Dying Light

Dying Light is a great experience from beginning to end. The combat is stellar, the parkour is a genre best, and it's taking place in an environment perfectly designed for the game's strengths. For all of its problems, Dead Island was pointing towards something great in the future, and it's clear that Dying Light is that something.

Dying Light is an enjoyable yet clichéd zombie game that successfully injects Parkour into its mechanics.

Dying Light is better than Dead Island in just about every way possible.

Dying Light probably won't be the most innovative game of 2015. Even its plot and main characters are a bit lame, but gameplay wise, what it does, it does right. Zombies, parkour, co-op, RPG elements... It's one of those games that if you give it a chance, (better on co-op), you won't be able to drop the pad.

It’s just so easy to pick up and get lost in for a few hours at a time. You can credit Techland for that success because it picked a few ideas and really got them right.

With some crazy fun online elements and a badass sense of actual achievement, Dying Light is the zombie game we've been working for. Just mute those terrible voices. [Issue#254, p.64]

Quotation forthcoming.

Its main story is unspectacular, but the memorable side quests and sheer fun of exploring its world do a fantastic job of offsetting that, making Dying Light one of the most engrossing open-world games – zombie-infested or otherwise – I've played in a while.

Dying Light is a strong open-world zombie game that delivers a good experience on nearly every front.

Forget Dead Island, the most famous production from Techland. Dying Light is more "survival", and more "horror". It's not a perfect game, but it's pretty scary and challenging, especially if you love parkour.

Overall, my time with Dying Light has been incredibly exhilarating and entertaining. The ability to play with friends, but still improve my character without having to worry about losing out on any progress I have earned keeps me coming back for more and more.

All in all, Dying Light is a lot of fun, thanks entirely to the way it handles movement and city exploration.

The good news is that both Alex the Action-fan, Susan the Stealth-lover and Gareth the Graphics-geek are going to enjoy Dying Light. The bad news is that Steven the Story-freak won’t be joining them.

Dying Light is a breath of fresh air in such an already well-known genre the games involved with the zombi universe. The mix of parkour and walking dead makes the offering a fancy result, with few technical issues.

While it may borrow from games we already know and love it does so with its own flair and separates itself from other less than spectacular zombie themed games out there.

It's not perfect, but Dying Light is last, brutal and most importantly, fun. [April 2015, p74]

It’s tough to get excited by video game zombies these days, but by blending a detailed open world, cool parkour moves and a satisfyingly deep system for character and weapon customization, Dying Light has clawed out a novel space in this crowded genre. Long live the undead.

It is scrappy in places, and often trite, but is well structured and compelling. Let’s hope Techland take this success and run with it.

Whether it's free running run one side of a map to the other, traversing great heights or simply making a zombies head explode with a baseball bat, Light offers you plenty of diversity to keep the game interesting.

The story's a waste of time and the audio's lacking, but other than that, Dying Light is a blast. As far as mindless, dumb fun with a healthy dose of free running goes, you won't find much better than Dying Light.

Dying Light presents a dynamic and frustrating parallel; it's quick to dazzle its audience with heaping stacks of energetic (if not wholly borrowed) content, but equally capable of coming apart under the burgeoning stress of weaving it all together.

Dying Light just about fires on all cylinders. The immensely satisfying gameplay, stunning visuals, and horrifying nights makes this easily one the best survival horror games to come out in the last couple of years.

Dying Light is easy to write off as a Dead Island knockoff, but it is anything but. It has a completely different feel, with intense mobility and speed mixing with far more deadly enemies. It's also more tightly designed and more fun to play and is an overall improvement over Dead Island in almost every way.

A surprising mix of old and new, which has managed to once again rekindle my excitement for both the genre and the developer. It may stumble every so often, but Dying Light is still the most fun I’ve had in a while.

Dying Light is a really enjoyable game. The atmosphere is absolutely spot on and the game world is a joy to traverse with your parkour skills. It has issues with its mission structure and confusion in the direction of its protagonist, but you’ll likely be having too much fun to care.

Dead Island meets Mirror’s Edge: it could seem a bizarre marriage but Dying Light makes the most of it.

Dying Light starts out disappointing, but once you allow its brand of undead action to circulate your bloodstream, it can be difficult to put down.

On the surface Dying Light may be nothing more than your average run-of-the-mill zombie game complete with predictable story and tons of flesh eating monstrosities. But, beneath the very pretty surface lies a game with some excellent ideas that, when combined with some tried and true mechanics, create one of the best zombie games in recent years.

Fun and good looking, but hardly revolutionary. That would be the perfect definition for dying Light, which seems to conform with just introducing parkour mechanics to justify its spin on the zombie games genre.

Dying Light is a good game, but the story and the fighting system disappoint. We appreciate this game for being a lovely mixture of action, excitement, gore and freedom.

