Aside from sound, Dying Light’s other big selling point is in its title. Once players get through the game’s tutorial, the day/night cycle begins to kick in. While things are pretty easy during the day – just dealing with standard zombies and other enemies, the game takes on a completely different feel once the sun goes down. At this point, ultra powerful monsters known as Volatiles begin roaming the streets. These guys are in a completely different league compared to every other enemy in the game – with the speed to keep pace with your own parkour skills and the power to make quick work of you if they get ahold of you. Fortunately, players can take advantage of Volatiles aversion to sunlight in the form a special flashlight that emits UV rays. While this won’t outright kill your pursuers, it does will stop them dead in their tracks, allowing you a little extra breathing room. If this all sounds like a bit too much for you, you’re able to sleep at safe houses until the next morning and skip these night segments. However, those brave enough to take on the things that go bump in the night will be rewarded with double Agility and Power points for all for all of their actions, as well as big chunks of Survivor points related to how long they stay out. It’s the kind of high risk/high reward gameplay that thrill seekers will eat right up.
Best of all, the game supports cooperative multiplayer for up to four players at once. In fact, I spent almost the entire time playing with my friend, Serena. Since there are no other playable characters, everyone gets their own clone of Crane to run around with. While some may say that playing co-op undermines the horror themes of Dying Light, I find it makes the game more accessible to people who may otherwise pass over it because of those themes. It’s much more fun to run through a herd of zombies or explore an abandoned school with a buddy than sweating it out yourself. Plus, having an extra safety net and not having to restart a quest if you die is pretty helpful, too. It’s unclear if the difficulty changes at all if there are more players, though I have read that more zombies fill the streets depending on how many players are in the game. That said, it wasn’t clear to me if this was true. The streets always seemed pretty packed regardless of whether I was playing single player or co-op.
If you’re looking for some sweeping narrative about one man’s journey through this zombie-infested city, it’s kind of a mixed bag. While supporting characters like The Tower’s leader, Brecken; kinda-sorta love interest, Jade; and even the villain, Rais, are interesting, I found Crane’s relationships to them fairly unbelievable. I don’t think it would be much of a spoiler in a zombie story to say that people do start dying eventually, but I just didn’t think Crane had enough interactions with these people to elicit the reactions I got from him. Additionally, I would have liked to see the use of Zombrex– oops, I mean Antizin, the medicine that staves off the zombie infection, play a more active role in the gameplay. While bite victims apparently need an injection every day, Crane only suffers from the effects of his infection when the story calls for it. I feel that, with the day/night system built into the game, it feels like a missed opportunity to have players search for merchants selling this hot commodity, or hunt down raiders who might be hoarding it.
However, like so many contemporary Ubisoft titles of recent years, I’m not drawn to these open-world games so much for their strong writing – it’s the enormous playgrounds that players are given to do just about anything they want. Unlike similar games, being a parkour genius means that it’s incredibly easy to get around – weaving through groups of zombies with ease or climbing up and around obstacles when the streets are too dangerous. This also means that there are many ways to go about completing objectives or reaching important locations. More often than not, Serena and I would take vastly different routes to a given point – choosing either the longer, but easier land route or climbing straight up a building or simply weaving through a herd of zombies.
That said, if having the run of the city and trolling the zombie hordes isn’t enough for you, there are plenty of missions to keep you occupied. Aside from the main story, NPCs populating the game’s safe areas will ask you for help with a variety of tasks. While this side missions are related to the main story, they do allow you to meet the… shall we say… “colorful” residents of Harran. While some of the people you talk to are only concerned with helping their communities survive the plague outside their walls, others are a bit more… eccentric. From a strange man wearing a gas mask who wants you to find his knapsack of air in the river to a pair of genius brothers who think you have the intelligence of an ape, a lot of the game’s more interesting and amusing stories are told in these little snippets away from the main missions.
As I already mentioned, making noise is a big no-no in the world of Dying Light, so how are you supposed to take on the undead hordes without making a big ruckus? The solution is that melee weapons are much more important to your continued survival. Various blunt and bladed weapons are at your disposal. While you don’t start with much more than pipes or planks with nails in them, you’ll eventually find much stronger weapons like sledgehammers and pickaxes. However, you’ll need to keep an eye on the durability of these weapons and repair them as necessary. Unlike many other games, though, these weapons can only be repaired a certain number of times before they become completely useless, so you’ll want to constantly update your arsenal by visiting merchants, finding weapon boxes throughout the city or, better yet, taking them off defeated raiders. Guns are also a valid option, but, as I already mentioned, you better be prepared to make a quick escape or deal with the repercussions.
Much like Dead Island before it, players can also mod their weapons to increase their damage, durability or add elemental effects, as well as craft a variety of items to help increase their survivability. The ingredients for these items can be found while you’re out and about, or bought from merchants. Simple items, like firecrackers that will temporarily distract zombies or throwing stars that can deal damage silently from a distance, are fairly easy to find materials for, but more powerful weapon mods may require you to turn the city upside-down to find what you’re looking for. Personally, given the limited lifespan of your weapons, I didn’t find see much point in modding them too far, but it is nice to have that feature for someone who gets particularly attached to a certain baseball bat or machete.
I should point out that my computer probably wasn’t totally up to snuff to get the most out of Dying Light’s graphics, but the game still ran well, and looked great. And, by “great,” I mean, every zombie looked absolutely ghastly. Rotting flesh and disgusting growths are the order of the day, and you can really tell that the disease that has gripped these ex-people is something serious. Aside from the zombies, though, the city itself is a marvel. The game features realistic shadows as the sun makes its way across the sky, smoke rises in the distance from various fires and every NPC in the game seems to be a unique person (aside from the raiders, but their faces are covered by bandanas most of the time). The blood and gore effects were also suitably… juicy. I found it particularly interesting how, after cutting of a zombie’s head, its blood would begin to pool on the ground as it continued to bleed out. Little things like that go a long way to keeping with the immersion.
I found the game’s sounds incredibly off-putting… and that’s exactly what you want from a zombie game. It’s an incredibly desolate soundtrack, with plenty of somber tones and distant vocals during downtime. However, the music changes completely if you do something to attract Virals. At this point, the music becomes much more dire, with some incredibly threatening yells and growls out in the distance. It’s unclear if this was part of the music itself or not, but it’s an excellent signal that you better get moving lest you get run down by the sprinting horrors on the way. Don’t even get me started on the music that plays if you get caught out after dark by a Volatile. The game takes on a completely different feel at night, from the incredibly oppressive feel of sneaking around trying to not get noticed to the frantic and dangerous themes when being chased by Volatiles. Of course, the nature of the game means these tracks aren’t particularly memorable, but I greatly appreciated them for setting the scene of any given situation perfectly.
It took me a little over 20 hours to finish the game, though that was more due to the fact that I eventually started skipping side quests and just pushed through to the end of the story. If you want to take your time and really explore the game, I’m sure you could easily push through to 30 hours. I know a lot of people were disappointed by Dead Island by the end of it, but I found Dying Light an incredibly enjoyable experience, with a much more fleshed out world to explore, a more interesting story and fantastic gameplay and mechanics. If you want a more realistic take on the zombie genre, you owe it to yourself to check this out. Hell, bring a few friends along. There’s plenty of heads to smash for everyone!
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Review copy provided by the publisher and is based on the PC version.
Dying Light is available on Amazon:
