GamesRadar+ Verdict
Dying Light parades its lack of inventওion 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.
Pros
- +
Detailed city to explore
- +
Pleasing parkour
- +
Hitting zombies with planks
Cons
- -
Unrewarding mission structure
- -
Flimsy characters
- -
Frustrating difficulty spikes
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“I’m not a leader,” shouts Brecken, our leader. “I’m a goddamn parkour instructor!” This profound statement neatly summarises Dying Light. When it aims for high drama, it comes off like a George Romero soap opera: think Days of the Dead of Our Lives. When it gets on with the less serious business of running, climbing and kicking zombies in their bottoms, it’s marvellous fun♛.
So it’s a B movie, then. Plot holes are plugged with bloodied gauze. Characters are defined by their deaths. That’s not a bad thing, even though I probably made it sound that way. It just means that Dying Light is best when you’re e♕xperiencing it at your own pace: scaling tall things just because they’re there, delivering babies for random strangers and eating candy from bins.
Perhaps because of this, the story missions are the weakest part. Too many end in explicit failure, such as chasing airdrops for long-gone loot, or routine chores doomed to end in betrayal. It’s intended as a way of keeping you engaged; instead, much like staring at the night sky or counting my Twitter followers, it made me feel inconsequential. One especially wretched objective had me appeasing a disturbed man’s mother in exchange for medicine. This meant searching a DVD shop for a movie - because apparently, eveꦦn video rental can be raised from the dead - and sourcing a box of chocolates. When I deli♑vered this stuff, he still wouldn’t give me the drugs. Worse still, his mum turned out to be made of buckets and was thusly unable to truly appreciate either the movie or the chocolates. It’s one disappointing example of many, and it contributes to the nagging sense that you’d rather be out hitting the restless dead with pipes.
🧸This feeling is aggravated by some ropey characterisation. Hero Kyle C💖rane is little more than a gruff pair of trousers who scampers up things and says ‘fuck’. A few NPCs stand out - most notably cuddly scientist Dr. Zere and siblings Jade and Rahim - but the rest are merely static mission dispensers. I don’t expect a zombie parkour game to have the literary flair of Bioshock - primarily because I just described it using the words ‘zombie’ and ‘parkour’ - but when you’re forced to join Crane on a personal journey, these inadequacies soon grate.
Multiplayer is a big deal in Dying Light. As well as 4-player co-op, you a🌄lso have access to the Be The Zombie mode. When darkness falls you can invaded by another player who controls of the Night Hunter: a rubbish name for something that’s entirely awesome. They have a range of powers specifically designed for butchering you, including night vision and Venom-style tendrils. It adds another layer of horror to the already-gruelling evenings. And, if that sounds too stressful, you can toggle the settings on and off. Or better yet, just play as the Night Hunter yourself, spring through the city on your fleshy proboscises and dismember your friends! Lovely.