Name: Dying Light
Platform(s): Windows (reviewed), Linux, Xbox One, PS4
Price: US$60 (as of April 30, 2015)
A few friends and I finished Dying Light last night. Ugh. Fucking ugh.
The first third of the game is pretty good but it falls off so quickly after that point that it's kind of silly. In short, the game drops more plot threads than The Room, the combat gets insanely tedious after a couple of hours, and the story is painfully bad. It would have actually been better if they'd stuck with the cliche story that they were initially setting up. When they try to throw in clever "twists" it always winds up failing hard. The only thing that really stands out is the parkour system. Every other aspect of the game has been done far better in other games.
The story is nothing short of a goddamn mess. Plot threads start abruptly and peter out almost as quickly. Elements that were added in the dialogue to give you a sense of urgency just simply don't fucking matter (in one instance you're told that you have 48 hours to do something, but in reality any number of game days can go by--the event is just plot gated). The pacing is completely off, with the game trying to make you feel David Cage levels of emotion when characters that you barely know are abruptly killed off. There are some characters that you literally share less than five minutes of time with, but when something happens to them, Our Glorious Hero screams and wails about it as if they'd been friends for ages. If you would have gotten to know these characters over the course of several hours it would have been a different story and might have actually been effective, but the way it stands now it just feels like the writers are trying to manipulate you into being upset.
They tried hard to make the main villain terrifying, but to say that the attempt failed would be a drastic understatement. It looks like the writers were attempting to conjure up a mixture between Far Cry 3's Vaas and Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker, but all you really end up with is a dude who spends half of the game
torturing and murdering his own bloody people and ranting about chaos and how much of a slave the main character is. His schtick gets old and tired after the first scene. It gets to the point where 1) you wonder why the fuck anyone would willingly follow someone like that, their own morality aside, and 2) you just want to kill him so that you don't have to listen to his stupid babbling speeches.
The gameplay is honestly kind of a disaster. The game frames itself as something that rewards crafting and melee combat, but the reality is that guns become quite viable early on. There is a certain point in the game--only a couple of hours in, no less--where ammo becomes available very cheaply. While some could argue that you shouldn't use guns because that attracts the zombies, in reality you wind up getting swarmed anyway. The only real caveat with firearms is that you can't carry a whole heck of a lot of ammo, but they do so much damage that it generally doesn't matter. As long as you remember to stop at shops you can use guns quite often without having to worry.
The main questline is all over the place, with some parts being reasonably fun and other parts being laced with artificial difficulty and insta-kills. Definitely a ton of "
Do It Again, Stupid" gameplay in many of those parts, and the fact that you lose experience points when you die in the daytime certainly doesn't help matters. The side quests are mostly a bunch of tedious fetch quests. My group and I started out doing them, but ultimately we just focused on the storyline because they were just that dull.
The parkour generally works fine, though in the instances that it does fail it tends to be when you're a hundred feet above the ground. Ouch. Climbing down from heights does tend to be a bit more harrowing than it really should be, but thankfully the game doesn't force you to do that very often.
Oh yeah, the final boss fight is a QTE. That's it. There are also a number of annoying QTE-like things thrown all around the game, like when biters randomly grab you. Instead of a fairly seamless system like Killing Floor, your cameras is forced to look at them, your weapon immediately disappears, and you have to mash a key or button. Don't get me wrong, Killing Floor's system is far from perfect, but it's
way better than that. Additionally, there's the obligatory scenes where you have to pull a panel off or open a gate, all of which require you to needlessly mash buttons.
The PC port is also a bit lackluster. While it's generally fine from a technical aspect, playing silky smooth with no stuttering or drops, it's deeply flawed from a controls perspective. The weapon and item switch systems are clumsy and awkward and some actions share a key with things that you absolutely don't want to accidentally trigger.
For example, the game has a "co-op competition" feature. In certain sections that button will trigger a little mini-event that allows the players to compete for survivor points. That's all fine and dandy and for some groups may even be kind of fun, but the real problem lies with the fact that it shares a key with the damn medkit. We've had it happen several times where we went to heal up and accidentally triggered a competition, causing our characters to get locked in place until we figured out what happened and cancelled out of it. Considering how many keys are on a keyboard, there's absolutely no excuse for that.
All in all, I'd recommend giving it a miss if you haven't already picked it up. It might be worth $10 on a Steam sale just to dick around with the parkour, but even that's kind of a stretch. Like one of my friends said, it feels like they built this great sandbox and parkour system before realizing that they had to tack a story onto it. Extremely disappointing.
Final Score: 45% - Disappointing
Edit: Converted this to my shiny, ultra-new, not-exactly-patented review format.
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