"Chaos is the one true order of things. To pretend otherwise is the sheerest folly."
--Rais, Dying Light
The fictional Middle-Eastern country of Harran is the combat and acrobatics paradise of Dying Light, a zombie game that can easily span 70+ hours and that offers a deep system of gameplay mechanics. The Following, included as part of the Platinum Edition, easily adds an additional 20-30+ hours for completionists in the form of an additional (formerly DLC) story about a religious cult that has found a means of immunity to the Harran virus even after getting bitten. Featuring some of the best gameplay in the zombie and parkour subgenres, Dying Light soars incredibly high at its best, only hindered by a basic main story (in that it does little beyond the standard or easy zombie plot threads) and a presentation of moral relativism that only condemns it for non sequitur reasons.
Production Values
Sometimes, the faces and character models as a whole are rather detailed for a Switch port. Certain characters like Jade and Rais benefit from this the most. The environment of Harran is massive and has enough diversity between its different locations and the day-night cycle to ensure that Dying Light is not hostage to an open world with limited design, with the loading times to accelerate the upcoming day or night when using a sleeping area being almost immediate. Whether slamming a melee weapon into an undead attacker or leaping and climbing buildings in a smooth series of movements, the game tends to maintain a strong aesthetic with relatively high quality graphics and performance. This is amplified by intervals of natural phenomena like rain and fog that can affect the gameplay--one example is that rain can prime zombies to be hit with electrified weapons. Great voice acting all the way through, including in the DLC, reinforces the production values even more. Not every character gets developed despite the many hours of main and side quests, but that is not the fault of the voice cast.
Gameplay
What Dying Light does right, it does exceptionally well, chiefly its zombie fighting and environmental traversal respectively. After a point in the primary story, human enemies become more commonplace, but it is the zombies and the risks of using the always breakable melee weapons or guns that can attract more of them with noise that adds deeper urgency to the combat (though the bow sidesteps both of these problems and you can even retrieve arrows that have been shot). You come to buy and craft far more than just enhanced pipes, with the arsenal expanding to bows and arrows, various firearms, and specialty melee weapons of increasingly high damage outputs. As the separate combat and parkour experience bars level up, more durability and abilities become available as well. Eventually, for instance, playable character Kyle Crane can smear corpse blood on his body to conceal himself from zombies, which wears off faster with quicker movements but can be replenished again and again.
This can be used to slaughter masses of undead quietly one by one or to secure time for an escape. Other things like the capacity to craft shields can be unlocked. These abilities help you survive much more easily against the droves of sometimes slow zombies during the day; at night, the experience points earned for acrobatics and combat are doubled outside of safe zones marked by UV light, and although every upgrade helps, the zombies are more aggressive--and Night Hunters, patrolling enemies that can chase you relentlessly to a safe zone, lurk. Death at night does not forfeit XP as it does during the same, the exception being death inside daylight challenges. Aside from the multitude of missions and challenges in the base game, the Definitive Edition includes Hellraid levels accessed through an arcade machine at the Tower, where a medieval-esque setting with its own themed weapons can be found free of the day and night system. Hellraid bounties can also unlock weapon blueprints for the rest of the game.
Then there is The Following DLC, a tale of Kyle departing from his allies to investigate a cult supposedly immune to the virus. Here, you can actually decrease the amount of Night Hunters by optionally destroying Volatile Hives scattered around the enormous map: however, they are occupied by the Night Hunters during the day, so night attacks are ideal. Without the introduction of the upgradeable buggy, traversing this new location would take an incredible amount of time: not only is the map very large, but it has very few buildings, so the grappling hook is not anywhere near as useful. The streets and architecture of Harran are replaced by mostly open roads and fields. A plethora of zombies are there to be run over by the initially basic vehicle that you can summon from any safe area, but it can eventually be equipped with enhancements like a reinforced exterior, a flamethrower, an electric barrier that shocks every zombie striking your car, or temporary UV lights to create a mobile safe zone at night. Yes, Dying Light brings more unlockables in this DLC.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
Kyle Crane, an agent of the Global Relief Effort, is dropped into the country of Harran after a virus devastates the people trapped inside. His mission is to find someone named Suleiman who he is told has information on the viral structure that can be used to fashion a cure. Turning people into zombies once bitten, the Harran virus is not all that Crane faces--human troublemakers under the command of warlord Rais practice a host of cruel, selfish, and emotionalistic acts for the sake of power. Kyle infiltrates a benevolent local group situated at what is called the Tower to help survivors and gain more information about what is occurring.
Intellectual Content
The main human antagonist--for the "real Harran virus," as Kyle calls them, would be evil, stupid people instead of zombies--is Rais, who plans on making Jade, a renowned athlete before the virus, fight to her death against zombies, cuts a hand off of one of his subordinates for stealing from him, lies to Crane about a deal to give the latter life-saving Antizin (an antiviral drug), and often espouses fallacious, relativistic, egoistic philosophy, sometimes bordering on outright misogyny as well. A former follower of his even says that eating a human eyeball is required to join him. Pretending that it is enlightened and grand to disregard all moral notions except for one's own preferences (of course, one cannot make reason false, an impossible thing in itself, by wishing it or nullify moral obligations because it is inconvenient), Rais says he and Crane are in a philosophical war, something Kyle is himself too stupid to understand since he denies it.
An irony of the brutality Rais is seen engaging in on one occasion is that, though he claims that it is weak or invalid to pursue anything less than what is ultimately egoistic relativism, he punishes the aforementioned person for theft with the loss of their hand, a cultural norm in the Middle-East derived at least in part from Surah 5:38 of the Quran, which says to cut off the hand of a male or female thief. It is untrue that believing or doing something another person happens to believe or do makes one irrational, unoriginal, or weak, but Rais would hold otherwise, and yet he still practices something that he might only have thought of due to religious and cultural influences. He is a fool indeed, just not merely because he is a danger to the protagonists. His philosophy is inherently irrationalistic and, beyond this, he is a seeming hypocrite even when it comes to living it out.
Conclusion
Masterfully combining climbing, escape, and combat mechanics as the foundation of perhaps the greatest zombie gaming franchise of all time, Dying Light gets so much right that its at times lackluster storytelling execution and somewhat halfhearted, wildly philosophically incomplete exploration of egoism and moral relativism do not capsize it. Between the base single player content and The Following DLC, one could also easily play for 100 hours or more, all on a handheld system thanks to the Switch. These hours are not artificially multiplied or devoid of superb gameplay and landscapes. More than with many other games, the mechanics and digital landscapes are united excellently.
Content:
1. Violence: From decapitations with bladed weapons to the removal of limbs and explosions of blood, this is a distinctly violent game.
2. Profanity: Words like "fuck," "bastard," and "bitch" are used.
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