Dying Light Reviews
In the end, I think I wanted to like Dying Light for its flashes of brilliance more than I actually liked the overall experience of it.
Parkour. Open world. Zombies. Online co-op. Crafting. Radio towers. Zombies. Collect-a-thons. Zombies. Zombies. Dying Light desperately tries to be all of the videogames in a bid to impress everybody. If only it had tried as hard to be its own thing, we'd have had an amazing horror game on our hands. Instead, we just have another indistinct jack-of-all-trades to throw on top of the ever growing pile.
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.
A very buggy attempt at recreating Dead Island with a very overwrought approach in distancing itself from the obvious inspiration. Without a massive patch, Dying Light can't really explain why it should stand out from the crowd.
It's gory as all get out and pretty intense, but you'll probably forget all that round about the 50th time you plunge to your death from a bad jump
Some will love it, others will hate it, but Dying Light is an interesting experiment at least.
It's an interesting game, and one of the handful of current-gen projects that truly feel like they wouldn't have been possible on older consoles, but Dying Light ultimately falls short of being anything other than a decent time killer.
The end result is something that feels like little more than the finished product of a well-oiled entertainment machine—a safe appeal to a mass audience. This is unfortunate since there is genuine joy to be had in simply navigating Techland's fictional city. If the same attention was paid to narrative development and visual design as has obviously gone into the player character's movement, Dying Light's world would be much more inviting.
All the energy that should've gone into giving players a good reason to want to survive in Harran went toward an uninvolving multiplayer.
Dying Light can be great, but it doesn't understand its own strengths.
Anyone who is able to look past the game's faults however will find it a rewardable zombie adventure that isn't perfect, but has plenty to do.
The parkour and risk/reward of the day/night cycle are nice features, but they aren't enough to overcome the abysmal writing or the boring, repetitive fetch quests that unnecessarily bloat this game.
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.
What's here works well enough, but it lacks soul, and if there's any motivation to continue it's only that you want to see it through - a damning indictment for any game.
With Dying Light, Techland has most certainly improved on Dead Island's melee-focused, open-world formula, but it still hasn't perfected it. Improved enemies and better navigation mean that while the journey from A to B and back again is more exciting this time around, it's a trip you'll be making far too frequently.
Dying Light isn't a bad game, it's just one that feels like it goes on a bit too long, and was too invested in the trappings of an "open world" to make itself really stand out.
Killing a bunch of zombies still has its charms in this day and age and I'll likely have nightmares about the dying light of Dying Light, but Techland's latest proves to be an uneven experience. Ultimately it's a game I appreciate for its ideas more so than its execution.
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.
This isn't a game of jump scares, but it is one of dread. When you're running from a herd of volatiles, and you look behind you and see them all chomping at your heels, there's a rush of adrenaline.
If the best time you can have with Dying Light is through avoiding the main content, maybe that says a lot about how you shouldn't be structuring an open world game.