The zombie apocalypse, parkor, action, and horror. What guy wouldn’t love this game? Adam Workman reviews this new first-person perspective video game.
—
Let me just start out by saying that this is exhilarating game play, especially if you play with friends. I might mention my pal DarkForces18 as just D from time to time. I’ve had a lot of fun playing this and since there are so many side-quests to discover and conquer, for the survivors around the city, I still have not completed the game. ‘Dying Light’ has been fun because of the skills and parkour abilities you can upgrade into, the crazy weapons you can find and craft, and the wide open city to explore.
♦
As for the parkour abilities that put this game on the map, the hype was not without a basis. Everything and it’s brother is a new way to move if you upgraded to gain the abilities in the skill trees. You can learn how to, for instance, double-leg dropkick the zombie your partner, D, was about to decapitate. You can learn how to use a zombie to vault over a car or other obstruction and leave your friend to fight the horde your activities have stirred up. Don’t worry though it was not always me causing the problems, as on more than one occasion I ended up with a zombie-luring firecracker exploding at my feet while I managed my inventory, or purposefully throwing a Molotov cocktail at the peculiar oily puddle and accompanying barrel that I was standing in.
⊕
As for the weapons of the game and their apocalyptic modifications, I can only say that Techland has pulled through again in their effort to make sure your weapons are always as catastrophic to a zombie horde as possible. To testify to the effectiveness of the upgrades I can honestly tell you that there was more than one occasion where D and I were carving through a zombie horde, drop kicking as we went, when all of a sudden the flick of my wrist would send out a spark from my weapon that sent a zombie sprawling twenty feet away.
♦
Drop me a line and tell me for sure what it was that you use to upgrade the weapons. For the most part what I noticed had a lot to do with aerosol cans and lighters, or electric wire and batteries or at least those are my favorites.
⊕
Last, but never least, on my review list is the open-world aspect of the game. The city of Harran, Techland’s zombie-infested playground for parkour specialists, is amazing, and I haven’t even been to the second section of the city. Moving through the blood-stained apartments and biter-filled streets looting and scavenging for supplies really helps you feel the desperation of the situation at hand. You feel like that much more of a humanity’s last hope type of person when you find the helpless people throughout the city, who either need your help with a task or are just being attacked and can not seem to fend for themselves under the pressure.
♦
To be completely honest this a terrific and supremely entertaining game, and I don’t usually like zombie games. So I am going to give this game a 4.5 out of 5. I took off the half a point because it is really annoying when the zombies grab and bite you and you can’t seem to do anything to protect yourself, and because being outside a safe zone at night might as well be shooting yourself in the foot with a bullet that has some random poison on it. You might survive if you are lucky enough to find an antidote.