Preface
This is my first attempt at a more comprehensive review, and while a game this massive definitely was not a good one to start with, I put 32 hours into the base game and 14 into the DLC in order to make this review as reliable as possible.
To begin, I picked up dying light and it's DLC, The Following, on sale for 15 dollars total. It had been about 5 years since this game's launch, so aside from a few hours of co-op with a friend, I mostly stuck to a solo experience as I assumed that leaving PvP zombie invasions on would lead to me being decimated by much better players. Consequently, this review will be covering the game in it's current state at the time of writing based on a single playthrough, with a heavy focus on the single player side of things and completely skipping co-op oriented activities like the Bozak Horde or the Prison, as I did not feel comfortable trying to solo a mission designed for four players. I also did not go for all collectibles, but did complete all side missions for both the base game and the DLC. I will be reviewing The Following DLC in full as well, with it's own separate sections.
Story
There will be spoilers ahead, but I'll try to keep them minor. Dying Light's story is fast paced, cinematic, and carries an air of tension throughout. It progresses in the game after the completion of Story Missions, often leading to a cutscene or a conversation between the game's characters. The events that play out always carry a sense of urgency, since in the narrative there's always a Dead Rising-like time limit. This time limit is not reflected in the gameplay, however, and you're free to go and do whatever you like with the story waiting patiently for you to complete the next mission. The issue is, the side quests are pretty well written and make you actually want to help the quest giver out, or at least see it through to the end, and give genuinely useful rewards like weapon upgrades or blueprints- that is to say, you're encouraged to do them.
During my playthrough, I did my best to stay immersed in the story, which meant that I did the story missions immediately if there was any immediate urgency involved and then went and worked on side missions when there wasn't. This worked for the first part of the game, and I did end up enjoying the story more as a result, but at the point in the game where you enter a new area, a character from an early game side quest appears and reflects upon the quest that you completed. I didn't want to miss out on any extra dialogue like that, so from that point on I did all side quests as soon as they showed up. This completely broke the narrative flow and made trudging through the side quests an absolute chore, especially when the story was interesting enough for me to want to keep playing it. I broke my "do side quests first" rule a few times, but in the end I really did regret not focusing on the story more, as I developed a real sense of apathy towards the events happening until I decided to do the last few missions back to back and became much more engaged. I would recommend only breaking off from the story if a side quest really grabs your attention or you want a break from the narrative, and just cleaning up any side quests you need to finish after you beat the whole campaign.
But enough digressing about side questing, let's talk about the main story while spoiling as little as possible. Dying Light does a good job introducing you to the world and establishing characters, as that's what makes up the first couple of hours in the game. The main characters are fleshed out quite well with many conversations in cutscenes, and the side characters that you interact with often got endeared to me simply because I saw them and worked with them so much. However, the reuse of character models, especially with children, can make some characters forgettable. As a positive, though, as you do more for the survivors, you gain a bit of fame and admiration, and it really does feel earned by how much you help them.
The cutscenes that aren't conversations are beautiful, and story sequences are often framed in order to create a cinematic moment during gameplay, something that consistently astounded me due to it's skillful execution. The depth of field can get a bit much during some scenes, completely blurring out the backgrounds behind characters, for example, but it isn't that big of a deal.
The story initially feels a lot like you're just doing chores for people, which does introduce you to the world and it's inhabitants in a natural way. This section of the story doesn't stay too long thouhg, and soon you're earning your fame by doing missions that only you would be able to. The "bad government organization" trope that's set up near the beginning actually acts as a fantastic staging device for the narrative, and the second half of the game has so many different characters all working towards different goals that seeing them interact with their conflicting interests makes a familiar plot go in new and engaging directions. It isn't groundbreaking by any means, but for a zombie game it does it's job well and leaves players wanting to know more.
Gameplay
Dying Light's gameplay consists of a well developed parkour system, daytime zombie slaying, nighttime stealth gameplay, and human combat. Overall, every aspect of the game is outstandingly bad at first. Parkour is slow, weapons take forever to kill zombies, you're too weak to survive at night, and you get annihilated by other survivors. However, after all the skill trees are filled out, the core gameplay is incredible and leaves you with so many options to use in any different situation. This provides a very strong sense of progression throughout the game as you go from being incapable to becoming Zombie Batman, but the clunkiness of early game is just inexcusable. I've known people to drop the game due to how bad their first impression was.
Early parkour is fine, if a bit slow, but combat is where the game suffers the most. Blunt weapons are nearly useless, and since weapon durability exists, you naturally want to save your best weapons and end up handicapping yourself as anything less that your highest damage bladed weapon is going to take minutes to kill a single zombie, bringing gameplay to a standstill as you repeatedly wait for your combat stamina to recharge. This would be acceptable if avoiding combat was more encouraged, but you're often forced to fight your way out of situations or clear an area in side quests and story objectives. Eventually you learn that you should be using your best weapons and selling all others so you can buy even better weapons, but that doesn't make the awful start any less egregious.
The first pillar of gameplay is the parkour system, letting you climb on the outside of buldings and mitigate fall damage by landing in trash cans or on the hoods of cars. Initially, it works fine, but as you level up the agility skill tree, you gain so much more mobility. Moves to further reduce fall damage, jumping off zombies' heads, stamina increases, and sped up animations all make you feel so much faster and agile, culminating in the acquisition of the grappling hook in the survivor skill tree. I have mixed feelings on the grappling hook; it works like a hookshot, despite that not making any sense whatsoever since it's just a rope with a hook on the end, but it makes scaling buildings trivial and can act as a quick escape option in rough situations. However, overuse of it can result in you completely skipping a well designed platforming section simply because you grappled to the end of it right off the bat, so you have to show some self control so you don't miss out on genuinely fun platforming sections. It can be argued that the grapple is bad game design as it is the most effective method of traversal in most situations, but is less enjoyable and immersive than maneuvering without it. It works fine if you use it only for scaling buildings or saving yourself after a missed jump, but it kind of sucks that you have to temper your reliance on an item to get the most enjoyment out of the game.
