Originally published February 2016

I'm not a huge fan of zombies. I certainly don't dislike them completely, as I have thoroughly enjoyed the classic George Romero zombie trilogy, as well as the Dawn of the Dead remake, Shaun of the Dead, and the original Resident Evil video games. However, they've blown up in popularity over the past decade for a reason that still eludes me. I've never caught that train of interest, but I am still willing to try the occasional movie or video game, so long as the rest of it seems sound. I had hopes for Dead Island a few years back, but I haven't gotten around to playing it after word of mouth deflated my interest. Dying Light, however, managed to keep my interest even after my first experience with the game was underwhelming.

The first time I touched Dying Light was on my friend's PlayStation 4. I typically prefer to play first-person games with a mouse and keyboard over a controller, especially with one focused on platforming and melee combat. I was willing to give it a shot though, since there had been games that had done those well on consoles before. However, I found this not to be the case for Dying Light.

Initial-Control Impressions

The controls and button placement were awkward and, in some ways, counterintuitive. It was also insanely difficult to survive enemy encounters with the lack of camera control. I could adjust the view with the right analog stick, but if it was too slow then I couldn't direct the running very well. If it was too fast, I would constantly miss my targets with my attacks. Plus, for some reason the enemies seemed to take forever to kill. I thought this odd. Even though it was early in the game's progression and the player's character was presumably weak, you need to fight or flee from zombies to level up and progress, so I wasn't sure how one would go about leveling up your combat abilities when you're just better off running all the time.

There were plenty of other issues I had with it at the time, but it mainly came down to the controls being my biggest problem. Which is why I was willing to accept the conflicting opinions of everyone else with whom I talked about Dying Light. The other people who had played it, or watched someone play it, told me that it was worth sticking it out. This, and the fact that I couldn't trust my experience based on the controller for a game like this, made me decide to give it the benefit of the doubt and try it again on my own computer with the latest Steam sale.

I can say that I was right to have my suspicions about my experience and they were right that I should give it a chance because I liked it a lot better once it was on my computer. If there is one bit of advice I can give in this article, it's this: if you want to play Dying Light, don't play the console version.

Traversal

Easily the greatest part of the game, Dying Light is probably the best first-person parkour simulator I've played. To my knowledge, there haven't been many other big-budget games that have attempted to integrate free-running with their gameplay outside of Brink, Mirror's Edge, Assassin's Creed, and Infamous. I haven't played Brink, but of the other two, I can safely say that Dying Light has got them beat.

Most of the time, platforming in a first-person game doesn't work. It's always been a pain due to the perspective, even with the increased control of a mouse and keyboard. Portal is a rare example of a first-person game that was fun, despite all the platforming without any parkour mechanics. The platforming of Portal still had its issues, but they were thankfully reduced by the fact that you didn't take fall damage, which is probably the main reason it worked out so well.

Regardless, first-person platforming has typically been a mechanic that developers who knew well enough have stayed clear. Maybe Techland didn't know any better, but I'm glad they embraced this idea because they seemed to understand what is necessary when it comes to making a game where the player can do the amazing grappling and acrobatics required to properly parkour all over the place. One of the big factors in accomplishing this is the leniency over what constitutes a successful jump. You can jump rather far, and so long as you're within a few "feet" of the ledge, based on your perspective, you'll be able to cling to the environment and move on without falling.

So far, I'd be willing to guess that at least 80% of what you can see in Dying Light's city can be reached by you. It speaks volumes about how crappy climbing typically has been in video games that there are countless pieces of the environment I don't expect to be able to climb in a video game, even though it would be easily usable in real life, such as an air-conditioner sticking out, or steel window bars. In Dying Light, if it looks like a ledge, chances are, you can grab it. As you level up and get more evasive abilities, the platforming only gets better and more satisfying to pull off, especially if you're running from a persistent group of zombies.

Of course, it's not perfect. I've encountered a few invisible walls that are quite annoying, and it's weird how the character has trouble climbing rock faces when he has no trouble climbing everything else. I also occasionally end up falling because I didn't manage to grab a ledge I expected to grab, but usually, there's enough other crap to grab that you can avoid the damage.

