Dying Light

26 Jan 2015

PC (Microsoft Windows) PlayStation 4 Xbox 360 Xbox One Linux PlayStation 3 Mac
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7.2 rating
2903 want
10934 played
824 playing
465 reviews
Developer
Techland
Publisher
WB Games

Tags

Time to beat

Main story icon

Main story

17h 36m
Main story and extras icon

Main story + extras

34h 54m
100% completion icon

100% completion

65h 26m
Based on 129 answers
Summary

Dying Light is a first-person, action survival horror game set in a vast and dangerous open world. During the day, players traverse an expansive urban environment overrun by a vicious outbreak, scavenging the world for supplies and crafting weapons to defend against the growing infected population. At night, the hunter becomes the hunted, as the infected become aggressive and more dangerous. Most frightening are the predators which only appear after sundown. Players must use everything in their power to survive until the morning’s first light.

Dying Light is a great and natural evolution of Techland's mediocre first attempt at creating a first person zombie survival video game, adding meaningful changes and mechanics that give this IP it's own iconic identity.

Visually Dying Light aged quite well, the bright sunrise and sunfall over the city of Harran is still stunning, but some textures upclose tend to look muddy at times, the game also has so sort of problem with motion blur that messes up with the image, but it is still servicable especially thanks to current gen patch, making the game run and look the best it ever did in 60fps. Besides that zombies look great and are satisfying to brutalise, especially I enjoy the x-ray bone cracking effect the game often does when you use blunt weapons.

Narrative received a much bigger focuse this time around, Crane is a pretty good and iconic protagonist, he has a solid character arc that makes him truly care about the people of Harran and the change is well realised. Main villain though is just average, nothing to talk about but he is well acted, side characters are great though only a handful are a standout. It's nothing special, mostly the protagonist carries the story with his often interactions with the agency and some of the side charracters that provide some emotional story moments.

Gameplay is the highlight of Dying Light, especially the main new gameplay element added to the mix - parkour. It's rather rare to see parkour being such integral part in video games and it is integrated, animated and used quite extensively and well, jumping around zombies and fleeing running infected across rooftops is always fun, but I do dislike how you need to upgrade and grind for ability point so the parkour would become more usable throughout the game and not just give you to play with it properly right away. Combat is solid, weapons are satisfying to use, dismemberment looks great, guns though are pretty undercooked when it concerns their both sound and animations. Crafting is also big part of the gameplay and it rewards you with alot of good weaponry if you try focusing your time on it, but it does require grinding though. Side Quests and overall available activities lack variety and don't wildly change beyond go the and clear the area of zombies/humans, but some stories can be entertaining.

Have to mention seperately that Dying Light was surprisingly supported with conctent for around 7-8 years which is praise wortht to say the least, the game currently is highly different from what you could have played at launch. Also open world has an insane number of secrets and easter eggs that most give you some unique blueprints, it's always fun to find those organically.

To sum up, Dying Light is a well rounded zombie survival video game and probably is one of the best choices you can make if you decided to give this genre a try. Also a friendly reminder that nearly every piece of DLC content was made free for you to purchase, adding to every base copy an entire "The Following" expansion, which is well worth your time and makes the overall package quite appealing.
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14 Dec 2024
Damn liked it
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07 Jan 2024
Dope parkour and dope zombie killing.
That's all you need!
story sucks tho lol
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01 Mar 2023
With a Plat
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15 Jul 2022
One of my favorite games of all time. This game felt like it was before it’s time a little bit, and it never ceased to amaze me. Everything from the main game and dlc just came out amazing.
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16 Dec 2024
You want a HELL YEA game? Dying light is the perfect mix of horror zombies parkour and adrenaline rush sepcially at night time. Goodnight Goodluck.
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16 Dec 2024
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