All in all, when you unlock the agility focused abilities, the free running can be constantly engaging, but can become tiresome when doing quests that are extremely spread out. I used the grapple a lot when travelling between objectives, as there's only so many times you can run across rooftops before you get a bit tired of it. The abilities you unlock are fantastic, but aren't enough to save the repeated travel across the game's maps from being annoying- I mean, you spend more time traveling than you do in a mission specific encounter sometimes, like in side quests where you just have to pick up an item and then go somewhere else.
Combat works surprisingly well once you realize what to do. Cutting a zombie's head clean off is oh so satisfying, and when you have a good weapon with a lot of durability, you're able to engage in combat scenarios for the fun of it. Fighting hordes is hard, as it should be- but with clever use of gadgets you can absolutely manage. The combat system is bolstered by not only the numerous useful moves unlocked in the skill tree, but also by the absolutely massive amount of craftable upgrades, weapons, and tools. You can apply elements to your weapons to make them stronger at the cost of a few resources, and add upgrades to further customize them, fostering attachments to your favorite weapons since you're the one that made it into something personal. The craftable gadgets are great too, and can make clearing out hordes a breeze as well as coming in handy in emergencies, although explosions or other loud noises can draw the attention of fast moving Virals.
Also, you obtain a lot of throwables, especially from humen enemies. The throwables are weak, and while they provide a brief stun and a hit of damage, I never found them worth equipping, and ended up discarding them when i realized that you get many different types that each take up a backpack slot. Any situation where you could use a throwable, a conventional weapon or a gadget is most definitely a better choice. They're just not worth picking up- even the most garbage of weapons sell for more money at shops.
Overall, the combat works well with the exception of useless throwables, but fighting isn't always the best decision. Camouflage, an early upgrade, makes it possible to just skip combat encounters, similar to what the grapple hook does to platforming challenges. After killing a zombie, you can cover yourself in its blood to become unnoticable by any daytime undead. With a few upgrades you can kill another zombie, use it for camo, and keep going while being completely unnoticed. Combined with the stealth takedown- which takes entirely too long to unlock, like it's near the bottom of a skill tree- you can infinitely chain zombie takedowns and camo refreshes to avoi combat altogether. Volatiles, the nighttime-only ultra-strong-and-fast zombies can actually see through the camo, but it's rare that you'll see one during missions, especially if you sleep through nights.
Nights in Dying Light got my heart pumping harder than most horror games, as Volatiles appear and hunt throughout the darker hours. They have trouble seeing in the dark, so you'll have to turn off your flashlight, and once you're spotted, they'll chase you until you either die or reach a safe house. They're hearty, too, so killing them is just a waste of durability or ammunition. Moving around at night awards double experience points for anything you do, but that just simply isn't worth it when you can die extremely quickly if caught by even a single Volatile. They even move faster than the player so the only way to keep them off you is by using gadgets, which is risky, or by using vericality and doing parkour moves to gain a bit of distance and hoping they don't catch up to you. Nights are taxing on a player's resources, and can drain your survivor tree xp if you die, so it's smarter to book it to a safehouse at the first sign of nightfall and sleep until morning.
While you'll hopefully be avoiding combat with Volatiles, you'll need to defend yourself against other survivors. Human on human combat is pretty clunky, and without a ranged weapon you'll end up getting your strikes parried constantly. The better option is to use guns or bows and take out humans from a distance, and the gunplay against human opponents is actually quite good. Use of the survivor sense, which reveals enemies through walls, makes Dying Light play like a fairly good cover shooter. You can also use the sound of enemies' gunshots to draw Virals to their location, and they'll often win the fight for you. It really is a shame that hand to hand combat against humans is so lackluster, though.
Systems
Dying Light has a lot of interlocking systems, but the one's I'd like to talk about are the skill trees, quests, challenges, weather, safe houses, and the minimap.
Dying Light's skill trees are small, but packed with useful skills and very rarely require you to unlock a bad skill in order to access a much better one. The player agency given when picking your next skill to unlock feels good and helps personalize your gameplay experience. The XP required to level up the skill trees is given from performing the dedicated action, with running and climbing upgrading agility, fighting upgrading power, and turning in resources and suviving nights upgrading survivor. XP is also awarded from quests and challenge completions.
On the subject of quests, side quests are more often than not just fetch quests. The game feels bloated when doing these back to back, since travel takes longer than the quest itself. However, the monotony can be broken up by challenges sprinkled around the map, which task you to perform a specific task under a time limit, often with some restrictions. This can range from getting headshots to climbing a tower, and they bring out the best in combat and parkour since you don't have time to use camo and fail agility missions if you use the grappling hook. I often looked at challenges as little distractions to stumble upon while traveling across the map. They give less XP on repeat completions, encouraging you to beat it when you come across it and then move on to whatever you were doing. I enjoyed them for what they were and appreciated the XP they provided.
The game sometimes has weather, like fog or rain, which looks incredible and can make traversing the game world more interesting even if you're in an area you know well, since you might not be able to hear or see zombies due to the weather conditions.
Unlocking safe houses allows you to spawn at them, and is necessary when you have to do missions on the outer fringes of the map. Clearing the safe house requires killing all zombies in it's area and turning on lights to ward off the undead. The zones can be used to instantly end Volatile pursuits, change outfits, manage inventory, and accept easy, repeatable bounties. The act of unlocking them and then being able to operate out of them gives a good sense of familiarity with that specific safe house, and further allows players to personalize their play experiences as they will actively have to go and clear a safe house in order to gain a foothold in a new area of the map, which will be an experience completely unique to them. On top of that, there's often a lot of environmental storytelling present, with bodies or equipment scattered around that you can look at to glean knowledge about why that safe area was overrun.