Combat

The combat, for the most part, isn't bad. First-person melee combat is also a tough nut to crack in video games. There have been some good entries in the past, like Condemned, which used some rather responsive mechanics for controllers. Even the original Dead Island, also by the developer, Techland, had the ability to adjust the controls to let you better maneuver your attacks. Techland removed that level of depth to the controls from Dying Light, but they seemed to have gotten a better grasp on first-person melee than most developers nonetheless.

The thing you're usually trying to do when fighting in Dying Light is to aim for the head. However, even with the better-designed controls, this can still be a challenge. The ability to learn how to consistently hit a zombie in its head with a melee object has been crucial and I'm still getting the hang of it. Thankfully, in my usual fashion, I took a little time before getting far enough in the story to unlock any advanced zombies, as in the first mission past the platforming tutorial. I spent a fair amount of time in that weird limbo of the game where the sun never set because it was waiting to introduce the night mechanic. While I was in tutorial purgatory, I mostly just practiced my running and fighting abilities against the weak and slow zombies—something I recommend to anyone playing Dying Light for the first time.

Learning when your character swings a weapon horizontally and vertically, as well as the reach of the weapon is not clearly explained. It has to be learned by the player from playing the game. Once I got a knack for it, I had more fun dealing with the undead than I had originally on the PS4. It allowed me to take out a single zombie in just a few swings, instead of using up the durability of the item on a zombie only to find that it was still a threat and I had been surrounded by all his friends. By the time I started dealing with the more advanced and dangerous zombies, the game's difficulty felt relatively balanced, but you definitely need to have a grasp on the controls if you want to progress.

It would have been nice if Dying Light had provided a combat tutorial that was at least as detailed and necessary as the platforming one. For those who haven't played first-person melee games, it can be difficult to learn on the fly, especially under the pressure of a thousand zombies around you. They may be catering to the pacifists by not forcing you to kill any zombies in the beginning, as combat is not as necessary as simply being good at running away, but it would still come in handy for many situations.

Hoarders

This game would be a hoarder's dream if you could physically store the stuff you find on shelves in your hideout. Unfortunately for them, it mostly just remains an icon in your inventory once you find it.

There is a ton of junk in this game for you to loot from all over the place. Loot is the big incentive in this game. The loot is upgradable and color-coded, much like any loot-based game like Diablo or Borderlands. And there is a lot of it. Quests, as well as just going out into harm's way will earn you tons of trash to line your pockets. When you're exploring, you're typically looking for garbage and objects you can use to either use as a weapon or craft into something else. You rarely have to look far or hard to find stuff, they even give you a little pulse button to highlight any materials in the area you could scavenge.

What do you do with all this trash? Craft things. Crafting is what you do with most of the garbage. I won't say that the crafting system is very involved, or even very good, but I will say it's acceptable; it's better than Rage's, and miles ahead of Dragon's Dogma's. When you craft an item, it has an arbitrary loading screen to indicate that something is happening—which really should just be instantaneous in game terms—and suddenly you have an item that is of little relation to its original ingredients. If your argument against this criticism for the arbitrary loading screen is for the realism of crafting something, explain to me how a buzzsaw blade and a string turn into a ninja star. It doesn't matter. The point is that the crafting system may not be perfect or realistic, but you are able to create a multitude of useful little items such as medkits, ninja stars, molotovs, etc. Again, this may seem like Rage's crafting system, for which I had many complaints, but it does a few things better.

Dying Light gets the crafting system right in a couple of simple ways. For one thing, the items you craft are actually useful and necessary in order to kill the zombies or the armed living, partially due to the fact that the weapons you have are insufficient at killing them quickly. Rage and Dragon's Dogma both had the same problem of having a crafting system for a game that gave you plenty of powerful weapons, ammo, and health packs. You didn't need anything else; all the other junk you could make. Crafting systems for those games were useless and served only as a distraction to the main gameplay. What you make in Dying Light is useful and necessary to survival because your weapons break over time, you have to grab new weapons, you have to upgrade these new weapons till they break, and you need the extra variety of the ninja stars and burning cocktails to cover your ass in between.

