Dying Light
Fleet-footed open-world zombie shooter Dying Light takes a few tumbles.
Like its hero, the wall-climbing, sewerspelunking, cityhopping Kyle Crane, Dying Light has its ups and downs and is all over the map. Techland, creator of the Dead Island series, takes elements from a number of games—especially the Far Cry series—and mashes them together to make its open-world first-person zombie shooter. It’s an uneven mix, bookended by a slow start and an exasperating finish, not to mention a few troubling performance issues, but in the middle lies a sweet spot that provides hours of satisfying, zombie-stomping fun.
Kyle Crane, government agent, has been sent to the city of Harran to retrieve critical data about a virus that’s turned most of the population into zombies. Immediately botching his mission and getting bitten, Crane falls in with a selfless group of survivors, contends with a warlord bent on controlling the medicine supply, and takes orders from an agency superior who would prefer to simply napalm the entire mess. Who will Crane ultimately pledge his loyalty to? I wonder.
Crane, despite being what I assumed was a top physical specimen, initially can’t run for long before slowing and gasping, and can only swing a melee weapon a few times before running out of stamina, resulting in a slow and awkward first few hours of play. Your starting weapons are limited to pipes, wrenches, small knives or sticks of wood, all of which do little damage to zombies and need frequent repair. The melee combat itself is a bit wonky: sometimes you score a staggering hit or grisly decapitation and win your fight instantly. Sometimes you just have to spam the mouse until you run out of stamina or your enemy falls. It doesn’t feel like precise aiming helps: I’ve tried very hard to land my strikes perfectly, but the harmless glancing blows and devastating skull-crushers feel randomly determined.
Weaponize yourself
Blueprints can be found or purchased, enabling you to craft upgrades to electrify pipes, sharpen or poison knives, add nails to baseball bats, and otherwise beef up your attacks, and better weapons such as swords and axes slowly begin to appear as you progress. Flipping through menus to craft gear tends to slow things down a bit, but if you don’t play in marathon stretches as I did it may not become as tiresome as it eventually felt for me. It takes hours of play to even get your hands on a gun, and the relief of finally having a firearm somewhat defuses the issue of there being only a couple of pistols, two types of rifles, and a double-barrel shotgun.
Your best weapon is Crane’s slowly improving agility, coupled with a city perfectly built for climbing and roof-running. Once you get the hang of leaping and climbing and realize that nearly everything in the city that looks like it can be climbed
can be climbed, Dying Light opens up and becomes a fun, zombie-infested playground. Techland has done a great job with the running, jumping, climbing and clambering: zipping up the sides of buildings, sprinting across rooftops, and dodging and dashing through the crowded streets becomes real fun, an instinctive and exciting way to travel.
Skill points are doled out slowly and individually as you play and there’s lots to spend them on. The vaulting skill is a useful one: you can plant your foot right on a zombie’s face and launch yourself over it, leaving it in the dust. A related skill stuns your targets as you leap off them, so you can land, turn, and bash your wobbling enemy’s skull in. A fun, flying, two-footed kick can stagger enemies or knock them off perches, and a sliding kick can shatter a zed’s legs. Despite finishing the main story I’ve still only unlocked about half the skills, and uber-skills such as stealth kills and the ability to use a grappling hook come very late in the game. The result is a well-paced, gradual increase in skills and a character who markedly improves but never feels like some sort demigod placed on Earth to smite zombies.
The undead come in a few flavors. Mostly, they’re slow, shambling types, clogging the surface streets and bridges, lurking in buildings
and alleys, and occasionally staggering around on rooftops, providing amusement as they flop off ledges or over balconies while mindlessly trying to follow you. There are also specials: huge, durable brutes who swing clubs or hurl hunks of concrete, spitters who barf slime from a distance, bloated blobs who scream and explode, and a handful of freshly-infected citizens who haven’t lost their mobility and can still sprint and climb. Distracting them, rather than fighting them, is often the best move: firecrackers will work for the few important seconds needed to pick a lock (a Skyrim- style minigame) or force a door, and the city is littered with other traps, such as cars rigged to explode and puddles of water that can be electrified. The zombies’ attraction to noise is a double-edged sword, however, as it can draw an overwhelming crowd.
When night falls, the zombie game changes entirely. A new breed, the Volatiles, appears, and suddenly Crane is no longer the fastest thing on two legs. Volatiles prowl the pitch-black city, and if you wander into their vision cones they pursue you at a lightning pace while screeching to attract other zombies. A single stumble usually results in a quick and brutal death. The difference between day and nighttime in Harran is remarkable, and I always find the approach of night to be genuinely panic-inducing as I sprint for the nearest safe zone. You’re occasionally forced to carry out missions at night, but otherwise you can advance the clock to morning by sleeping in a bed.
Bright frights, big city
Harran itself is peppered with stuff to do, much of it familiar from other open-world games. In addition to lengthy story missions, there are multipart sidequests, looting and scavenging expeditions, random encounters with hostile thugs or boss zombies, airdrop recoveries, citizen rescues, collectibles, safehouses to secure, and a few timed challenges. It’s all standard openworld fare and easily ignored when you’re headed to a mission, but if you’re just out for a run you’ll always find something happening nearby.
The story itself is a bit of a clunker. Crane, supposedly torn between his loyalties, grapples unconvincingly with his conscience despite very obviously being a complete Boy Scout. The characters are familiar and forgettable: the reckless kid, the reluctant leader, the soullessly pragmatic government agent, and an assortment of helpless or nefarious NPCs. The evil boss executes his henchman for minor infractions and taunts you over loudspeakers as you infiltrate his headquarters. At one point, after you slip from his clutches because he wanted to deliver yet another monologue instead of just killing you, he even raises his face to the sky and howls “Craaaaaaane!”
You can skip cutscenes and speed up conversations by tapping the spacebar, but Dying Light still commits a series of my personal gaming no-nos. I was stripped of all my weapons and dropped into an arena not once but twice. There’s no manual save or quick save, only checkpoints, and these were mostly absent for the final story mission in a cheap attempt to make it more challenging. A lengthy dream/ hallucination sequence, shamelessly ripped from Dishonored’s Outsider interludes, slowed my movement to a crawl to force me to listen to some truly terrible voiceovers. Finally, I had to engage in a stupid QTEbased knife fight with a boss when I had guns, grenades and Molotov cocktails stuffed in my pants.
I played a couple of hours of co-op—which allows friends to drop in and out of each others’ games, team up for missions, engage in competitive challenges, or just run around and bash zombies together. It was fun, though my co-op partner and I both experienced very heavy lag at times. I also tried Be The Zombie mode, which pits a group of survivors against a player-controlled uber-zombie stalking them through the city, but it just felt like a halfbaked version of Left 4 Dead.
Lag was hardly the only technical problem. I experienced framerate dips as well as issues in cutscenes. When a scripted scene or a conversation with a character began, the visuals would completely freeze, sometimes for as long as 15 seconds. Then the audio would freeze while the visuals struggled to catch up. I eventually found that simply turning off depth of field fixed it, though I have no idea why. If you’re on the fence about buying this, you may want to hold off to see if patches make any significant improvements.
When it wasn’t tripping over its own feet, I enjoyed Dying Light. Over the three consecutive days spent playing it almost constantly, I typically came away having had a pretty good time. There are frustrations here, but there’s also an exciting movement system and a healthy if familiar list of activities for you to engage in.
Suddenly Crane is no longer the fastest thing on two legs