Finally, on normal mode, the minimap displays the locations of Virals, the fast moving zombies that are attracted to sound, and the locations and view cones of Volatiles at night. This means you'll be often watching the minimap very closely, and it's one of the game elements that breaks immersion pretty severely. On hard mode, the minimap doesn't show any of those things, and only shows human opponents and objectives. These are fine since they're super necessary and if you don't have humans marked, you'll get gunned down immediately when they see you. However, this doesn't undercut the fact that hard mode boosts immersion greatly in many ways. Using survivor sense is much more necessary, and having to actively look around for the marked zombies creates tense experiences constantly and is leaps and bounds better than staring at the corner of your screen for hours on end. Survivor sense also doesn't mark items, which can be a bit annoying if you're looking for quest items, but I'd say that's pretty minor most of the time; I did have to look up locations for a few items though. Hard mode also makes it so the game doesn't pause when you open your inventory, increasing immersion further as you'll have to hide and wait for a safe time to craft items. I switched to hard mode after beating the story, and recommend that you switch to hard as soon as you get a handle on the game's systems or when it feels too easy. I enjoyed the hard difficulty much more than normal, and wish I switched earlier into the story.
Guidance
The game's guidance when it comes to objectives is passable; it's definitely not hand holding, and it's personally rewarding to figure out the more obtuse objectives on your own. However, you can get lost pretty easily, especially inside buildings. When instructed to find something or get somewhere, you might be left stumbling around blindly if you don't know where to start. This is at its worst when you're in a story setpiece that tells you that you need to go fast, but you can't find where to go and you look around for a doorway for ten minutes while high octane music plays. Objectives that require you to get into an area are often pretty messy as well, since some areas have very specific ways to get in that aren't easy to spot, especially on a first playthrough. The grapple hook helps with this issue, though.
In the event that a path is outlined, the objects you'll need to use to traverse the environment will be colored yellow, drawing your eyes to them. I personally really liked this as a natural way to show players where to go without breaking immersion.
I've talked about it already, but we need to address it just one more time: the game not telling you how to effectively fight zombies is a huge issue. If you have someone showing you what to do, I'm sure it's fine, but if not, you'll have to deal with not knowing that blunt weapons are much weaker than bladed ones and that you should be picking up and selling most of the random weapons you stumble upon. This lack of instruction and generally obtuse design hurts new players and may turn them off from the game if they don't quickly figure out the optimal ways to play.
Replayability
Dying Light has a lot of replayability, mostly present in the challenges, random events, quarantine zones, and legend skill tree. We've covered challenges already, but redoing them for XP and better scores could definitely be a draw for some people- it just wasn't for me, so I can't really vouch for them.
Random world events show up in blue on your map, and are either limited time shops with good deals, survivors fighting hordes of zombies, or armed thugs holding hostages. These events are similar to challenges as they are nice distractions to get caught up in when you're in the midst of traveling. They award a widely varying amount of XP, and unfortunately sometimes don't feel worth it when you get a small amount of money and XP after you use a big chunk of your hard earned resources. There are also survivor escort missions that show up randomly, where you have to defend a survivor as they run around the map. The survivors are fun and have cute quirky personalities, but these activities give extremely lackluster rewards.
There are also quarantine zones, repeatable quests that task you with exploring a closed building full of zombies. Camo works well here, as the zones provide surprisingly effective horror scenarios and you'll want to be hidden so you're not caught off gaurd. They provide a good chunk of survivor XP, which is helpful since you lose survivor XP upon death.
The legend skill tree unlocks when you get a skill tree to the max level, and that tree's points will then be funneled into the legend tree. Unlocks in the legend tree are basic percentage bonuses to physical attributes like health and damage, and provide something else to work towards when your other trees are maxed. The legend XP is lost upon death, similar to the survivor tree, so it enourages staying alive as the penalty of losing a half hour's worth of XP is pretty intense. It's nice to see something for hardcore players to work towards when everything else is completed.
Personal Reflection
I played a little Dying Light on Xbox back when it launched, at it was great getting to play it on a framerate that didn't give me a constant headache. I did almost abandon the game due to the weak start, but I pushed through and ended up loving it by the end. I was surprised at how well the platforming worked; it almost always worked as intended and very rarely did I climb objects or do actions that I didn't expect to. In addition, the visual effects are astounding; Dying Light is easily one of the best looking games I've ever played.
An unfortunate thing that happened for me was that after I finished the story, the replayability-focused content felt empty to me. The bounties were tedious and I didn't enjoy running round the city looking for world events or redoing challenges. Those activities really worked as distractions, but couldn't hold the game up on their own in my opinion. I also wasn't the biggest fan of the game's self awareness, with Dying Light logos and gaming in-jokes spread about the map, but I realized it wasn't a big deal- it was just breaking my immersion while I tried to focus on the game's self serious story.
Speaking of the story, it was elevated above being simple and boring all because the score was incredible. The synth enhanced story moments and I just loved listening to it in the main game world. It's a shame they're not getting the same guy for the sequel's soundtrack :/
A few anecdotes: I got teleported back to the first area when I had the story at 52 percent complete and had to look up how to get back to the second area, and I ended up selling a weapon on accident, exited out of the vendor menu, and then found the Buy Back menu was empty when I tried to retrieve it. Those are pretty small bugs and personal issues, but I feel like they should be stated at the very least for someone to learn from. For a quick final positive, there was a moment where I talked to a person I needed information from to advance the main story. My character told him he'd help him take care of his kids later since the main story was quite pressing at the time, and it was a great moment of player agency to let me come back and do his quest when everything was resolved and it helped me connect to the game's story in a way I hadn't prior to that moment.
A final note, and a conclusion: I know I talked about a lot of negatives throughout this review, but I finished the game hungry for more and immediately jumped into the DLC- that is to say, I enjoyed it so much I couldn't get enough. The game is rough around the edges, that's undeniable, but there's so much passion and detail put into every inch of it that it's become one of my favorite game's I've played this generation. I wholeheartedly recommend it, but if you're gonna get it, pick up The Following DLC too. It improves on everything in the base game and even if you don't enjoy the base game as much as I did, it's worth checking out to see how much better every aspect of the game becomes.
The Following[
This section will be a bit shorter than everything above it, since it's expected you'll go into The Following with nearly maxed out skill trees and extensive knowledge of the game, so I won't nee to complain about the new player experience or anything. I once again completed all the side quests and thoroughly explored the game, and got both main endings an the secret ending.
