DYING LIGHT: HELLRAID —THE PRISONER
A half-decent update shackled to a shambolic DLC.
When a trailer announcing a major update for your DLC puts forward a stamina potion as a noteworthy ‘new feature’, then you’re probably a little thin on ideas. A fire potion? Sure. A frost potion? Cool! But a stamina potion? A tincture so bland that you always forget about it until it clogs up your inventory? Come on now, Techland. You’re better than this…
The stamina potion isn’t the highlight of this update to Dying Light’s dungeon-crawling Hellraid DLC— that would be the new story mode— but it is kind of apt. It speaks to the lack of imagination running through a DLC that fails to capture the appeal of its base game, or of the dungeoncrawler style it tries to emulate.
The new story mode takes place in the same dungeons as the base DLC, but sees you following the guiding voice of a wizard—the titular prisoner—who’s been shackled deep in the dungeon and requests your help. As you go about opening portcullises and popping skeleton heads from their bodies, you’ll find a couple of new weapons—a Corrupted Bow and a Bonecruncher Warhammer—that you can take back to the main game with you.
Oh, and there’s a new skeleton enemy with a shield—a complete pain in the ass to fight, and a prime exhibit showing that Dying Light was never designed as a one-on-one sword-and-shield fighting game.
The update itself isn’t terrible—it just feels like it should have been part of this DLC when it first came out, rather than ten months later. The update spruces Hellraid up slightly by improving the lighting, but its corridors and chambers, and its propensity towards neon lighting, give it the rudimentary feel of a mapmaker level from TimeSplitters 2. Its design has nothing on the base game’s city of Harran.
It also fails to address Hellraid’s clumsy overlaps with the main game. You’ll get alerts to use a ‘medkit’ when in Hellraid they’re actually healing potions, you’ll get warnings about attracting ‘Virals’ when they don’t exist in this mode, while the base-game UI with its bleeps and bloop sounds does little to bolster the already tenuous fantasy theme.
HELL NO
The frustrating thing about Hellraid is that it negates the base game’s greatest strengths: That gritty rush of parkouring through back alleys, then up onto the rooftops to escape your undead pursuers. Many of the best combat mechanics—the sliding leg breakers, the bounding over zombie heads, the look-back grenade throw while sprinting—work in the context of making enough space for yourself to get away from the hordes. Here in these dungeons, there is no escape or way to build such momentum. You’re just smashing enemies to pieces until you’re puffed out, rebuilding your stamina, then running back in.
The best I can say for Hellraid is that it’s made me long for the open skies free-running freedom of
Harran, compelling me to revisit the main game. Six years on from its original release, Dying Light feels archaic in its weapon management and inventories, but remains one of the most exhilarating zombie bashers around in large part thanks to how its parkour mechanics flow with the environment. Hellraid doesn’t have such strengths to lean on.
Credit has to be given to Techland for trying to salvage this most misguided of DLCs. With the studio presumably working full-throttle to finish Dying Light 2 after one of the most troubled developments in recent memory, it’s good to see them still paying attention to a piece of content that could easily have been brushed under the carpet.
With this DLC, and some troubling stories coming out around the development of Dying Light 2, Techland hasn’t done its reputation many favors of late. This update doesn’t change that, but it at least builds a little goodwill as the studio builds towards its biggest moment.
IT NEGATES THE BASE GAME’S GREATEST STRENGTHS