Dying Light (2015)

The first Dying Light entry is an open-world zombie survival game that stands out for its parkour movement system. Traversing the rooftops and alleyways of Harran feels fluid and exhilarating, giving you a unique sense of freedom compared to most games in the genre. The day and night cycle is one of its strongest features, dramatically shifting the tone of the game. During the day, players can scavenge and fight with relative safety, but when night falls, the city becomes terrifying as more aggressive and deadly infected emerge, creating tense survival scenarios.

The core gameplay loop combines melee combat, scavenging, and crafting, which keeps survival engaging and resource-driven. Visuals and atmosphere were impressive for the time, with detailed environments and lighting effects that enhanced immersion. However, the game isn’t without flaws. Side missions often become repetitive, mostly revolving around simple fetch quests or clearing areas. The story, while serviceable, leans heavily on familiar zombie tropes and doesn’t leave a strong narrative impact.

Despite its shortcomings, Dying Light delivers a rewarding experience for fans of survival and action games. Its blend of parkour, brutal combat, and the fear-inducing night cycle makes it one of the more memorable entries in the zombie genre. This is one of the best survival horror titles that I've played, even though it heavily focuses in action, it still delivers most of the main elements of a survival game in general. I highly recommend not skipping this one if you like this genre to any extent.

Hour 1: Zombie parkour? Awesome! Hour 5: Wait there's really no fast travel? Hour 10: Oh I'm still fighting zombie hordes with a wrench? And combat with humans is pretty whack. Hour 15: Ok I have a gun now, but I'm starting to think first-person platforming isn't such a great idea. My guy can climb 200ft radio towers, but he somehow doesn't know how to climb down anything. Hour 20: Aaaand the story finale is just about 100 platforming deaths in a row.

Such great ideas in this game, but it eventually wound up more frustrating than fun for me. Worth $15 but not much more.

I had high hopes for Dying Light, and while it mostly delivered on an interesting core loop, and includes my favorite in-game activity of open-world parkour, I found the combat repetitive and the mission difficulty highly uneven. At some point I encountered a story mission that kept pulling large numbers of zombies to a building I was interested in via an alarm and I just gave up.

Great locations and a reasonable story line were not enough to keep me playing after that roadblock, and I think that says it all.

Essentially a Dead Island game but with parkour and guns you can shoot.

I’ve had this in my backlog for a while and thought what better time to play it than pandemic. The game is fine. Maybe a little better than Dead Island but not by a long shot - at least in my opinion.

In the game you play as a secret agent of some government organisation sent to the infected city of Harran with a job of finding some secret document. Things go south, you get bit and will try to complete the mission while trying to have a constant supply of antizyne - an infection stopper - while making friends and looking for an antidote.

Visually I’d say it’s a mixed bag. While the graphics quality is really good I did not particularly like the level design. The town seems lacking in character. The city is divided into two parts. First one reminds me of some South african town and reminds me a lot of the Dead Island game. The second part has an Italian feel to it - something along the lines of Assassin’s Creed 2. While the second is more likeable it’s also a lot easier with more accessible rooftop paths.

Gameplay wise it’s very much like Dead Island. There are a couple of zombie types, the slow walkers, the runners, the spitters, the bruts - the usual bunch. For most part you’ll be running around avoiding them and occasionally smacking them in the head with crafted weapons.

The addition of parkour is a welcomed one. Adds a lot of maneuverability and when executed correctly makes traversing the terrain quite pleasant.

The game also adds usable guns. And quite a lot of late game gets you shooting both zombies and people - a very nice change to melee combat.

The whole story is fine. Nothing particularly engaging. There’s plenty of side quest though in most cases felt like fetch quests and I quite quickly decided to skip them in entirety. I focused on the main quest and even with it I was kind of bored towards the end and wanted it to be over.

One more annoying thing which might affect my overall enjoyment of the game was that I started playing during some social event for Left 4 Dead. The event is turned on by default and even turning it off - turns it on every other game launch. And since I was not aware of it I started playing first missions with the event on. The event changed all zombies into running ones - making the game unbearably hard. And I struggled a lot to finish the first missions thinking it was just that way. And I did finish those early missions - and by that time I was fed up with the game and was going to uninstall. Checked some youtube gameplay though and finally realized what was going on.