Story
The Following's story starts after the main story of Dying Light finishes, and the player character is sent out of the Harran Quarantine Zone to find more medicine for the survivors inside. The story features a cult worshipping a mysterious figure called "The Mother" who somehow wards off the infection of her subjects. The Following is a great deal more mysterious in nature than the mostly straightforward main story, and is focused mainly on having the player complete tasks for the cult in order to gain their trust and get access to their technique for avoiding infection. This actually works a lot better than the base game, since your main goal is to gain trust and, with the absence of story missions, you're free to just do side quests and get distracted all you want, knowing it'll be advancing the story no matter what you do. The setting is also very different to the city of Harran; the countryside is mostly flat with wide stretches of nothing but open road, with the exception of a small town with similar structure to Harran's Old Town. It's a nice change of pace to travel over huge, gorgeous expanses and have to plan your route throughout a map that is easily a few times larger than either map in the base game. The travel is aided by the buggy, a new vehicle you gain access to at the start of the campaign, which does an amazing job at making travel engaging, an area where the base game fell slightly short.
Before we talk about the buggy, however, I should mention that the story has a lot more little features that were absent in the base game. With the renewed focus on side quests, it's great that they allow you to engage in optional conversations with people to see how they were affected by your actions or to gain some insight into their society. These conversations also flesh out characters more than the base game, and you fell like you truly got to know them by the conclusion of the campaign.
Speaking of the conclusion, there's actually multiple endings this time around. There are 2 main endings, as in there's a choice that determines how the story finishes up, and 1 secret ending. However, while one of the main endings is a fantastic boss fight, the other is a glorified cutscene with little player input. The secret ending is similar, and while there is slight foreshadowing hinting at it's contents, it only involves finding a few hidden items and activating a final cutscene. No diologue, no resolution. It's a bit of a let down, but it takes very little time to track down the items for it and it's nice to see a secret like that. You are able to get all the endings on a single save file, you just have to select the story mission you want to start from. It's pretty easy, so you don't have to stress about backing up your save or picking a bad ending.
The story does end on a much more emotional and somber note than the base game, leaving you feeling helpless and desperate as you lose contact with your friends inside Harran. In the moment, it felt like a lot of diologue just to heighten the sense of tension, but in retrospect, the last few hours are there to bring you down and leave the DLC on a bittersweet (or just straight up bad, depending on your ending) note, which I can appreciate. No story told in moral shades of black and white could leave you thinking about it as much as one told with nuance, in my opinion.
Gameplay Loop
The main gameplay pull of The Following is the buggy; a new skill tree is added for it's gadgets and techniques and it handles quite well. The buggy drives pretty realistically and consistently, and it's easy to pull of some cool drifts or jumps with it right away; it's just that intuitive. Having to plan out your route through the world is also super engaging, combine that with hard mode where the game doesn't pause when you open your map and you'll be looking for places to pull over and safely check your path, hoping that nothing sneaks up on you while you do it. I loved this aspect, and it got me completely immersed within minutes of loading up the game and itching to come back as soon as I turned it off. You definitely get to know the lay of the lan after driving around it for a few hours, and as you begin to recognize roads and landmarks, it feels amazing to realize that you really know your way around the map. The increased familiarity also makes it satisfying to pull off drifts to get to your destination faster, and repairing your buggy's parts after a long drive is never too much of a hassle.
Unlike the base game's skill trees, the driver tree's progression is shown to you in a tangible way, as your buggy gets attackments and armor depending on the upgraes you choose, adding a nice personal aspect to it beyond just the paint job customization. The side quests are also a bit more fleshed out this time, and involve varied scenarios that feel worth the slightly longer travel time. The new weapons are also a nice change; the melee weapons are similar to what was in the base game, but the new crossbow an SMG are welcome additions that handle unlike any previous weapon and fill new niches in the game's sandbox.
Systems
The DLC also adds Volatile Hives in an attempt to make the night/day gameplay a bit more developed; these hives are full of volatiles during the day, but full of Virals at night. The point of them is to get in, get through the horde kill a stationary Volatile that wont fight back, and get out before dawn. Clearing the nest will reduce the amount of Volatiles roaming the countryside at night, and it's a system meant to let you have the ability to get the bonus night XP if you want to put in the extra work. It's still easier to just sleep through nights as the Volatile nests are super spread out and require a lot of work to get to one, sleep until night, and then take it out. I never bothered with them beyond the side missions that require you to clear some out, but I also rarely ventured out during the night, so theres a bit of player choice available there.
The car abilities and upgrades also allow a lot of player expression. The driver tree not only lets you mod your car with new attributes, it also gives you access to attachments on your car, like a flamethrower or a portable safe zone formed by UV lights, and it allows you to activate these abilities remotely to create distractions or traps. The sky's the limit when it comes to the possibilities, and it's a welcome addition that can completely change up how you approach situations.
Replayability
The Following also brings a great deal of replayability options for those that want that. The challenges from the base game return, but are focused around the buggy this time. Races, killing zombies with your car, and simple checkpoint runs are all present and act as welcome distractions when you come across one.
The Volatile hives also lend some replayability, but can only be completed once. Thankfully, they're supplemented by the returning world events, which don't bring anything new, but are nice distractions regardless.
A big chunk of replayability also comes from the locked crates strewn around the map. At different points in the story you get different tools that let you track and access these crates, that often hold extremely useful items, such as guns or ammo packs. They're decently fun to track down, and the rewards are almost always worth it to track down if you get pings from one.
Personal Reflection
The Following improved on everything I had issues with in the base game, so it's pretty easy for me to say that I loved it. I enjoyed the driving a lot more than I thought I would, and took a lot of pride in driving well. The new SMG was actually really useful to me, and I got a lot of use out of it towards the end of the story. The story gripped my attention way better than the base game, and I wanted to know how it would end and stayed engaged the whole time. I put way more hours per day into the DLC than I did into the main game- it was just that fun. There were a few small issues I had, like when the world event where armed thugs are holding a civilian hostage just wouldn't complete, even when I killed all the enemies. I also didn't like how the exploder zombies on the roads were constant and a bit annoying, but they did keep me on my toes all the time, which I can appreciate. Overall I think The Following is a necessary purchase for anyone who had even a little bit of fun with the base game.
Alright, that's the review! This is my first review of this calibre, and I hope it turned out good. Thanks for reading!