Dying Light is a satisfying zombie survival game with a few features that make it stand out against the many other zombie survival games out there. Even so, after playing it for a while, the gameplay becomes quite repetitive.

Take a large measure of Dead Island, a pinch of Mirror's Edge, a handful of Left 4 Dead, a little of Dead Rising and a few grams of Far Cry, and mix the result. You'll get Dying Light, an open-world game which tries to bring something new without really being able to do it.

Dying Light has its moments. It has a great concept and that concept is executed relatively well, with a few minor drawbacks. I still say the villain seems awfully familiar and the story is just way too predictable, and some of the main missions feature design choices that are definite head-scratchers.

A slightly better version of Dead Island in everything but name. [Apr 2015, p.84]

Dying Light is a sum of its inspirational parts. It brings together Techland's previous Dead Island with a bit of Mirror's Edge and Far Cry 3. At its best, leaping across the rooftops with zombies milling about below, it surpasses those titles. At worse, it has mechanics that needlessly pad out the game's running time.

Although a sound game, Dying Light just falls short of greatness.

Quotation forthcoming.

Dying Light features some truly serene moments as you glide from building to building, but once that serenity halts, so does the player’s enjoyment.

If you’re a Dead Island enthusiast, zombie addict, or free running connoisseur, Dying Light is the game for you.

My dearest Dying Light, I am so grateful for your specialness, for it shines through even when I am prepared to damn you to hell.

Dying Light introduces a new way to see the survival horror genre. It combines aspects of other great games and carries its own soul to demonstrate how a real zombie apocalypse would be in an open world game. Great fast-paced action.

Even though its story will leave most players unsatisfied and its open-world design is questionable at best, its phenomenal side stories and often entertaining gameplay will prevent distaste. This isn’t the next The Last of Us, and its narrative comes nowhere close to Telltale’s The Walking Dead, but the framework is in place for a generally good time.

Techland proves with Dying Light that the zombie genre has potential to grow. The parkour system works great, the setting is fresh and killing undead is always good. On the other hand there are cliches, boring missions and stolen inspiration, which are keeping this game from really getting good grades.

Fans of zombie survival, open worlds, and first-person shooters will find things to enjoy in Dying Light, but it’s a rough ride. The contextual movement and realistic time progression suggest that Techland wants to immerse you in Harran’s apocalyptic plight, but the game’s realism takes a hit at almost every turn whether it’s the graphics, the enemy AI, or the mannequin-like demeanor of the souls you’ll attempt to save.

Without such a narrative, Dying Light devolves into almost pure gore. It’s not that the game is inordinately bloody or hard to stomach; it’s that it presents itself like a sadistic RPG, where the main goal isn’t to find the aforementioned file for the GRE, but rather gain as much strength, agility, and weapon modifications as you can so that your zombie skirmishes become more and more ludicrous the deeper you get into the game.

Bad storytelling and mission design that brings mechanical flaws to the forefront, however, and dampens whatever momentum the experience has. If the best time you can have with Dying Light is through avoiding the main content, maybe that says a lot about how you shouldn’t be structuring an open world game.

The sheer "stuff" can keep you occupied for hours upon hours, simply because the mechanics are clean enough and the game world itself is beautiful. When the game is still in its tutorial portions, you'll find yourself on top of a high building. Take a look around from there, and you'll see a detailed and varied city, see plenty in the distance. This is a good-looking game.

It’s a shame those moments aren’t more frequent, though, because I really wanted to like Dying Light more than I did. I still wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it if you’re in need of some schlocky fun, there are just some caveats clutching on to this recommendation that even a bloody hatchet won’t fix.

Dyling Light's problem is that it also brings everything else that comes with open-world games with it, and it's a poor, uninteresting fit with how strong the free-running is.

Don’t let concerns with Techland’s previous Dead Island games stop you from taking on a chance on Dying Light. You have to slog through some really terrible story missions and some very janky combat, but there’s a detailed world to discover, and a lot of fun mechanics to take advantage of.

Dying Light isn't a bad game, it's just one that feels like it goes on a bit too long, and was too invested in the trappings of an "open world" to make itself really stand out.

What’s here works well enough, but it lacks soul, and if there’s any motivation to continue it’s only that you want to see it through - a damning indictment for any game.

The parkour and risk/reward of the day/night cycle are nice features, but they aren’t enough to overcome the abysmal writing or the boring, repetitive fetch quests that unnecessarily bloat this game.

Ultimately it's a game I appreciate for its ideas more so than its execution.

Unless you have better luck acclimating to the traversal mechanics than I did, Dying Light is hard to recommend.

A small improvement on Dead Island, but there’s still barely anything that either works as well as advertised or is isn’t just stolen wholesale from other, better, games.