With the lack of reviews out in the wild and having an opportunity to have been playing since Friday, thought I would share my overall thoughts about the game with the community. There may be potential spoilers below.
Gameplay I love the walking dead series. There is a sense of desperation and urge to survive that I have rarely seen captured in any zombie games. Dying light I believe really captures this feeling really well. During the day, you run around to secure safe houses spread around the map and gathering resources that you need. At night you scramble to find a safe house to get away from the super zombies (I hope you can level up to a degree to hunt them down eventually). The night is so freaky that I get nervous going out at night. It's a true testament to what Techland was able to accomplish, when they said "At night you are the prey". The last game I remember that really freaked me out was Dead Space.
There are a lot of activities to do. From the standard running missions (Go and fetch something and deliver) to quarantine zones which are like insta dungeons, will be great for co-op.
Every few hours in game, there is an air drop that is a race against time to get there before others do to secure the drop. It's a race against time versus A.I. and I suspect other players when co-op is open. The rewards are huge survivor points if you successfully secure an air drop. Found these really fun to complete.
You have to be a lot more methodical in your approach to taking down zombies, you can't just run around bashing them all in - you will get swamped.
So far I have across the following types of zombies:
- Standard Zombie - Slow moving with limited damage
- Standard Zombie on steroids - Running zombies with limited damage
- Zombie Hulks - Slow moving with heavy damage
- Spitters - Jumping and spitting venom
- Boomers - They explode and can insta kill you
- Hazmats - Zombies with tanks of oxygen on their backs that explode if striked from behind
- MOTHERfukkING NIGHT HUNTERS - ONLY APPEAR AT NIGHT AND ARE THERE TO fukk YOUR DEAD CORPSE. HATE THEM.
- Screamers - Baby Zombies that scream at you and attract other zombies. (Thanks WhatABlindManSees)
The amount of zombies you see at a time I would say is about 15 - 20 max. It's not anything like dead rising with massive numbers of zombies. I personally think it works well with the style of the game.
Controls You start out learning to parkour and as you level up, you open up more abilities that adds multiple combinations in your approach to the combat and parkour. You have 3 skill trees - Survivor (from completing missions), Agility (from parkour) and Power (from fukking up zombies). As you level up, you get points to unlock nodes on the tree.
At first, the controls were a bit jarring. The jump button is mapped to the right bumper on ps4 (R1). This is your main button that initiates your parkour. This was completely counterintuitive to me being used to 'X' being the jump button. Although as you keep playing it more and more, the controls become more natural - I did have the occasional issues when out off fore of decade of gaming I hit the 'X' button. You cannot map individual buttons to different functions and have only 3 presets. To initiate parkour, you need look upwards towards a ledge and then hit the jump button. It's a lot of fun sequencing a series of jumps to run across a series of obstacles. It's very very fluid once you get used to the control mechanism.
Each weapon you pick up has a different style of striking and it varies based on the stamina you have (stamina sucks in the beginning). Stamina works as follows - initially you can only strike 3 times in a row before you run out off stamina. As you level up, your number of strikes increases. It strikes a fine balance between being able to take down a few zombies and needing to run.
Weapons Most of the weapons I have come across are melee weapons. There are supposedly ranged weapons too and guns, but haven't come across them yet. The melee weapons have different levels reflected by a colour code - each higher level having better damage and durability. As you use the weapons, the durability goes down till you need to repair it - and you have a limited number of repairs per weapon.
Story (Potential spoilers) With the lacklustre of the story telling in recent games (destiny, watch dogs), I was nervous about the story in dying light. You are essentially a mercenary who has been sent in to retrieve a secret file. You come across two camps of survivors - a group who are trying to save as many people as possible and a rival group who will do whatever it takes to survive. As you run missions for these two groups of survivors, you are also following the orders of the unit that sent you in. In between all these survivors you come across other pockets of survivors who have their own set of side missions. I find most games lack a compelling story to draw me into it, but surprisingly I have found myself drawn into the story presented here. I am at 15% of completion with the story (15 hours in), been sidetracked by so many other activities.
Sound The voice acting is great. The voices of the characters are varied enough that as you spend more time with the game, you come to associate certain voices with certain characters. The voice acting adds a whole dimension of character to the survivors you meet, from the exuberant kid who wants to save the world to the desperate voice of a father who just wants to survive. There is a great amount of attention to detail with the characters that the voice acting brings to life.
Techland has done a fantastic job with the sound design that really adds to the atmosphereand really immerses me in the game. One of the coolest things is that when you are on a two way radio, you receive the responses over the Ps4 controller speaker, as if you are holding the radio in your hand. Very cool implementation. You controller rumbles every time a plane with a supply drop passes over you. There is also a rain cycle that at night or day really changes the atmosphere and feel of the game, everything is much darker making it harder to navigate; and imagine the sound of rain drops, thunder and deafening screams of zombies in the background.
TLD: I love the game. 8.5/10
EDIT: On a separate note, I forgot to mention I got banned from Twitch for streaming it. Got a whole DMCA take down letter from WB. Found it hilarious.
EDIT: Added 8th zombie type, thanks WhatABlindManSees.
Just IN TIME!
always late