Techland was kind enough to supply us with a pair of review codes for Dying Light on its release day. Since then we’ve been playing hours each day and the end of the game isn’t in sight, so I figured I would do am impressions article to keep you until our more comprehensive review goes live. Read on to discover our impressions roughly halfway through Dying Light.
PC ports of games this generation have been a mixed bag and unfortunately in the performance department Dying Light is no exception. Our main PC gaming rig has a top of the line Maximus VII motherboard, an overclocked Intel i7-4770K CPU, 16GB of fast G.Skill RAM, an overclocked GTX 970 FTW, and a 500GB Samsung 840 Evo solid state drive, but even after a couple of helpful performance patches we still cannot run the game with V-sync enabled without turning it into a slideshow. We’re hoping against hope that further optimization will be applied with later patches, but as it stands unless you’re SLI-ing a couple of Nvidia Titan Black graphics cards don’t expect to play Dying Light in its current state without a good helping of screen tearing.
Performance aside, the game does look nice when its running properly, and more importantly its extremely fun to play. We generally stayed away from Techland’s previous Dead Island games because of their reportedly lacklustre gameplay, but everything play-wise in Dying Light works really well. There are three skill trees you level up while playing: Survivor which levels up by doing main/side missions and other sundry tasks, Agility which levels up as you leap over and under things with your mad parkour skills, and Power which is levelled up through combat. Once you reach the higher levels in these trees the perks become quite significant and add a lot to the gameplay (especially once you unlock the grappling hook that opens up huge new venues of time and butt-saving navigation through the city).
While you’re bound to have a blast hopping through the city and whaling on zombies of every size and shape, Dying Light‘s story and characters are still about as bland and formulaic as they come. You could say that just because there’s a zombiepocalypse it doesn’t mean that everyone is suddenly interesting and compelling, but in the context of a video game where you’re hacking through crowds of zombie with electrified scythes you’d think that they could have spent a little more time giving you a reason to be there and people to care about. Another often hilariously strange thing about the game is that just about everyone you meet, regardless of race or gender, seems to have a random accent cherry picked from around the globe. I’m not personally aware of just how ethnically diverse the average Middle Eastern county is, but I am sure that there is probably more than just two or three Middle Eastern people in the average city and that the other 99.9% of the population probably isn’t a mixture of vaguely British, French, Australian, South African, and occasionally American people like the majority of characters in Dying Light.
Finding cool new items and doling them up with all kinds of bonuses is fun even with the fact that the durability of items is not spectacular and you’ll be on to the next greatest zombie basher in a hurry once your current +40 poison baseball bat crumbles to dust much like in Dead Island. Dead Island isn’t the only series that Dying Light liberally borrows from though, the lock picking from Fallout/Skyrim is present along with tower climbing a la Far Cry 3/4 and eventually a grappling hook mechanic that while spectacular smacks of the likes of Arkham Asylum and Just Cause 2.
Dying Light‘s original features are what set it apart and make it a truly worthwhile experience, though. One of the biggest of the game’s innovations is that the generally fairly slow and lumbering zombies from the daytime are accompanied by incredibly fast and strong zombies during the night that often mess you up if you don’t get to a safe house in time (even with your Power and Agility points doubled at night). The risk/reward ratio increases as you stay out at night too, though, as you level up much faster when its dark so you have to decide if the possible gains of running madly about at night are worth the possible loss of a lot of your Survivor experience should you fail. The second excellent novel concept in Dying Light is that supply air drops are dropped periodically throughout the day. These airdrops in addition to general supplies contain packages that can be exchanged for huge amounts of experience, so whatever kind of mission or exploration you’re doing you drop everything as soon as you feel the controller rumble and hear the airdrop plane approaching. If you’re not fast enough to the airdrop location your reward is first halved by other characters stealing part of it (who you then have to fight) and then completely forfeited. This is the first time I’ve experienced such an element in a game that can make me randomly drop whatever I’m doing no matter how important it is to rush off to a different part of the map. It’s fun, it’s invigorating bounding through the game’s world past the countless zombies, and in co-op it’s even better because you can challenge each other to foot races, looting races, and zombie-killing races with a nice chunk of extra experience as a prize.
Check back with us soon for a full review of Dying Light, but know that it’s already one of the funnest games we have played this year and definitely worth your consideration — particularly if you have friends to play it with.