Dying Light is a game of many faces, one face is amazing, the other face is average, and the final face is functional but not all that good to look at. The best face is always the one you should look at, admire, and praise, without ignoring its flaws. The following three things are going to tell you exactly where Dying Light shows it’s beautiful face.
#1 – Good Night Good Luck
In Venisia Gonzalez’s review for Dying Light, she says that “at night it’s scary as hell.” While I don’t agree that it’s scary per say, I definitely do find it very tense. During the day, the game is free and flowing. Giving you the ability to run into a horde of zombies and jump off their heads to pass them, or even take them on in a fight. But then at night, the Volatiles come out, they are creatures whose only real weaknesses are high-level weapons and UV light. They will chase you and often catch up with you. These are what make the night so tense. If one sees you, your only opportunity is to run. Until you have high-level gear and have upgraded your combat skills, fighting Volatiles is pointless. You are powerless and that gets your heart going.
In the dark zombies WILL hear you scream! Probably in space too.
#2 – Buddy Team of Four
The one thing that is lacking in many games of recent years is co-op and not just 2 player, but 4 player. Dying Light has that covered, where you can team up with 4 friends. In co-op everything is 4 times as good, be sure to make Volatiles run into your friends and no longer be worried about them! It’s fine, you can just revive your friends later.
Even the things which bring Dying Light down are not much of an issue in co-op, where you often skip the story anyway when playing with friends. And making the constant fetch quests a race to get to the loot first is a lot of fun.
Look at my team, aren’t they just looking epic?
#3 – Freedom of Movement
I would say the feature in Dying Light which makes the game stand out the most from all other games with zombies in, is the movement system. Without the parkour, Dying Light would just be Dead Island in a new setting. The range of movement afforded to you is staggering, leap, clamber, jump, roll, climb, kick, all of these words and more!
Dying Light doesn’t just do parkour well, it does it better than any game before. It has the slick movement of Mirror’s Edge, but without the wall running. It has environments built for parkour, like Brink. Both of these games did an excellent job with their parkour systems, but Dying Light simply does it better.
Dying Light appears to be using the ideas behind Brink’s SMART (Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain) system and improving it, making it more fluid, thus more like Mirror’s Edge. Of course, no system is perfect. It has its flaws, but mostly the system works flawlessly. It would just be great if it was more obvious which buildings we can’t climb up.
Leaping across gaps like this is some of the most fun I’ve had in recent games.
Dying Light is a great game and should be celebrated for what it does well. The parkour, the 4 player co-op, and the day/night cycle.
I would love to see more games use a day/night cycle like Dying Light’s, Dragon’s Dogma is a great example of it also. And now I climb onto just about everything I’m not sure I want to go back, I want to see almost every game have a parkour-esque system no matter how simple it is. Simply vaulting or jumping over things isn’t enough anymore.
Dying Light is out now on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC digitally, the physical boxed release is coming on the 27th February.
Which features do you like the most in the game?
And be sure to read about the three worst things in Dying Light.
