Dying Light Reviews
As a follow up to Dead Island, Dying Light represents an improvement on the technical front, but has lost some of its knockabout charm in the process. It shares its predecessors pace and shape, as things start on a relative high as you explore into the game's systems, but then tail off the hours tick by. Dying Light mixes up Techland's own recipe to enjoyable effect, but can't fully disguise its regurgitated flavour.
High-speed parkour and gruesome zombie massacres make Dying Light a blast, even if the story's just okay.
Despite a clunky story and technical performance, there's a lot of fun to be found in dashing and dodging through a zombie-filled city.
'Dying Light' hides all of its best gameplay behind a frustratingly steep learning curve and boring fetch quests, but shows potential once players dig a little deeper.
Dying Light parades its lack of invention and frustrates with some unrewarding missions, but it barely matters: there's an immediate joy in exploring this compelling concrete playground of undead, explosions, and bins.
Tense and full of adrenaline-fueled moments, Dying Light is a blast
Dying Light too often loses track of what it's best at
Dying Light has plenty of rewards to offer as long as you're willing to overlook its frustrations.
A thrilling zombie adventure that makes me remember what I love about Dead Island and forget what I hated.
Techland's latest title is by no means perfect, nor is it one of the best zombie games, but it's solid enough to warrant a playthrough. Even though its story will leave most players unsatisfied and its open-world design is questionable at best, its phenomenal side stories and often entertaining gameplay will prevent distaste.
Like the best open world games, it's a factory for anecdotes and you'll create plenty of gems in its company. That's worth celebrating, no matter how derivative the various machines in that factory might be.
What a good game. It's really good. It's just so easy to pick up and get lost in for a few hours at a time. You can credit Techland for that success because it picked a few ideas and really got them right. The zombie-infested world is pretty and dangerous, and your character is fun to control. On top of that, the mechanics and the systems keep the core from getting boring.
Dying Light keeps the best bits of Dead Island, forgets to get rid of the bad, but makes up for it with awesome parkour and a tense day/night dynamic.
Despite its flaws, it's an enjoyable and still fresh experience, more than anything seen across the beautiful Middle East-inspired Harran that promises plenty to do, sights to see, and missions to complete.
Funny and gimmicky but hardly revolutionary. That would be the perfect definition of Dying Light, which seems to settle for only parkour to justify a twist on the zombie video game genre.
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Although a sound game, Dying Light just falls short of greatness. Compared to its predecessors it looks stunning and has picked up a raft of new and interesting ideas. Several hours in, however, and a familiar sense of fatigue will inevitably set in. Unless roaming Harran with friends in tow, Dying Light isn't one of those games you can comfortably sit and play for hours on end. Zombie enthusiasts are still in for a treat though, as well as anyone looking for an unconventional first person action game.
Unfortunately, Techland is still unable to deliver a story worth telling. I didn't feel any emotional attachment to any of the characters, nor did I care if they ended up surviving or not. The addition of an overall weapon durability was also something I could have done without as I prefer to cut down my enemies without having to worry whether or not my weapons will disintegrate in my hands.
Fans of zombie survival, open worlds, and first-person shooters will find things to enjoy in Dying Light, but it's a rough ride. The contextual movement and realistic time progression suggest that Techland wants to immerse you in Harran's apocalyptic plight, but the game's realism takes a hit at almost every turn whether it's the graphics, the enemy AI, or the mannequin-like demeanor of the souls you'll attempt to save. Jumping around and smacking zombies is fun, but we're hoping whatever comes next focuses more on realistic living people than realistic dead ones.
The zombie is the perfect antagonist for this kind of interactive delusion, always justifying new abandonments by threatening another victim, a cycle which goes on until the entire world has been infected and stands in the streets, needed by no one, and with nothing left to want.
A small improvement on Dead Island, but there's still barely anything that either works as well as advertised or is isn't just stolen wholesale from other, better, games.