By that time I got a little too good too quickly. The game in normal settings seemed too easy and it made at least half of the game to be lacking in challenge.

Overall I did finish the game. But it was just an ok experience. Perhaps in multiplayer it would have been better but I don’t know (or care).

Play this game with a friend. Don't even think about it, find your best friend, and both pick this game up. if you both like open world rescourse gathering, slight RPG elements, and mindless, fun zombie killing, then you will not regret playing this game co-op. Find someone on a forum, maybe even this website on the update logs, find anyone, form a bond, and play dying light.

The reasoning for that overly passionate paragraph is because I played this game completely co-op with my frequent online buddy. Traditionally I don't fair too well with zombie games - I find the 'it's right behind you' scenario far too tense and I end up getting a headache instead of enjoying the game. With dying light it's not like the zombies aren't a threat, it's more of the feeling that you're quite a capable person. You can free-run, craft weapons, throw weapons, shoot guns, kick zombies back, jump over zombies, grapple zombies, stamp on their heads... the list goes on.

If you turn the lights off, sit on your own, then yeah it will feel pretty damn scary; for me I chose to play co-op for the entire playthrough, which for starters it should be said that the availability to do such thing is amazing alone. When you start playing co-op the whole game feels different; suddenly you have this playground where more laughs occur than crys for help. Some of my most hilarious moments in a game have been with Dying Light. When at first you would have been in trouble if you were corned on a bridge with 30 zombies, now your co-op partner (it should be said that you can have up to 3 other players with you too!) can swoop in from the roof top, jump on-top of a zombie, and hack them to pieces whilst you're struggling to grapple them away from you. It's like a scene from kill bill where in the background you can just see a ninja slicing heads and arms off rampaging zombies - never gets old.

As for the actual gameplay and game itself; the narrative is pretty interesting and there is an expansion if you get the enhanced edition which kind of adds a whole new full sized map. The expansion map is based in farm kind of district where there are a few buildings, but mainly open farm land. Because of this, I rarely play the expansion map because I prefer the city environment of the original game. If you're like me you'll end up completely not caring for the story and just making your own way through the game, having a blast doing it at every turn!

Without spoiling too much of the exploration for you the main aspects of the game which I think are worth purchasing for are:

• The weapon handling - the weapons for weighty and different depending on what weapon you choose to equip. Big hammers are slow but powerful, small knives are incredibly quick but don't pack much of a punch as you would expect. Even the small useless weapons like drain pipes and hammers still feel incredibly satisfying to use; you really feel like you're surviving and making the most of your surroundings. You also gain XP for all the hits you make on an enemy so don't feel like you have to have the best arsenal at all times.

• The free running is really satisfying yet easy - Running, jumping and climbing never feel old and you get that extra kick when you're running away from a zombie at night (they get incredibly fast at night, would not recommend). When jumping for a ledge it does take some practise getting used to how they handle the grabbing controls. You have to press the jump button and then kind of press the grab button (might be the same button) just as you reach the ledge.

• The size of the map - the things to do and the size quests are plenterful - you can go inside some buildings, capture strong holds etc. There's some fun to be had here for the trophy collectors out there.

• Small things - I appreciate small details in a game and this game has a few nice ones; enemies react to where abouts they're hit. If you want to cut their arm off, aim for their arm! If you cut their legs off they'll sometimes still be alive too. The weapon crafting feels really nice, when you electrify a blade and see the electric tingling around the edges of the blade, and then when you wedge that blade into a zombie and see the electric flow through the zombies body... oddly satisfying. The weapons can have numerous affects applied to them such as fire, electric, poison, heavy weight etc.

If you love open world games, zombies, and playing with friends than I can't recommend this game enough. It has provided me with months and months of laughs and 'running for my life' moments. The amount of easter eggs and pleasant surprises are frequent and there's always something to see or do. I don't really have anything bad to say about this game, and besides, if there was anything, I would instantly forgive due to the amount of fun I have had whilst playing. Please do you and your gaming pal a favor and pick this game up.