Dying Light review: fear of heights

The Polish developer has made a name for itself in the shrinking middle tier of game development, putting out games that were at the very least something different than the status quo. With Call of Juarez, it's demonstrated an ability to deliver an interesting, narrative-driven game, and with the original Dead Island, Techland also showed an ambition to make something big in a difficult space — the open-world action game.

But Techland's output has also been inconsistent — games like Call of Juarez: The Cartel, Nail'd and even Dead Island demonstrated both questionable stability and broken in-game systems. Even at the best of times, Techland's reach has just slightly exceeded its grasp. With Dying Light and new publisher Warner Bros Interactive, Techland is reaching for the big leagues.

There are things to like in Dying Light, and a lot of pieces of cool, satisfying gameplay that, on their own, are exciting. Its height, its sense of scale all build an intimidating verticality. But it's easy to lose all that in a sea of the undead.

Dying Light takes place in the fictional country of Harran, which, in the lead-up to a global athletic games competition — not the Olympics, obviously, because licensing — is overtaken by a mysterious zombie plague.

In this respect, Dying Light takes the zombie apocalypse scenario long since driven into the ground by both film and video game alike and leads it into some less-traveled areas. The middle-eastern setting — Harran appears to be based on Turkish architecture and shares a name with an ancient city in Messopotamia — is distinctive, and presents different character and social dynamics than the largely western environments so common to the genre.

Almost as interesting is the timeline of Dying Light's outbreak. The game takes place several months into Harran's nightmare, where a sort of new normal has been established after the military's failed attempts to contain the situation were followed by more concrete quarantine procedures. Its bridges and avenues to the outside world collapsed, people have found ways to survive, to live in a city overrun.

As Dying Light begins, GRE contractor Kyle Crane is parachuted into Harran to find one of the agency's other assets and a file in his possession. Crane is attacked by thugs as he reaches the ground, and their fight attracts the zombie horde. Crane is rescued by residents of "the Tower," a refuge for some of Harran's surviving residents, and must aid them in order to gain their trust and complete his mission.

That mission quickly sends Crane out into the open-world Harran and hundreds if not thousands of zombies. The city is progressively more overrun as the game moves forward, with a constantly shifting day/night cycle. During the day, zombies can mostly be avoided and aren't much of a threat. But they become more dangerous at night, and there are worse things than shamblers when its dark out.

While Dying Light isn't survival horror exactly, resources are finite. Guns are rare, and gunshots draw the attention of the infected. Like Techland's previous zombie game Dead Island, even melee weapons aren't exactly reliable. They're fragile; they can be repaired and even modified with upgrades, but eventually, they will break. Zombies, on the other hand, are resilient, requiring multiple strikes to take them down in most cases.

This is a problem, because combat in Dying Light gets old pretty fast. While Dead Island introduced a finessible "analog" combat mechanic, Dying Light is much simpler. You can aim at specific body parts, and bladed weapons can dismember in the right circumstances, but even a few hours in, I felt like I was having the same fights over and over again.

The real gem buried within Dying Light is its vertical navigation. You'll spend a lot of time climbing low structures, two and three story buildings too, but there are specific places within Harran that tower above the city. And sometimes, when you're lucky, you'll need to get to the top of them.

These sections are the equivalent of boss fights in other games, towering enemies to be conquered by what felt like clever decisions on my part to make my way upward. Where this might be a disconnected puzzle in other games, Dying Light's visual presentation captures a distinctive sense of scale and height, and even for me, as someone terrified of heights, a genuine hint of vertigo. The ground was much more of an enemy to me in Dying Light than any hoard of zombies was.

In fact, I found myself constantly wishing for more of that, for more death defying traversal, more intelligent navigational challenges. What I got was more zombies, and a lot of bad mission design.

It often felt like there was only one kind of mission in Dying Light — fetch quests. Everyone wanted me to go somewhere and grab something to bring back, which almost always involved having to clear some zombies out first. These missions only evolve insofar as they sent me to more places to grab more things, or, worse, more places to find the same thing. Later in Dying Light some quests are the proverbial wild goose chase, sending you to places only to realize that none of the original "possible points of interest" have what you're supposed to find. Instead, they have a lead on another point of interest. The worst of these dangled the same goal in front of me for four separate locations.

This bizarrely MMO-influenced design is exacerbated by the absence of any sort of fast travel system. 10 hours in, I was running over the same areas again and again to get to a place I had already seen.

There's a bizarre sense that Dying Light is padding out its running time by stringing objectives as far away from one another as possible, which is borne out by my playtime — the game clocked it around 30 hours, though my Xbox One claimed closer to 60. I'd split the difference at 45. In that time, I don't feel like I did that much, save for kill a lot of zombies.

And there are so, so many zombies. Zombies are Dying Light's seeming solution to everything, the obstacle inserted into every scenario to make it last longer than it feels like it should. This isn't always bad — clearing safehouses of nascent infestations felt productive in that open-world sort of way, like concrete progress in a world gone crazy. But elsewhere, they're often a distraction or a cheap trick pulled from zombie movies and even other zombie-oriented games in the most predictable ways.

By the end of Dying Light, after spending dozens of hours instructing me in the fine arts of selective engagement and zombie avoidance, Techland's strategy was, increasingly, to almost literally pour zombies on top of me. Dying Light also got worse at pointing me where it wanted me to go, at adding any development to its characters — shy of kidnapping them or killing them in a cutscene. The story itself is often aimless, and just about always bogged down under clichéd plot beats that drag things out even longer.