Dying Light

I recently had a sudden urge to play some games about zombies—as you do—so I decided to go back and finish Dying Light, the zombie parkour game that came out in 2015 and got a large amount of free and paid content updates over the next five years. You can now buy all of the significant content (minus cosmetics and overpowered DLC weapons) for cheap, which is a pretty good deal if you want a lot of zombie-killing action.

The game takes place in the fictional city-state of Harran, located somewhere in the territory of Turkey, which has been consumed by a zombie pandemic—and since the city was hosting the Summer Olympics International Summer Games at the time, there are a lot of extra bodies around for the virus to infect. Cut off from the outside world by a military quarantine, the survivors have been left to fend for themselves as the city descends into violence and chaos.

You play as Kyle Crane, a generic slab of meat parachuted into Harran by the Global Relief Effort to track down some stolen research documents. Kyle is kind of a fuck-up though, so he gets bitten as soon as he lands and has to ingratiate himself with a survivor community in order to get his hands on the drugs that will stave off  zombification. As Kyle gets closer to the survivors and is pushed to take more and more ruthless actions by the GRE, his priorities shift from his mission to helping the people of Harran—and that puts him at odds with Reis, a depraved politician-turned-warlord.

I think Kyle is supposed to have some sort of military or CIA training or something, but his real secret weapon is PARKOUR, BABY. The Harran survivors have taken the sensible attitude that the zombies can’t chomp you if you never touch the ground, so Kyle’s role in the city is as a “runner”, sprinting across rooftops in order to complete various objectives and tasks.

This is the game’s big differentiating factor compared to other zombie games, and for the most part it works well. Jumping, climbing and melee combat have always been hard to pull off in first-person, but Dying Light handles all three better than maybe any game had before. The combat feels punchier than something like Skyrim, where it often feels like you’re just waving your sword in front of enemies, and I like that head attacks do way more damage so you often find yourself carefully aiming your attacks instead of just whacking enemies.

The gameplay isn’t perfect, though. There’s plenty of moments where Kyle will refuse to clamber onto a ledge for no apparent reason or stop running abruptly, which can lead to unfair deaths. The game has a stamina system for running that forces you to slow down for a few seconds so Kyle can catch his breath, which I assume was intended to make running away from zombies more challenging but is just annoying.

Fighting regular zombies is fun, with a difficulty level that makes you feel like a badass when you’re taking them on in small numbers but can lead to instant death if you get overconfident or let yourself get surrounded. The game spices things up with your standard array of “special” zombies (big zombie, bigger zombie, zombie that spits acid, zombie that explodes) including “virals” that are attracted to sound and can chase you up onto rooftops. It’s a good idea on paper, but the game eventually starts throwing huge numbers of them at you, which is frustratingly difficult until you realise you can just stand on a rooftop and repeatedly kick them off as they climb up to you, at which point they just become tedious.

This unbalanced difficulty extends to human enemies. Early on, when you have to fight them with melee weapons, they’re ridiculously OP due to their ability to dodge and block nearly all of your attacks. Then you start getting guns, and they become utter cakewalks because they just run towards you mindlessly as you pop off headshots.

One of the game’s big features is its day and night cycle. At night the zombies become faster and more aggressive and hulking, mutated Volatiles emerge from their hiding places and patrol the city. If you get spotted by one of them, a big chase will begin and you’ll need to get to a source of UV light to shake it off. This obviously makes the city far more dangerous at night, but the trade off is that you get double XP to spend on sweet parkour and combat upgrades.

It’s an interesting risk/reward mechanism, but it’s undermined by the fact that the Volatiles have Metal Gear Solid-style vision cones that show up on the minimap, which means it’s very easy to avoid them and sweep up that sweet, sweet double XP bonus with very little risk.

There’s this whole thing where you’re meant to be able to lure pursuing hordes into traps to get them off your back, but I never actually did this because it was always easier to just avoid getting chased in the first place. And then eventually you get a grappling hook, which lets you yeet yourself away from pursuers so quickly that any other method becomes obsolete.

This sounds like I’m critcising the game a lot, but the reality is that the game’s core gameplay of sprinting around Harran and fighting zombies is strong enough that these problems are usually well below the surface. There are only specific moments—like when story missions force you to take on a specific gameplay element with no wiggle room—when things can get frustrating.

Dying Light’s story is the textbook example of “functional” videogame writing. It’s propulsive enough to get you through the main campaign and it’s never badly written exactly, but if you’ve ever played any big-budget video game, ever, you will be able to predict everything that happens from the opening scene onwards.

The one area the game’s story stumbles is when it comes to the villain, Reis. The things we learn about him during the initial outbreak make him sound like he was a fairly interesting character before the story starts, but once Crane gets on the scene he’s turned into one of those annoying Joker villains who has a bullshit philosophy about chaos that he never stops talking about. His sole motivation throughout the game is fucking with Crane for no real reason, and since Crane is a roided-up idiot he keeps falling for it.

The definitive edition of the game comes with a DLC expansion called The Following, which I’ve heard is well-regarded, with some people liking it more than the base game. It takes place after the main story and is set outside the urban confines of Haran, and you have a little scrapped-together vroom-vroom buggy that you can use to run over zombies.

It seems cool, but I didn’t play much of it because it was such a huge departure from the parkour gameplay of the main game, which I had been enjoying greatly up until that point. Maybe someday I’ll go back and try it out.