The other reason Dying Light's crafting works is something that Rage got right, but Dragon's Dogma did not. The crafting items do not take up inventory space or weight. You can hoard as much of the trash as you like. The only things you can't hoard in your backpack at a time are weapons, but there are solutions for that as well. By making the crafting items weightless and infinite, it takes some of the tedium and dread out of the crafting system. Players don't have to be concerned about backtracking to find a certain item again or running low on supplies. They can do a supply run between missions and be ready for the next go.

Mission Plan

There's a lot of progression in Dying Light and tons of experience points to gain through quests, as well as just playing the game. There are three different tech trees to go down and level up your protagonist. Two of which can be upgraded by simply jumping around and fighting enemies. You gain experience points from running and jumping over every little obstacle, and for every kick or bat swing against a zombie. It's all designed with a very clear instant-satisfaction mentality of rewarding you for every insignificant thing you do.

The third tree is upgraded by completing missions or securing supply drops. I've definitely progressed further in the parkour and combat trees more than the other, since I haven't done as many missions in the game, for a few reasons.

I'm not sure I've played a game with longer explanations as to why I need to do something on a mission. There are a lot of side-missions and challenges to do in Dying Light, so you'd think they'd speed up their explanations a little bit. Instead, every NPC that has a task for you blathers on and on about what they want from you with some super long-winded explanations and backstories to their problems. Some are even so obnoxious as to talk very slowly while they take forever to get to the point. There are no dialogue options to keep you involved in the conversation, you just have to sit there and listen to them talk about their problems. Or you can just hit the skip button and sacrifice any chances of absorbing the story, which is pretty tempting, most of the time. This, of course, translates over to the missions that are central to the story and is exacerbated.

The story takes itself way, way too seriously. It tries to break up the seriousness with a few jabs here and there that are meant to draw a laugh since all the characters are soooo clever, but it doesn't really work. It's thick with sentimentality and moments where I'm supposed to feel sad. It also tries to build up an atmosphere with the occasional survivor with a backstory. A deep and emotional backstory in this type of game would be fine if the presentation of it was better and more consistent. Dying Light tries to draw out emotions using cliché dialogue and dead-eye facial animations in between the moments you are crafting exploding ninja stars out of aerosol cans and saw blades. It tries really hard to make its story powerful, emotional, and meaningful. However, it all ends up being long-winded and laughable. The writing and the graphics simply aren't good enough to convey the emotions and complexity they're going for. I'm hoping that, as I get deeper into the game, the tone tries to become a little more playful to get around the shoddy presentation and better match the playful nature of Dying Light.

[No] More to come...

Even with all the nice things I had to say about Dying Light, time has taken its toll. Up to this point in this article, I had written everything as I played, with the expectation of doing a Late Bird review upon completion. That won't be the case, however. I am just tired of the gameplay and the why-so-serious story, so I have decided to call it quits for now. I may go back and play it again at some point and complete the game, but for now, I have totally lost the motivation to do so.

The free-running navigation in the open world is fun and responsive. It still is probably the best parkour simulator I've ever played and probably has the most competent first-person platforming in a game that I've played too. The problem stems partially from the in-game rewards you get by continuing to play Dying Light, and significantly from its ham-fisted story. While many argue that story isn't important in video games—at least, it doesn't always have to be—it is still can be an important motivator. It motivates the player to want to continue playing the game once the gameplay no longer offers new avenues of entertainment. Dying Light tries introducing new challenges and enemies as the game progresses, but the rewards are only as good as the player views them. I viewed them mostly as fruitless loot-based rewards. Every once in a while, there was something interesting or significant that it would provide you, or maybe an interesting little story to tell, but this was something of a rarity.

Dying Light is a competent game with solid platforming mechanics, despite its first-person perspective. The process of running through the city, looting it for supplies, and fending off the variety of different enemies with your crafted/upgraded arsenal can be quite satisfying, for a while. Eventually though, if you are not entertained by the story or side-missions that lay on the thick sentimentality, the reason to keep going out makes less and less sense. I only played this game on my own, but I'm willing to bet that playing this with friends or against online players helps add some fun and excitement. As for me, I've had my fill for a while.