Played it on: PS4
Approximate Playtime: 30 hours
RATING: 6/10
Dying Light is supposed to be good. It's supposed to be great, in fact. Techland's last two attempts at a commercial title were both zombie games. Both operated on the same mechanics as Dying Light. Both involved weapon crafting. Both were decent role playing games. And, most importantly, both were actually extremely fun despite being buggy and unbalanced. So, with a game like Dying Light, one expects it to be flawless, to take in all the criticism from previous titles, and to use them as fuel for the creation of a masterpiece.
So what the hell happened?
So what the hell happened?
To begin with, Dying Light does boast itself as an Action RPG. Now, this puts it a category with titanic titles such as The Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, Dark Souls, and Borderlands. With that said, it's also the same category that the previous two Dead Island games fell into, and the main problem with this fact is that, while both Dead Island games managed to make a niche for themselves rather well, Dying Light does nothing of the sort. In reality, the extremely minimal, pseudo-RPG elements in the game exist solely to mask what Dying Light is really trying to be: a first-person action-adventure title. And while there is nothing inherently wrong with that genre, it puts a massive damper on the game's premise as a whole. Techland touted the game as being almost something of a survival game, with players free running around the environments, wielding the classic, jerry-rigged weapons fans have come to love from Dead Island while competing for limited resources like airdrops of food. The free running aspect of the game especially was massively hyped up in all the trailers and press releases, which was just the right thing to entice lovers of Mirror's Edge like myself. And the last, beautiful spice on the top was the fact that at night, players would be subject to invasions from other players who could embody special infected and hunt the living to their deaths. In reality, none of that came true.
The first major problem is the story. You play as Kyle Crane, a man hired by the GRE, a sort of totally not blatantly evil humanitarian group with a hidden agenda, to hunt down a fellow operative and get back a file that contains information that could kill thousands. A boring, over-used, cliche'd hook to be sure. Upon arriving at his destination in the fictional city of Harran, he is ambushed by generic villains, which attracts a horde and gets him bitten. This introduces a fascinating narrative concept that could have been the perfect hook in the extremely bloated zombie genre, the fact that Crane needs a drug called Antizin or he will seize up and eventually turn. After the first seizure Crane has, I expected this to be a major gameplay mechanic: keep up on your Antizin or risk a seizure in combat, which could be fatal.
Instead, Crane goes through an arbitrary cutscene where he receives a shot, and that's it. In-game, Antizin is never dropped by the GRE airdrops. It is never mentioned unless it's part of a main quest. And Crane could spend months simply killing zombies without ever getting a booster shot, a concept that the main questline tries to scream at you isn't true. The concept of needing Antizin does become important again for a single sixty second interval when the main questline deems it necessary to shove the "you're infected" concept down players' throats as hard as possible while Crane has repeated seizures as he tries to escape the main villain, but that's the extent of it. No urgency, no consequence.
Crane himself is one of the most inconsistent protagonists to date, which removes any feeling of legitimacy to his character and destroys the actual role playing aspect of this supposed RPG. Call me a bit tainted by playing too many BioWare and Telltale titles, and I probably am, but I was under the impression that a "role playing game" was supposed to involve, you know, playing a role. Becoming somebody else for a while and making decisions that concretely affect a fictional universe, that's what playing a role means. It's something that was first introduced by the god of tabletop, Gary Gygax (praise be unto him), back in 1974, and it's something that has continued to be the icing on the cake of role playing as the games shifted from being played on a table to being played on a computer. But, while tabletop is still alive and kicking harder than ever, Dying Light seems content to make all of the important decisions for you and force you to watch Crane bungle around like a roided out moron as he generally insults the entire populace, and still has the disrespectful nerve to call itself and RPG. Even the skill tree elements seem rather token and tacky, and could just as easily have not existed at all. As they are, they simply pad down a game that's desperately trying to be an 8 hour campaign experience. One of the most unfortunately memorable parts of the game is when Kyle makes his daring escape from the main villain, but the game wrestles control from you, shows you turning into a ninja and killing several armed guards and single handedly slicing off a hand, and then lets you watch as Crane deftly dodges bullets fired from guards with the worst aim since Return of the Jedi, before handing the game back to you with the very heavy feeling of, "See, look at our set piece action, aren't you enjoying yourself?!?!?!"