This is my first attempt at a more comprehensive review, and while a game this massive definitely was not a good one to start with, I put 32 hours into the base game and 14 into the DLC in order to make this review as reliable as possible.
To begin, I picked up dying light and it's DLC, The Following, on sale for 15 dollars total. It had been about 5 years since this game's launch, so aside from a few hours of co-op with a friend, I mostly stuck to a solo experience as I assumed that leaving PvP zombie invasions on would lead to me being decimated by much better players. Consequently, this review will be covering the game in it's current state at the time of writing based on a single playthrough, with a heavy focus on the single player side of things and completely skipping co-op oriented activities like the Bozak Horde or the Prison, as I did not feel comfortable trying to solo a mission designed for four players. I also did not go for all collectibles, but did complete all side missions for both the base game and the DLC. I will be reviewing The Following DLC in full as well, with it's own separate sections.
Story
There will be spoilers ahead, but I'll try to keep them minor. Dying Light's story is fast paced, cinematic, and carries an air of tension throughout. It progresses in the game after the completion of Story Missions, often leading to a cutscene or a conversation between the game's characters. The events that play out always carry a sense of urgency, since in the narrative there's always a Dead Rising-like time limit. This time limit is not reflected in the gameplay, however, and you're free to go and do whatever you like with the story waiting patiently for you to complete the next mission. The issue is, the side quests are pretty well written and make you actually want to help the quest giver out, or at least see it through to the end, and give genuinely useful rewards like weapon upgrades or blueprints- that is to say, you're encouraged to do them.
During my playthrough, I did my best to stay immersed in the story, which meant that I did the story missions immediately if there was any immediate urgency involved and then went and worked on side missions when there wasn't. This worked for the first part of the game, and I did end up enjoying the story more as a result, but at the point in the game where you enter a new area, a character from an early game side quest appears and reflects upon the quest that you completed. I didn't want to miss out on any extra dialogue like that, so from that point on I did all side quests as soon as they showed up. This completely broke the narrative flow and made trudging through the side quests an absolute chore, especially when the story was interesting enough for me to want to keep playing it. I broke my "do side quests first" rule a few times, but in the end I really did regret not focusing on the story more, as I developed a real sense of apathy towards the events happening until I decided to do the last few missions back to back and became much more engaged. I would recommend only breaking off from the story if a side quest really grabs your attention or you want a break from the narrative, and just cleaning up any side quests you need to finish after you beat the whole campaign.
But enough digressing about side questing, let's talk about the main story while spoiling as little as possible. Dying Light does a good job introducing you to the world and establishing characters, as that's what makes up the first couple of hours in the game. The main characters are fleshed out quite well with many conversations in cutscenes, and the side characters that you interact with often got endeared to me simply because I saw them and worked with them so much. However, the reuse of character models, especially with children, can make some characters forgettable. As a positive, though, as you do more for the survivors, you gain a bit of fame and admiration, and it really does feel earned by how much you help them.
The cutscenes that aren't conversations are beautiful, and story sequences are often framed in order to create a cinematic moment during gameplay, something that consistently astounded me due to it's skillful execution. The depth of field can get a bit much during some scenes, completely blurring out the backgrounds behind characters, for example, but it isn't that big of a deal.
The story initially feels a lot like you're just doing chores for people, which does introduce you to the world and it's inhabitants in a natural way. This section of the story doesn't stay too long thouhg, and soon you're earning your fame by doing missions that only you would be able to. The "bad government organization" trope that's set up near the beginning actually acts as a fantastic staging device for the narrative, and the second half of the game has so many different characters all working towards different goals that seeing them interact with their conflicting interests makes a familiar plot go in new and engaging directions. It isn't groundbreaking by any means, but for a zombie game it does it's job well and leaves players wanting to know more.
Gameplay
Dying Light's gameplay consists of a well developed parkour system, daytime zombie slaying, nighttime stealth gameplay, and human combat. Overall, every aspect of the game is outstandingly bad at first. Parkour is slow, weapons take forever to kill zombies, you're too weak to survive at night, and you get annihilated by other survivors. However, after all the skill trees are filled out, the core gameplay is incredible and leaves you with so many options to use in any different situation. This provides a very strong sense of progression throughout the game as you go from being incapable to becoming Zombie Batman, but the clunkiness of early game is just inexcusable. I've known people to drop the game due to how bad their first impression was.
Early parkour is fine, if a bit slow, but combat is where the game suffers the most. Blunt weapons are nearly useless, and since weapon durability exists, you naturally want to save your best weapons and end up handicapping yourself as anything less that your highest damage bladed weapon is going to take minutes to kill a single zombie, bringing gameplay to a standstill as you repeatedly wait for your combat stamina to recharge. This would be acceptable if avoiding combat was more encouraged, but you're often forced to fight your way out of situations or clear an area in side quests and story objectives. Eventually you learn that you should be using your best weapons and selling all others so you can buy even better weapons, but that doesn't make the awful start any less egregious.
The first pillar of gameplay is the parkour system, letting you climb on the outside of buldings and mitigate fall damage by landing in trash cans or on the hoods of cars. Initially, it works fine, but as you level up the agility skill tree, you gain so much more mobility. Moves to further reduce fall damage, jumping off zombies' heads, stamina increases, and sped up animations all make you feel so much faster and agile, culminating in the acquisition of the grappling hook in the survivor skill tree. I have mixed feelings on the grappling hook; it works like a hookshot, despite that not making any sense whatsoever since it's just a rope with a hook on the end, but it makes scaling buildings trivial and can act as a quick escape option in rough situations. However, overuse of it can result in you completely skipping a well designed platforming section simply because you grappled to the end of it right off the bat, so you have to show some self control so you don't miss out on genuinely fun platforming sections. It can be argued that the grapple is bad game design as it is the most effective method of traversal in most situations, but is less enjoyable and immersive than maneuvering without it. It works fine if you use it only for scaling buildings or saving yourself after a missed jump, but it kind of sucks that you have to temper your reliance on an item to get the most enjoyment out of the game.
