When I first saw the trailer for Dying Light, I thought to myself, “This looks like an upgraded version of Dead Island.” When I saw the gameplay demo of it, I thought to myself “Well this looks like a Dead Island clone.” And I’m not going to lie, I wasn’t too interested in buying it. But now that I have my hands on it, I must say — I’m really glad I was wrong.
Dying Light has lived way past my expectations. It definitely has a lot of Dead Island elements to it with the zombies, the open world and the weapon crafting, but it feels like such a fresh new game. The story seems way more present than Dead Island. With Dead Island, the story just didn’t feel too “there” enough for me, but with Dying Light it definitely plays more like a single-player game that has a co-op campaign in addition to it, instead of the almost constant in-your-face co-op that Dead Island kinda did. Am I saying that Dead Island was a bad game? No, not in the slightest. I loved Dead Island and I still play it with my friends as well, but I feel the gameplay and the storyline in Dying Light are much more improved than in Dead Island.
The weapon crafting is pretty much the same as it was in Dead Island, but I feel the mods in this one are much more realistic than it was in Dead Island. And with the vastly improved day and night cycle, it adds a completely new element to the gameplay, because let me tell you from a personal point of view, once you experience nightfall in Dying Light, you’re going to be very hard-pressed to want to be out after dark. There are things out there that you probably don’t want to fight yet.
If I have to say anything, I would say Dying Light is a very fine hybrid between Dead Island, Mirror’s Edge and Assassin’s Creed wrapped together very nicely and done very well. The parkour element is pretty simple and fun to use, and the different skills that you’ll unlock in the different skill trees definitely seem more needed to complete various challenges in the game. But in the end, you’re definitely going to find yourself randomly running around and jumping from rooftop to rooftop, drop-kicking a zombie in the face and bashing its head in with whatever weapon you happen to be carrying. And to be quite honest, there’s nothing more liberating than drop-kicking a zombie in the face.
The combat is pretty much the same as all the other Dead Islands, but with Dying Light you really do want to pick your battles, because once you break a weapon you can repair it a certain amount of times, but after that, when it’s gone it’s gone. And given the fact that this is now on next-gen consoles, they have a lot more power to put more zombies on the screen.
With Dead Island you can easily see eight different zombies on the screen at once, but with Dying Light this game will easily fit somewhere in the neighborhood of like twenty-two zombies at once, so yeah you can probably take down three or four but you don’t want to fight any more than that, and don’t even get me started on the volatiles. I’ll let you discover them on your own.
All in all, Dead Island is a really great next-gen title, and I’m really looking forward to Dead Island 2. Dying Light is in stores right now so if you have the means to buy it, get it. If you have a friend that has a physical copy, get it. If you have a friend that will let you take their license so you can download it to your Xbox or PS4, get it. Because this is a game you probably don’t want to miss out on. There’s much more to explore and there’s much more to see and do, and I for one want to see what this world has to offer. So go pick up Dying Light as soon as you can. Goodnight and good luck.
