The Case

Techland is no stranger to the survival horror genre. Originally releasing the two games in the now-forgotten Dead Island series, they were slated to develop Dead Island 2, before handing it off to Yager. Though the wave of zombie games has come and gone, with an impressive fourteen zombie-themed games being released in both 2009 and 2011, Techland still saw fit to push ahead with Dying Light. The question remains as thus: is the game alive and kicking, or has it shambled into the streets, unaware of the abandoned streets it now finds itself in?

The Defense

What happens to humanity when faced with the prospect of almost certain annihilation? This is not a question exclusive to Dying Light in particular, but is represented in zombie games as a whole. How do people react when they are forced into situations of extreme survival? In Left 4 Dead, we find that normal citizens become extremely efficient and wisecracking killing machines. In DayZ, we find that most people online aren't particularly nice, which isn't surprising.

Dying Light, on the other hand, gives us survivors trapped in a city. Stepping into the role of one Kyle Crane, you are a hired gun employed by the Global Relief Effort, a humanitarian aid organization dedicated to supporting the people of Harran at any cost. Literally airdropped along with some supplies, you're nearly immediately infected and almost have your legs broken by a gang of thugs, before friendlier survivors drag your useless body back to The Tower. This “Tower” is packed full of survivors hiding from the streets, and it's where you'll home in the first half of the game.

With no escape in sight, they imprison themselves behind high walls, topped with barbed wire and flanked with burly guards. They look to the skies, watching for supplies and the faintest hope of rescue to come, even as they well know that it won't be. The sidequests they assign you are detailed, and can span the entirety of both parts of the city, as you attempt to retrieve mementos, or deliver time-limited medicine. These sidequests really do a fantastic job of fleshing the characters you share the city with, making it feel more alive, as come to be trusted by more and more of the residents still left behind.

As far as the game's plot is concerned, you've been dropped into the city to retrieve a “file” from Suleiman, a former employee of the GRE, and now going by the name of “Rais”. Rais has collected the city's sadists in an attempted to amass the world's largest force of mentally-deficient meatheads, and has seen fit to outfit them with some of the best weapons around. Quests and the plot will brush you up against Rais's thugs, and these encounters are universally dangerous. Regardless, you spend time doing errands and otherwise making the city a better place to survive for everyone throughout the course of the game.

It's a bit of a shame, then, that even with the great characters that make up the populace, that the actors in the plot itself, along with most of the plot's content is so stale. Nearly none of the characters, save yourself and Jade, go through any major character development, and it definitely feels as though certain characters were killed off just to have them out of the way. People are introduced and forgotten about almost immediately, and it feels as though the game is almost burdened with actors to a point where you couldn't care about some of them, even if you wanted to. It feels strange, that in a game that focuses so intently on the human experience within the apocalypse that the characters are just presented so poorly.

None of the events that take place in the game's main story arc are particularly noteworthy, either. While there were some unexpected moments, in the grand scheme of “zombie game plots,” you expect someone to sacrifice themselves to defeat a large horde of zombies, you expect there to be people who turn to evil in a time of great despair, you expect to see the fraying human mind come apart as their world collapses. It's simply all been done before, and the game's plot suffers because of it.

While the plot may be disappointing, special care has been given to making the setting as engaging as possible. Harran, while not a real city, takes place in what appears to be modern-day Turkey, with two sections: the Old City and the Slums. Starting off in the slums, you're slowly introduced to the game and the free running, with nothing proving to be too challenging.

The slums is also where you'll find a majority of the game's content, whether that's in the form of random encounters, quests, or citizens, scattered about buildings and hiding in a few different safe zones. The slums themselves are full of decrepit apartments, with poorly constructed roofs of plywood, trash and abandoned cars everywhere in the streets, and utterly packed with zombies. Clearly hit hardest by the epidemic, there are artifacts of survivors everywhere, from books and food strewn about forgotten rooms, to upended bags of clothes near the burning wreck of a car.

That's not to say that the Old City hasn't also suffered in the outbreak, but it's in noticeably better shape. Gorgeous red accented by the off-whites of stone, while clock towers and university steeples attempt to pierce the sky. The free running element is equally elegant, where once you could rely on trash piles and shoddy construction to guide you across the buildings, here you slide along zip lines and thick wires running between buildings. Safe houses are different as well. In the slums, they'd be basketball courts, old radio stations, junkyards, or shantytowns, but in the Old City, they're universities, high-class restaurants, and rooftop parlors.

Case Review

Judges panel

Doubleplus Score 4/5

4

K-putt Score 4/5

4

MrJenssen Score 3.5/5

3.5

Bobfish Score 4/5

4