All in all, when you unlock the agility focused abilities, the free running can be constantly engaging, but can become tiresome when doing quests that are extremely spread out. I used the grapple a lot when travelling between objectives, as there's only so many times you can run across rooftops before you get a bit tired of it. The abilities you unlock are fantastic, but aren't enough to save the repeated travel across the game's maps from being annoying- I mean, you spend more time traveling than you do in a mission specific encounter sometimes, like in side quests where you just have to pick up an item and then go somewhere else.
Combat works surprisingly well once you realize what to do. Cutting a zombie's head clean off is oh so satisfying, and when you have a good weapon with a lot of durability, you're able to engage in combat scenarios for the fun of it. Fighting hordes is hard, as it should be- but with clever use of gadgets you can absolutely manage. The combat system is bolstered by not only the numerous useful moves unlocked in the skill tree, but also by the absolutely massive amount of craftable upgrades, weapons, and tools. You can apply elements to your weapons to make them stronger at the cost of a few resources, and add upgrades to further customize them, fostering attachments to your favorite weapons since you're the one that made it into something personal. The craftable gadgets are great too, and can make clearing out hordes a breeze as well as coming in handy in emergencies, although explosions or other loud noises can draw the attention of fast moving Virals.
Also, you obtain a lot of throwables, especially from humen enemies. The throwables are weak, and while they provide a brief stun and a hit of damage, I never found them worth equipping, and ended up discarding them when i realized that you get many different types that each take up a backpack slot. Any situation where you could use a throwable, a conventional weapon or a gadget is most definitely a better choice. They're just not worth picking up- even the most garbage of weapons sell for more money at shops.
Overall, the combat works well with the exception of useless throwables, but fighting isn't always the best decision. Camouflage, an early upgrade, makes it possible to just skip combat encounters, similar to what the grapple hook does to platforming challenges. After killing a zombie, you can cover yourself in its blood to become unnoticable by any daytime undead. With a few upgrades you can kill another zombie, use it for camo, and keep going while being completely unnoticed. Combined with the stealth takedown- which takes entirely too long to unlock, like it's near the bottom of a skill tree- you can infinitely chain zombie takedowns and camo refreshes to avoi combat altogether. Volatiles, the nighttime-only ultra-strong-and-fast zombies can actually see through the camo, but it's rare that you'll see one during missions, especially if you sleep through nights.
Nights in Dying Light got my heart pumping harder than most horror games, as Volatiles appear and hunt throughout the darker hours. They have trouble seeing in the dark, so you'll have to turn off your flashlight, and once you're spotted, they'll chase you until you either die or reach a safe house. They're hearty, too, so killing them is just a waste of durability or ammunition. Moving around at night awards double experience points for anything you do, but that just simply isn't worth it when you can die extremely quickly if caught by even a single Volatile. They even move faster than the player so the only way to keep them off you is by using gadgets, which is risky, or by using vericality and doing parkour moves to gain a bit of distance and hoping they don't catch up to you. Nights are taxing on a player's resources, and can drain your survivor tree xp if you die, so it's smarter to book it to a safehouse at the first sign of nightfall and sleep until morning.
While you'll hopefully be avoiding combat with Volatiles, you'll need to defend yourself against other survivors. Human on human combat is pretty clunky, and without a ranged weapon you'll end up getting your strikes parried constantly. The better option is to use guns or bows and take out humans from a distance, and the gunplay against human opponents is actually quite good. Use of the survivor sense, which reveals enemies through walls, makes Dying Light play like a fairly good cover shooter. You can also use the sound of enemies' gunshots to draw Virals to their location, and they'll often win the fight for you. It really is a shame that hand to hand combat against humans is so lackluster, though.
Systems
Dying Light has a lot of interlocking systems, but the one's I'd like to talk about are the skill trees, quests, challenges, weather, safe houses, and the minimap.
Dying Light's skill trees are small, but packed with useful skills and very rarely require you to unlock a bad skill in order to access a much better one. The player agency given when picking your next skill to unlock feels good and helps personalize your gameplay experience. The XP required to level up the skill trees is given from performing the dedicated action, with running and climbing upgrading agility, fighting upgrading power, and turning in resources and suviving nights upgrading survivor. XP is also awarded from quests and challenge completions.
On the subject of quests, side quests are more often than not just fetch quests. The game feels bloated when doing these back to back, since travel takes longer than the quest itself. However, the monotony can be broken up by challenges sprinkled around the map, which task you to perform a specific task under a time limit, often with some restrictions. This can range from getting headshots to climbing a tower, and they bring out the best in combat and parkour since you don't have time to use camo and fail agility missions if you use the grappling hook. I often looked at challenges as little distractions to stumble upon while traveling across the map. They give less XP on repeat completions, encouraging you to beat it when you come across it and then move on to whatever you were doing. I enjoyed them for what they were and appreciated the XP they provided.
The game sometimes has weather, like fog or rain, which looks incredible and can make traversing the game world more interesting even if you're in an area you know well, since you might not be able to hear or see zombies due to the weather conditions.
Unlocking safe houses allows you to spawn at them, and is necessary when you have to do missions on the outer fringes of the map. Clearing the safe house requires killing all zombies in it's area and turning on lights to ward off the undead. The zones can be used to instantly end Volatile pursuits, change outfits, manage inventory, and accept easy, repeatable bounties. The act of unlocking them and then being able to operate out of them gives a good sense of familiarity with that specific safe house, and further allows players to personalize their play experiences as they will actively have to go and clear a safe house in order to gain a foothold in a new area of the map, which will be an experience completely unique to them. On top of that, there's often a lot of environmental storytelling present, with bodies or equipment scattered around that you can look at to glean knowledge about why that safe area was overrun.
