Yesterday there was a bit of an incident involving WB/Techland not getting out review copies of Dying Light out to members of the press. In my original post I criticized them for making a big deal about not having a review embargo for the game ahead of launch yet the solution to that was apparently not to issue review copies at all.
By the end of the day that was resolved but with codes given out to press only 12 hours or so before launch the only ones who were able to form coherent impressions of the game were the YouTubers who had agreed to brand deals with the developer ahead of time. The implication was that perhaps something was being hidden by actual review copies going out late and day one purchasers wouldn t have official reviews to warn them if something was amiss.
But from what I ve gathered Techland simply was working on the game until the last minute which was cause for the delay. It s also important to note that WB Games did something similar with rather late Shadow of Mordor review copies (though better than 12 hours before launch as I recall) and that game was one of the best of the year.
From my time spent with the game so far I can declare that no there was not some grand conspiracy to hide a terrible or broken game from the press. Dying Light is not a disaster of epic proportions and it seems this really was just poor planning and execution in terms of getting review copies to the press in a timely fashion.
With that said I ve spent at least a few hours with the game so far and have a few first impressions of the open world zombie survival title. While there s nothing outright awful about it I can t say I ve been especially impressed either.
I do like the fictional Turkish locale where your US paratrooper is dropped in to find a cure through infiltrating the local gangs. It s a gorgeously rendered city and a welcome change to have a cast of Middle Eastern characters in a game where they re not automatically all cast as villains. But that said so far the game is pretty light on story other than the bare bones of a traditional zombie outbreak.
After a rather lengthy tutorial which teaches your character how to club the hell out of zombies and parkour over obstacles you ll encounter in the city you re tasked with finding safe zones arming traps and running around doing various side quests for other survivors you meet in the Tower the central safezone of the game. Once you finish the tutorial and a tiny bit of the main questline no less than nine separate exclamation points spring up around the tower each a side quest demanding you help out someone or another in return for a reward. This is one of the core problems of Dying Light. It combines open world fatigue with zombie fatigue as both have felt very oversaturated as of late and a game really has to do something special in order to break out of the mold of either. 2014 s Sunset Overdrive was also technically an open world game about zombies yet its off the wall attitude and innovative mechanics made it stand out in the genre and encouraged players to stick with it until the end.
I m not sure Dying Light has that same draw. Though it s added things over Techland s past zombie series Dead Island like parkour and a Skyrim ish leveling system (the more you run or fight the better you are at running or fighting) it doesn t quite feel different enough to stand out and is more like a new Dead Island than anything else. It feels like the title switch has only been made because Dead Island hasn t quite blossomed into a booming franchise or the simple fact that we re not on an island anymore.
The problem is that the elements it has in place other games have done better. Its parkour is okay but it s not as smooth as Mirror s Edge or Titanfall. Its combat is fine but you ll find better gunplay and melee bashing elsewhere. And its crafting Well does anyone really like crafting But it s the third pillar of the game after freerunning and combat and where the survival in survival horror comes in. I know it s a staple of the genre but I ve had about as much crafting as I can stomach these past few years in gaming and searching every nook and cranny in an open world environment has never been my idea of fun.
But running and fighting have their issues as well the biggest is that both are artificially limited by stamina. Again in a survival game I understand the need for stamina as a factor to make the game more difficult and inject some sort of realism into the world. But in practice it makes the game feel arbitrarily restrictive and sluggish at times.
For example you never really get to feel like a smooth operator freerunner until presumably very late in the game because you get winded pretty quickly. And when fighting you only get about three or four swings with a weapon before your stamina is wiped as the bar decreases even when you miss. Combine that with destructible weapons that lose their potency enemies that can absorb a whole host of blows and generally slippery melee controls that make it easy to miss swings and combat in early stages of the game is annoying to the point where you don t want to do it at all. A side quest that had me trying to do battle with five other raiders all wielding pipes left me frustrated beyond belief as I spent more time running away than fighting waiting for my stamina meter to recharge and even after I killed almost all of them off the boss raider was a wall I simply couldn t get past and I had to abandon the quest. And this was literally the first side quest I took.
Obviously throughout the game you re able to upgrade both sprinting and running in various ways allowing for more diversity in gameplay and increasing your total amount of stamina to avoid being instantly winded when doing anything. But from what I ve heard from those who are 10 15 hours into the game combat never really gets all that interesting despite a host of upgrades.
Dying Light just doesn t really have a hook and combines two things I m already getting tired of open world games and zombies. True survival games like H1Z1 and Day Z are more about the wacky MMO like improvised story experiences you get into with other players but the campaign of Dying Light is just more Dead Island than it is anything else. Perhaps multiplayer changes that but I haven t experimented with it yet. The game can be legitimately scary however which is a point in its favor. I was very spooked indeed when a mission had me playing as the sun slowly set and I had to race to get inside before darkness blanket the land and zombies went into full berserk mode. While during the day zombies barely move more than a few feet in any direction and can be kicked to death by a small child at night they turn into psychotic 28 Day Later style beasts that sprint after you relentlessly. Suffice to say you ll get torn apart until later in the game when you re better equipped to deal with that kind of insanity. But that is an aspect of the game I can appreciate.
If you re looking for a better looking version of Dead Island with a few improvements in leveling and mobility Dying Light may be for you. But so far it isn t for me. That may change in time as I play more of the game but for now even if it s not a disaster I m not sure it s worth a 20 hour investment on my part either as there s nothing that s really grabbed me (other than a host of digital zombies of course).
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