a new way to play the game, but the vast majority of the time the human player won’t be able to kill the zombie since it is so overpowered. I don't know if this changed or not because I haven't played in ages, but I would hope that they balanced the mode out.


Conclusion

Dying Light may not be for everyone, especially those fatigued from open world and zombie games, but there’s no denying its ambition, despite the minor problems that it suffers from. Establishing an exceptional and flexible parkour system into an open world game is always a great idea, but implementing it into a world populated with zombies is tremendous. The possibilities to cause mayhem and slaughter are only limited by your imagination; every encounter is dynamic, with the ability to carve out new routes through Harran on the fly. Frankly, it would be very difficult for me to revert back to a zombie game without this level of freedom. I wouldn’t go as far as calling Dying Light revolutionary, but it definitely revitalizes a stagnant genre with some new tricks, which I’m hoping they continue to build on with their upcoming sequel, Dying Light 2 (if it ever comes out).

I also want to add that's it's amazing how long Techland has supported this game with patches and free dlc, I don't remember any developer in recent memory going this far to support their game. It's certainly admirable and I wish more publishers and developers alike would emulate Techland in their support for their games.

My rating for this game is a solid 8.8/10.