Finally, on normal mode, the minimap displays the locations of Virals, the fast moving zombies that are attracted to sound, and the locations and view cones of Volatiles at night. This means you'll be often watching the minimap very closely, and it's one of the game elements that breaks immersion pretty severely. On hard mode, the minimap doesn't show any of those things, and only shows human opponents and objectives. These are fine since they're super necessary and if you don't have humans marked, you'll get gunned down immediately when they see you. However, this doesn't undercut the fact that hard mode boosts immersion greatly in many ways. Using survivor sense is much more necessary, and having to actively look around for the marked zombies creates tense experiences constantly and is leaps and bounds better than staring at the corner of your screen for hours on end. Survivor sense also doesn't mark items, which can be a bit annoying if you're looking for quest items, but I'd say that's pretty minor most of the time; I did have to look up locations for a few items though. Hard mode also makes it so the game doesn't pause when you open your inventory, increasing immersion further as you'll have to hide and wait for a safe time to craft items. I switched to hard mode after beating the story, and recommend that you switch to hard as soon as you get a handle on the game's systems or when it feels too easy. I enjoyed the hard difficulty much more than normal, and wish I switched earlier into the story.
Guidance
The game's guidance when it comes to objectives is passable; it's definitely not hand holding, and it's personally rewarding to figure out the more obtuse objectives on your own. However, you can get lost pretty easily, especially inside buildings. When instructed to find something or get somewhere, you might be left stumbling around blindly if you don't know where to start. This is at its worst when you're in a story setpiece that tells you that you need to go fast, but you can't find where to go and you look around for a doorway for ten minutes while high octane music plays. Objectives that require you to get into an area are often pretty messy as well, since some areas have very specific ways to get in that aren't easy to spot, especially on a first playthrough. The grapple hook helps with this issue, though.
In the event that a path is outlined, the objects you'll need to use to traverse the environment will be colored yellow, drawing your eyes to them. I personally really liked this as a natural way to show players where to go without breaking immersion.
I've talked about it already, but we need to address it just one more time: the game not telling you how to effectively fight zombies is a huge issue. If you have someone showing you what to do, I'm sure it's fine, but if not, you'll have to deal with not knowing that blunt weapons are much weaker than bladed ones and that you should be picking up and selling most of the random weapons you stumble upon. This lack of instruction and generally obtuse design hurts new players and may turn them off from the game if they don't quickly figure out the optimal ways to play.
Replayability
Dying Light has a lot of replayability, mostly present in the challenges, random events, quarantine zones, and legend skill tree. We've covered challenges already, but redoing them for XP and better scores could definitely be a draw for some people- it just wasn't for me, so I can't really vouch for them.
Random world events show up in blue on your map, and are either limited time shops with good deals, survivors fighting hordes of zombies, or armed thugs holding hostages. These events are similar to challenges as they are nice distractions to get caught up in when you're in the midst of traveling. They award a widely varying amount of XP, and unfortunately sometimes don't feel worth it when you get a small amount of money and XP after you use a big chunk of your hard earned resources. There are also survivor escort missions that show up randomly, where you have to defend a survivor as they run around the map. The survivors are fun and have cute quirky personalities, but these activities give extremely lackluster rewards.
There are also quarantine zones, repeatable quests that task you with exploring a closed building full of zombies. Camo works well here, as the zones provide surprisingly effective horror scenarios and you'll want to be hidden so you're not caught off gaurd. They provide a good chunk of survivor XP, which is helpful since you lose survivor XP upon death.
The legend skill tree unlocks when you get a skill tree to the max level, and that tree's points will then be funneled into the legend tree. Unlocks in the legend tree are basic percentage bonuses to physical attributes like health and damage, and provide something else to work towards when your other trees are maxed. The legend XP is lost upon death, similar to the survivor tree, so it enourages staying alive as the penalty of losing a half hour's worth of XP is pretty intense. It's nice to see something for hardcore players to work towards when everything else is completed.
Personal Reflection
I played a little Dying Light on Xbox back when it launched, at it was great getting to play it on a framerate that didn't give me a constant headache. I did almost abandon the game due to the weak start, but I pushed through and ended up loving it by the end. I was surprised at how well the platforming worked; it almost always worked as intended and very rarely did I climb objects or do actions that I didn't expect to. In addition, the visual effects are astounding; Dying Light is easily one of the best looking games I've ever played.
An unfortunate thing that happened for me was that after I finished the story, the replayability-focused content felt empty to me. The bounties were tedious and I didn't enjoy running round the city looking for world events or redoing challenges. Those activities really worked as distractions, but couldn't hold the game up on their own in my opinion. I also wasn't the biggest fan of the game's self awareness, with Dying Light logos and gaming in-jokes spread about the map, but I realized it wasn't a big deal- it was just breaking my immersion while I tried to focus on the game's self serious story.
Speaking of the story, it was elevated above being simple and boring all because the score was incredible. The synth enhanced story moments and I just loved listening to it in the main game world. It's a shame they're not getting the same guy for the sequel's soundtrack :/
A few anecdotes: I got teleported back to the first area when I had the story at 52 percent complete and had to look up how to get back to the second area, and I ended up selling a weapon on accident, exited out of the vendor menu, and then found the Buy Back menu was empty when I tried to retrieve it. Those are pretty small bugs and personal issues, but I feel like they should be stated at the very least for someone to learn from. For a quick final positive, there was a moment where I talked to a person I needed information from to advance the main story. My character told him he'd help him take care of his kids later since the main story was quite pressing at the time, and it was a great moment of player agency to let me come back and do his quest when everything was resolved and it helped me connect to the game's story in a way I hadn't prior to that moment.
A final note, and a conclusion: I know I talked about a lot of negatives throughout this review, but I finished the game hungry for more and immediately jumped into the DLC- that is to say, I enjoyed it so much I couldn't get enough. The game is rough around the edges, that's undeniable, but there's so much passion and detail put into every inch of it that it's become one of my favorite game's I've played this generation. I wholeheartedly recommend it, but if you're gonna get it, pick up The Following DLC too. It improves on everything in the base game and even if you don't enjoy the base game as much as I did, it's worth checking out to see how much better every aspect of the game becomes.
The Following[
This section will be a bit shorter than everything above it, since it's expected you'll go into The Following with nearly maxed out skill trees and extensive knowledge of the game, so I won't nee to complain about the new player experience or anything. I once again completed all the side quests and thoroughly explored the game, and got both main endings an the secret ending.
