Dying Light is a zombie survival... action game? from several years ago. I played it around release time and got about halfway through the game but stopped - I have been meaning to go back as I thought it deserved a proper shot and it went on a pretty deep discount in the last Xmas sale, so here we go round 2!
You are Kyle Crane (called Crane 99% of the time) and a Secret Agent of the mysterious UN Agency "The GRE", and you have been sent into the fiction arabian city of "Harran", which is currently under a strict military lockdown due to a severe zombie outbreak. Much of the game involves running around this city, accumulating crafting parts and fighting off the occasional zombie or two or twelves. Your parkour skills are extraordinary but you do eventually get tired - meaning you have to plan your routes carefully. The zombies themselves are some seriously tough hombres - you have a meaty melee combat system but with a standard "gray" weapon, you essentially have to break it to kill a zombie, meaning you will be defenseless quite quickly if you put down every beast in your path forcing you to think about how to distract or outmaneuver the dead. This leads to the game's greatest strength - being perched on top of a building or bus, SURROUNDED by dozens of undead, and seeing your destination off in the distance and wondering to yourself "Okay how the heck am I going to make it over there with what I've got? And where could I maybe stop for a bit of loot along the way...". When the game sticks to this gameplay loop, it shines like a diamond. You unlock more abilities that help you traverse and fight off the dead (my particular favorite being an upgraded drop kick that hurls enemies off of whatever building you are leaping towards) and your arsenal slowly grows over time as well. However, not all is wonderful in this rough undead land - there are some sections, few at first, many later, where you are confined to small areas and must fight off hordes or groups of zombies with what weapons you have. This is where the game seriously falters to the point of significant frustration - these sections just kind of suck. The enemies are rarely any fun to actually FIGHT, and the autosave system that normally works well in the overworld parts is very constraining in the sections where you must then repeat fights with LESS resources than you had at the beginning.
Dying Light is a great survival zombie game that is held back by the developers insistence on mixing up the genuinely great thing they had going with obligatory "shooty bang bang" parts and it was a damn slog to get through them at the end. More than half of this game is a solid 'A' but the mandatory bits in sewers and buildings that could've been an interesting twist end up being anything but.
You are Kyle Crane (called Crane 99% of the time) and a Secret Agent of the mysterious UN Agency "The GRE", and you have been sent into the fiction arabian city of "Harran", which is currently under a strict military lockdown due to a severe zombie outbreak. Much of the game involves running around this city, accumulating crafting parts and fighting off the occasional zombie or two or twelves. Your parkour skills are extraordinary but you do eventually get tired - meaning you have to plan your routes carefully. The zombies themselves are some seriously tough hombres - you have a meaty melee combat system but with a standard "gray" weapon, you essentially have to break it to kill a zombie, meaning you will be defenseless quite quickly if you put down every beast in your path forcing you to think about how to distract or outmaneuver the dead. This leads to the game's greatest strength - being perched on top of a building or bus, SURROUNDED by dozens of undead, and seeing your destination off in the distance and wondering to yourself "Okay how the heck am I going to make it over there with what I've got? And where could I maybe stop for a bit of loot along the way...". When the game sticks to this gameplay loop, it shines like a diamond. You unlock more abilities that help you traverse and fight off the dead (my particular favorite being an upgraded drop kick that hurls enemies off of whatever building you are leaping towards) and your arsenal slowly grows over time as well. However, not all is wonderful in this rough undead land - there are some sections, few at first, many later, where you are confined to small areas and must fight off hordes or groups of zombies with what weapons you have. This is where the game seriously falters to the point of significant frustration - these sections just kind of suck. The enemies are rarely any fun to actually FIGHT, and the autosave system that normally works well in the overworld parts is very constraining in the sections where you must then repeat fights with LESS resources than you had at the beginning.
Dying Light is a great survival zombie game that is held back by the developers insistence on mixing up the genuinely great thing they had going with obligatory "shooty bang bang" parts and it was a damn slog to get through them at the end. More than half of this game is a solid 'A' but the mandatory bits in sewers and buildings that could've been an interesting twist end up being anything but.