Dying Light (PS4 Review)

(All screenshots in this review have been captured from the PS4)

Dying Light was a pleasant surprise given the foreboding sentiment it telegraphed with its lack of a review embargo. Usually that's a telltale sign of a bad game. What we got instead was an intriguing open world game that despite some flaws does a few things that I found worth checking out. While I find that the zombie theme has been nearly picked clean in video games over the past years, it was shocking that Dying Light managed to introduce a level of nuance I didn't expect. It introduces some believable zombie apocalyptic scenarios that I've yet to see handled with the same level of attention. I mean sure, The Walking Dead series handles some interesting scenarios, but Dying Light offers a perspective that feels better suited for a situation so horrifying. Games often run the misfortune of casting aside a lot of the things that make a zombie apocalypse so scary. Dying Light isn’t by any stretch a game that reinvents the wheel or makes me want more zombie games, it just handles it with an unexpected amount of care.

The parkour mobility is both awesome and frustrating. There are times when it works exactly as intended and you’re very glad that it does, but when it doesn’t it’s infuriating. With more freedom to climb the environment Dying Light runs into the problem of occasionally putting up exceptions where it doesn’t make sense. You’ll find some objects are simply unclimbable even though you swear that they can be climbed. Or even things like being unable to shift around corners while hanging onto a ledge. It can be a bummer, but otherwise the system works well enough. One thing that I found pretty bizarre was how difficult is was to climb down environments as opposed to climb up. The addition of a “hang to ledge” feature would’ve made a world of difference, but there are methods to get down quickly and unharmed. They can just be occasionally hard to find.

There are some things that just feel right about Dying Light from its limitations. While the game is based around a parkour system your stamina is limited. Climbing takes time, falling can cause staggering and immense damage, and you can’t run forever. Also, your character begins quite weak, only managing to salvage some planks and pipes from the city streets. Eventually those weapons break if they’re brandished frequently enough, and you’ll find that killing even the weakest and slowest of undead to take several hits before they’re bested. Considering the amount of hits you have to get in to kill a single zombie and the scenarios often involving far more than one enemy at a time, fighting sounds like a fool’s errand. But don’t worry, you’ll get better, because Dying Light introduces a similar leveling system to Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in that every time you perform an action (climbing, killing, jumping from rooftop to rooftop) you’ll gain experience attributed to that action. Oblivion was abysmal in implementing this kind of system because the total of categories you could level up was somewhere in the 20’s. Dying Light reduces them to three: survival, combat, and agility. As you garner more experience in each skill you’ll gain access to perks that will increase the level of tricks and tools that you have at your disposal - but in the beginning, you’ll need to scavenge and scrape by in the city slums to improve your chances of surviving.

Ultimately that creates a series of situations that will leave players considering the best way to tackle a scenario that seems unfavorable while learning to get around the game and accomplish quests unharmed. If there’s a shop you need to get into and there’s twenty undead right outside the shutter, you need to consider how you’ll get in there, open the shutter, grab the necessary items, and get out without them swarming you. What if entering the store triggers a security alarm? Suddenly a slow and stupid series of zombies becomes a problem, and that problem can be panic-inducing.

Outside of the slower zombies are a few varieties that include brutish undead, faster and more tenacious undead, and the nocturnal volatiles which are far more of a problem. Dying Light works entirely around a progressive day and night cycle, where weaker enemies wander the streets during the day and tougher enemies are thrown into the mix once the sun sets. The onset of nighttime is an unsettling concept and it works quite well. The lighting in general is marvelous. It might not sound that interesting but watching a single line of light begin to recede while inside a building is unnerving. It’s moments like these that punctuate the experience Dying Light has crafted - small little details that you could miss if you care not to look or mind. I remember encountering one of my first runners, a female. Running zombies are recently turned and still maintain some of their mobility and coordination, so they’re far more aggressive. As she’s screaming and thrashing I hit her over the head with a wrench to gain distance. Instead of continuing to relentlessly attack until she falls, she cowers down with her hands covering her head and says, “Please don’t hurt me”. It’s this humanistic touch reminding the player that these were people and that maybe a part of them still unwillingly exists within their bodies. I found that all very well done and adding a layer of depth to their take on a doomsday pandemic.

Another thing that I found interesting was how the quests were designed. Usually in an open world game a player will visit a town, find someone that’s lost their dog or something, rescue the dog, receive some amount of experience and an item, and never see this person again. In Dying Light some of these side quests span practically the entire game parallel to the main story. One of the first quests you’ll pick up lasts for a large portion of the game, constantly calling back to it. Even the briefer quest lines seem to add a level of commitment to them that’s wildly uncommon compared to other contenders in the genre. It touches poignantly on the hardships that come with living in such a world while simultaneously making the characters more than a vein of experience to mine; hardships like how to find insulin for a suffering diabetic in a world where every pharmacy has been looted, or sheltering the minds of children from the nightmarish reality outside on the streets. The side quests follow natural progressions that I found more than just fetch quests, because they seemed to be able to add an urgency, a struggle, and a logic as well as a committed level of production to the side content.

The sad truth is that there is a point of diminishing returns that comes with the balancing of the game. Some of these experiences I touched on earlier become diluted or cease to exist once your character becomes the badass he’ll surely transition into if you play the game long enough. When you unlock enough skills and gain access to more powerful weapons, you’ll be lopping the heads off of zombies faster than you can say “Ichabod Crane”. The game really takes a hard left turn when this happens. It becomes something completely different, more hack n’ slash, and there are people that will definitely prefer it. For me the game became a lesser version of itself when the threat had transformed into pesky weeds for my electrical fire machete to cut through on a path to the next objective. There are other perks like the grappling hook that make world traversal far easier and, regrettably, less interesting. Once I got to this point I decided to bum-rush the main story and complete it. I then tried to pick it up again and had little to no desire to keep playing. It sucked me out of the game entirely. I enjoyed the change of pace for a time, but after awhile, the veneer falls off and reveals just another generic zombie game.

There’s a lot of reasons to play Dying Light. It’s got a lot of small pieces that set it apart from games that carry similar themes. It’s one of my first true surprises for the year, having all of the makings to be as generic and uninteresting as possible and surpassing those expectations by a long shot before eventually crashing and burning. I think somewhere in the design of Dying Light there was the idea that all of these parts could fit together on a functional sense, but perhaps the greatest misstep was the lack of consideration for what this would do to the experience for the individual. It’s hard to satisfy everyone, it’s just as hard to completely satisfy someone. Within that conundrum is where Dying Light finds itself trapped, rotting inside a corpse’s shell.

GRADE: B