Story
The Following's story starts after the main story of Dying Light finishes, and the player character is sent out of the Harran Quarantine Zone to find more medicine for the survivors inside. The story features a cult worshipping a mysterious figure called "The Mother" who somehow wards off the infection of her subjects. The Following is a great deal more mysterious in nature than the mostly straightforward main story, and is focused mainly on having the player complete tasks for the cult in order to gain their trust and get access to their technique for avoiding infection. This actually works a lot better than the base game, since your main goal is to gain trust and, with the absence of story missions, you're free to just do side quests and get distracted all you want, knowing it'll be advancing the story no matter what you do. The setting is also very different to the city of Harran; the countryside is mostly flat with wide stretches of nothing but open road, with the exception of a small town with similar structure to Harran's Old Town. It's a nice change of pace to travel over huge, gorgeous expanses and have to plan your route throughout a map that is easily a few times larger than either map in the base game. The travel is aided by the buggy, a new vehicle you gain access to at the start of the campaign, which does an amazing job at making travel engaging, an area where the base game fell slightly short.
Before we talk about the buggy, however, I should mention that the story has a lot more little features that were absent in the base game. With the renewed focus on side quests, it's great that they allow you to engage in optional conversations with people to see how they were affected by your actions or to gain some insight into their society. These conversations also flesh out characters more than the base game, and you fell like you truly got to know them by the conclusion of the campaign.
Speaking of the conclusion, there's actually multiple endings this time around. There are 2 main endings, as in there's a choice that determines how the story finishes up, and 1 secret ending. However, while one of the main endings is a fantastic boss fight, the other is a glorified cutscene with little player input. The secret ending is similar, and while there is slight foreshadowing hinting at it's contents, it only involves finding a few hidden items and activating a final cutscene. No diologue, no resolution. It's a bit of a let down, but it takes very little time to track down the items for it and it's nice to see a secret like that. You are able to get all the endings on a single save file, you just have to select the story mission you want to start from. It's pretty easy, so you don't have to stress about backing up your save or picking a bad ending.
The story does end on a much more emotional and somber note than the base game, leaving you feeling helpless and desperate as you lose contact with your friends inside Harran. In the moment, it felt like a lot of diologue just to heighten the sense of tension, but in retrospect, the last few hours are there to bring you down and leave the DLC on a bittersweet (or just straight up bad, depending on your ending) note, which I can appreciate. No story told in moral shades of black and white could leave you thinking about it as much as one told with nuance, in my opinion.
Gameplay Loop
The main gameplay pull of The Following is the buggy; a new skill tree is added for it's gadgets and techniques and it handles quite well. The buggy drives pretty realistically and consistently, and it's easy to pull of some cool drifts or jumps with it right away; it's just that intuitive. Having to plan out your route through the world is also super engaging, combine that with hard mode where the game doesn't pause when you open your map and you'll be looking for places to pull over and safely check your path, hoping that nothing sneaks up on you while you do it. I loved this aspect, and it got me completely immersed within minutes of loading up the game and itching to come back as soon as I turned it off. You definitely get to know the lay of the lan after driving around it for a few hours, and as you begin to recognize roads and landmarks, it feels amazing to realize that you really know your way around the map. The increased familiarity also makes it satisfying to pull off drifts to get to your destination faster, and repairing your buggy's parts after a long drive is never too much of a hassle.
Unlike the base game's skill trees, the driver tree's progression is shown to you in a tangible way, as your buggy gets attackments and armor depending on the upgraes you choose, adding a nice personal aspect to it beyond just the paint job customization. The side quests are also a bit more fleshed out this time, and involve varied scenarios that feel worth the slightly longer travel time. The new weapons are also a nice change; the melee weapons are similar to what was in the base game, but the new crossbow an SMG are welcome additions that handle unlike any previous weapon and fill new niches in the game's sandbox.
Systems
The DLC also adds Volatile Hives in an attempt to make the night/day gameplay a bit more developed; these hives are full of volatiles during the day, but full of Virals at night. The point of them is to get in, get through the horde kill a stationary Volatile that wont fight back, and get out before dawn. Clearing the nest will reduce the amount of Volatiles roaming the countryside at night, and it's a system meant to let you have the ability to get the bonus night XP if you want to put in the extra work. It's still easier to just sleep through nights as the Volatile nests are super spread out and require a lot of work to get to one, sleep until night, and then take it out. I never bothered with them beyond the side missions that require you to clear some out, but I also rarely ventured out during the night, so theres a bit of player choice available there.
The car abilities and upgrades also allow a lot of player expression. The driver tree not only lets you mod your car with new attributes, it also gives you access to attachments on your car, like a flamethrower or a portable safe zone formed by UV lights, and it allows you to activate these abilities remotely to create distractions or traps. The sky's the limit when it comes to the possibilities, and it's a welcome addition that can completely change up how you approach situations.
Replayability
The Following also brings a great deal of replayability options for those that want that. The challenges from the base game return, but are focused around the buggy this time. Races, killing zombies with your car, and simple checkpoint runs are all present and act as welcome distractions when you come across one.
The Volatile hives also lend some replayability, but can only be completed once. Thankfully, they're supplemented by the returning world events, which don't bring anything new, but are nice distractions regardless.
A big chunk of replayability also comes from the locked crates strewn around the map. At different points in the story you get different tools that let you track and access these crates, that often hold extremely useful items, such as guns or ammo packs. They're decently fun to track down, and the rewards are almost always worth it to track down if you get pings from one.
Personal Reflection
The Following improved on everything I had issues with in the base game, so it's pretty easy for me to say that I loved it. I enjoyed the driving a lot more than I thought I would, and took a lot of pride in driving well. The new SMG was actually really useful to me, and I got a lot of use out of it towards the end of the story. The story gripped my attention way better than the base game, and I wanted to know how it would end and stayed engaged the whole time. I put way more hours per day into the DLC than I did into the main game- it was just that fun. There were a few small issues I had, like when the world event where armed thugs are holding a civilian hostage just wouldn't complete, even when I killed all the enemies. I also didn't like how the exploder zombies on the roads were constant and a bit annoying, but they did keep me on my toes all the time, which I can appreciate. Overall I think The Following is a necessary purchase for anyone who had even a little bit of fun with the base game.
Alright, that's the review! This is my first review of this calibre, and I hope it turned out good. Thanks for reading!