Dying Light Reviews
Excitement was high for Techland's full Dead Island team to put a new game, and for good reason. They are clearly a group of very talented individuals that know how to create some enjoyable gameplay mechanics. In Dying Light's situation, their great mechanic, the free running movement, can be overshadowed at times by climbing frustrations. It feels as if they need to take the ideas from Dead Island and Dying Light and mesh them together into a wonderful product. Dying Light features some truly serene moments as you glide from building to building, but once that serenity halts, so does the player's enjoyment.
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.
Dying Light is a cavalcade of zombie ultra-violence that's hard to put down. The parkour can be a little sketchy at times, and it's not without its flaws, but whether you're playing alone or with a squad of Kyle Crane clones, you simply can't fail to have fun amid Harran City's zombie apocalypse. If this is how the world ends, count me in.
Although we have smashed sluggish zombies hundreds of times, this convention still has its loyal fans. Thanks to Techland's Dying Light, the list of titles with which they will spend at least a few dozen successful hours has just expanded by another position.
Review in Polish | Read full review
Although the similarities are easy to see, Dying Light is set in a darker, grittier, and more realistic world than the bright and colorful island from Dead Island. Combat lacks limb interaction, but still allows you swipe legs with baseball bats or cave skulls in with heavy items. The game peaks when you are playing with a few friends, either completing missions, challenges or just roaming to uncover all the secrets of Harran. The mission structure leaves a lot to be desired, but throwing additional players into the mix keeps the game from feeling like a chore.
Dying Light is a decent run through your modern day zombie apocalypse but its visual wizardry and affable movement system can't mask some AI snafus, lame characterization and disappointing approach to horror.
Dying Light presents a dynamic and frustrating parallel; it's quick to dazzle its audience with heaping stacks of energetic (if not wholly borrowed) content, but equally capable of coming apart under the burgeoning stress of weaving it all together. A reticence to acknowledge its own pratfalls leaves the responsibility of proper assembly to the player. If you're up to that particular challenge, Dying Light's one of the more impressive games of the modern generation.
Whether it's free running run one side of a map to the other, traversing great heights or simply making a zombies head explode with a baseball bat, Light offers you plenty of diversity to keep the game interesting.
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.
Dying Light is a great mix of survival, RPG, exploration and horror. Compared to Dead Island it loses perhaps a bit in terms of novelty and setting, but it gains on other fronts thanks to the element of parkour and a more streamlined and instantaneous crafting system.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Even with a forgettable plot and tacked-on versus multiplayer mode, Dying Light is still a solid open world experience that will satisfy any zombie enthusiast for well over 20 hours.
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.
Dying Light is basically zombies on steroids. You're quicker, the zombies are quicker, and an action-packed, adrenaline-fueled rush. It's not without faults, but it's still a good time if you're into the whole zombie thing still.
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.
Your reward, beyond cracking a smile, is at least a collectable zombie statue because the team behind Dying Light are gamers, and they know what gamers want.
Gorging on detail, starved of originality
Dying Light is a fun game on the PlayStation 4 that definitely borrows heavily from the zombie genre and although the gameplay is not new, the inclusion of Parkour definitely adds a real element of excitement. However the Parkour can also be quite frustrating as a poorly timed jump can lead to your death on more than one occasion.
With a bit more narrative care, Dying Light could've been a classic of a zombie game. Instead, it's merely a few steps in the right direction.
Slick, scary and seriously big
Dying Light is a very impressive game that's clearly had a lot of care and attention put into it.