Even worse than that, what players got instead of the promised, beautiful mechanics was a watered down, useless upgrade system with three separate experience bars: one for overall level, one for combat level, and one for defensive/mobility level. While this idea may have been great at its core, allowing players to focus on crafting instead of health, or on mobility instead of combat, none of it matters. There are 24 levels of each tree, and exactly 24 abilities in each tree, meaning that all players will be identical at the end of the game. The only difference is the order in which abilities are acquired. Even then, the majority of the abilities, regardless of category, are utterly useless. A few, such as tackling zombies or leaping off zombie heads, are useful in just about every situation, and are actually quite game-changing. But most of the abilities are ones such as getting better sale prices (which is absolutely useless by the mid game, as Crane only ever needs five or six weapons at a time, which means that emptying one's backpack is a frequent and lucrative affair that nets tens of thousands of dollars regardless of perks) or increasing the duration of temporary booster potions, which are unnecessary fluff in the first place. In fact, I quite easily finished the game without ever once crafting a booster, as the ingredients were excruciating to fetch while avoiding hordes of infected, and I didn't need them anyway.
The survival, too, is completely forgotten about in the actual game. Sure, there are airdrops that the game asks you to fetch before the opposing side gets to them, but they don't make even a lick of difference in the actual narrative. Crane could lose every single airdrop ever sent, and none of it would matter. The only difference is that he would level up slower, as he wouldn't receive the ludicrous XP boosts that the packages give. And that leads to another blatant problem with this game: no balance whatsoever.
Completing a quest usually nets about two to three thousand experience depending on the job. Main quests are worth more, but most fall into that range. Establishing a safehouse is worth even less, only about a thousand experience points out of the tens of thousands required to level up. Simply fetching a few airdrops and turning them in all at once? I once received more than sixty thousand experience from turning in about ten or so airdrops, and they're plopped into the map two or three times per day cycle. Of course, this is probably meant to mask the insane amount of experience the game steals from the player upon death. Dying results in a relatively small loss at the start, but by the end it costs thousands of experience points to die, which is made even more infuriating by the fact that the majority of deaths are the results of unfair shenanigans, like falling too far due to extremely sticky, clunky controls, or because the player was grabbed one too many times while fighting a horde, something that the game actually encourages players to do by giving them crazy weapons and combat perks that often amount to diddly in practice. The grab, too, is extraordinarily broken, as the zombie's grab has a huge, magnetic tracking that often means dodging is useless as the zombie will just spin around and bite anyway. The bite, too, seems to be prioritized over every single other action, as Crane will quite literally stop in the middle of a swing and stand awkwardly, staring into the zombie's eyes just so the biting animation can happen and Crane can get screwed. This entire endeavor makes the game feel like it's still in early beta before the playtesting and balancing have happened, which cheapens the experience as a whole.
That being said, there are still some marginally decent parts of the game that prevent it from being a complete and utter flop like Brink or RAGE. To begin with, Harran is an actually beautiful and often grabbingly realistic world to play in. It feels like a completion of the world that Dead Island and Riptide were trying to create. In the parts where parkour actually works, it works extremely well, and I loved the mechanic that allowed players to jump onto a roof that would collapse underneath them, summoning zombies and knocking the wind out of Crane as he hits the floor below. Even though it became obvious later on as to which roofs were unstable, I thought the element was a nice touch. The night sections of the game were also a great trial, as running around at night was significantly more fun and scary than doing so in the day, and I felt like it added suspense to the otherwise generic title. If Crane is spotted by the mutated freaks that roam the night, he can use a UV flare or UV flashlight to stun them momentarily before continuing his escape, which is a mechanic that is difficult but rewarding to master. A final, if small, touch that I thought was at least interesting was the concept of a zombie that hasn't fully turned. Rarely, a zombie will be encountered that still retains part of its humanity, and will respond with human cries of pain and pleas to have mercy when Crane hits them over the head. For a ruthless apocalyptian like myself, I frankly didn't care, as it wanted to eat my face and I knew objectively that it was a zombie that the devs were trying to make me feel bad about killing... in a game who's entire premise is killing. But it gives small moments of pause to the otherwise action filled world, and it makes players actually think about their actions for a brief moment. Even if it didn't change anything, at least it felt as though thought was given to the game. And the co-op mode is both broken and hilariously fun, which genuinely helps revitalize the game and give it a bit more play time.
Unfortunately, overall the game is pretty lackluster. It's frustratingly unbalanced, it didn't deliver what the developers directly promised their fans, and it feels like something that barely squeaked out of the launch title section so that it might be considered for the big boys club. The replay value is less than zero, considering that there aren't even other characters and abilities to explore and the story is staggeringly linear, and even the first playthrough isn't exactly a joy as players are forced to watch Crane be an ass to everyone he meets and follow orders like a trained monkey for the first half of the game before he experiences his first emotion (it's sadness by the way, before you guess). And the entire experience is padded out with abhorrent fetch quests and worthless escort missions, which are the only other two missions in existence. In the end, it feels like a game that's trying way too hard to be noticed, when Dead Island knew exactly what it wanted to be and executed that to the letter. And for a game that was delayed so unbelievably far that I thought it might open a time portal and actually become Bioshock Infinite, I expected it to be Bioshock Infinite: a game with such quality and fidelity that it blew my mind so hard that I'm still cleaning my apartment and finding brain matter all these months later. That's what delaying a game is supposed to do, allow developers to make the game all nice and shiny and bug-free before launch. Instead, all we got was Techland's shoddy attempt at squeezing out a first person Assassin's Creed with zombies. And to be honest, that's more depressing than anything else.
That being said, there are still some marginally decent parts of the game that prevent it from being a complete and utter flop like Brink or RAGE. To begin with, Harran is an actually beautiful and often grabbingly realistic world to play in. It feels like a completion of the world that Dead Island and Riptide were trying to create. In the parts where parkour actually works, it works extremely well, and I loved the mechanic that allowed players to jump onto a roof that would collapse underneath them, summoning zombies and knocking the wind out of Crane as he hits the floor below. Even though it became obvious later on as to which roofs were unstable, I thought the element was a nice touch. The night sections of the game were also a great trial, as running around at night was significantly more fun and scary than doing so in the day, and I felt like it added suspense to the otherwise generic title. If Crane is spotted by the mutated freaks that roam the night, he can use a UV flare or UV flashlight to stun them momentarily before continuing his escape, which is a mechanic that is difficult but rewarding to master. A final, if small, touch that I thought was at least interesting was the concept of a zombie that hasn't fully turned. Rarely, a zombie will be encountered that still retains part of its humanity, and will respond with human cries of pain and pleas to have mercy when Crane hits them over the head. For a ruthless apocalyptian like myself, I frankly didn't care, as it wanted to eat my face and I knew objectively that it was a zombie that the devs were trying to make me feel bad about killing... in a game who's entire premise is killing. But it gives small moments of pause to the otherwise action filled world, and it makes players actually think about their actions for a brief moment. Even if it didn't change anything, at least it felt as though thought was given to the game. And the co-op mode is both broken and hilariously fun, which genuinely helps revitalize the game and give it a bit more play time.
Unfortunately, overall the game is pretty lackluster. It's frustratingly unbalanced, it didn't deliver what the developers directly promised their fans, and it feels like something that barely squeaked out of the launch title section so that it might be considered for the big boys club. The replay value is less than zero, considering that there aren't even other characters and abilities to explore and the story is staggeringly linear, and even the first playthrough isn't exactly a joy as players are forced to watch Crane be an ass to everyone he meets and follow orders like a trained monkey for the first half of the game before he experiences his first emotion (it's sadness by the way, before you guess). And the entire experience is padded out with abhorrent fetch quests and worthless escort missions, which are the only other two missions in existence. In the end, it feels like a game that's trying way too hard to be noticed, when Dead Island knew exactly what it wanted to be and executed that to the letter. And for a game that was delayed so unbelievably far that I thought it might open a time portal and actually become Bioshock Infinite, I expected it to be Bioshock Infinite: a game with such quality and fidelity that it blew my mind so hard that I'm still cleaning my apartment and finding brain matter all these months later. That's what delaying a game is supposed to do, allow developers to make the game all nice and shiny and bug-free before launch. Instead, all we got was Techland's shoddy attempt at squeezing out a first person Assassin's Creed with zombies. And to be honest, that's more depressing than anything else.
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