Dying Light
#194
We'll talk about it next time I see you
Time to Platinum: 40 Hours | Difficulty: 5/10 | Enjoyment: 9/10
Overview
Set in the fictional city of Harran. You play as Kyle Crane. An undercover GRE agent who's been sent to blend in with the locals (what's left of them) to help recover a file who was stolen by a man named Kadir Suleiman. Upon parachuting into the city. Crane is bitten and unlike generic zombie titles. There is a way to postpone the virus turning you into a zombie. You get rescued and end up at the tower. Which helps with your cover. You then try to earn trust of everyone by learning the basics of parkour and becoming something called a runner. Someone who basically goes around the city doing jobs and getting supplies etc. As you try and find stacks of Antenzin (The suppressant to the virus) you learn of someone whos become somewhat of a warlord. After that a lot of shit goes down and it's your job to stop a series of events, uncover the truth about the virus, become an absolute badass. There's a ton more to say on it really. It's story is pretty interesting and fleshed out. It's not just do this, do that, go here, go there. There's meaning to most of the stuff you do.
Gameplay
If you've ever played Dead Island I guess you could say combat is similar to that. Except it's much more fluid, you have better upgrades that actually do something and it's all around a ton of fun. The best part of the game honestly is the parkour. Running around building to building levelling up. Getting faster, moving from A to B with loads of different routes and ways to do it makes the game feel really fresh and flow really well. Don't get me wrong, it starts off a little stiff and probably what some may call boring. The more you level up though the better it gets. You get more moves to help in combat like throwing enemies. You can literally run up zombies and bounce of their heads like you would in the old school Mario games. There's a trophy referencing that game actually which was pretty cool. Same with Parkour. When you level that up. It makes traversing the narrow streets, building rooftops, swamps much much better. You eventually get your hands on a grappling hook which makes it flow so much better. It's so much fun going from A to B in some scenarios. There's two main hub areas. Slums and Old Town. Slums is more the open area with houses and like a favela type construct to the buildings? Forgive me if I got that wrong. It's just all cramped and yeah. If you've played it. I'm sure you know what I mean. The Old Town is probably the best for all the parkour stuff as it's a lot higher up, there's more paths, you can go through buildings, you can do this and that.
Overall it's a very fun game, gameplay wise. It does start off stiff and a little slow ability wise but level up and you will enjoy it so much more. Characters
There isn't much to say on characters really as you only really deal with some people a handful of times. I guess you could say the main two are Kyle (you, protagonist) and Rais (antagonist).
Kyle is your undercover agent with a mission to carry out. He has his orders but the good thing about him is he uses his own brain. He's not a government brained fool who think it's mission or dead. He thinks for himself and he tries to do what's best for everyone. He doesn't much at the start but as the story progresses he gets more and more attached to the situation and the people. As he uncovers more about the GRE, their intentions etc. He literally starts questioning his mission and yeah. I won't go into spoiler territory but he's a protagonist that has a brain. Also, he's voiced by a great voice actor to in Roger Craig Smith. He does, Chris in Resident Evil. Batman in errr Batman. Also, Ezio if you didn't know that. So a competent voice actor. To be honest, everyone has a good voice actor in this game. As for Rais. There's a lot to say but it's best to keep it short because of spoilers. He's the big bad of the game really and he tries to control everything happening in the quarantine zone. There is no government of police force inside the zone so he has full reign of what happens. He's ruthless and has no time for BS basically. You run into him a lot in the game and let's just say. Whenever he's around. Watch how angry Kyle gets, every single time, no joke. Great characters which make the game deeper and more fun than you probably think from Zombie game like this. Trophies
Main Game: For the main part, trophies on the main list are not hard at all. There's a lot of misc trophies. There's a trophy for doing all side quests. Story trophies, collectibles. Probably the most annoying trophy of the whole main list is doing 5 quests with the same 3 partners in one session. Luckily I had no trouble doing this with my partners in this game. That trophy was all set up and complete within 5 minutes of everyone joining. Honestly. I would say there's more misc than anything else really. You need to level up Power and Agility to 18. Couple of Co-op trophies that were no challenge at all really. Overall the main list game are pretty easy.
DLC: The game has 3 DLC lists. A Parkour challenge which isn't that easy. You have to complete 10 parkour challenges which is where you go through all of the checkpoints in a certain amount of time and some of the turns and speed you have to get is pretty incredible but once you learn the patterns of them they're not honestly that bad. Those DLC trophies are sat at UR. There's 3. Open 5 GRE chests in quarantine zones which is simple enough. They have some pretty good weapons. The others are for completing the 10 challenges. One trophy is for completing all of the challenges at night. Which makes it even more tough honestly. You have a flashlight which shines in front of you but it can be really dark. Also, at night is when the harder enemies tend to come out so you have to dodge them as well but if I'm being honest. I think the game if you do the challenges tends to keep them away from you. So you don't really run in to any when doing the challenges. You do run in to enemies and some can actually help get faster scores if you vault on them for momentum. There's videos on youtube if you get stuck on them. The guide rates them at 7/10 difficulty but honestly. I'd put them at about a 4. It's not that difficult if you have level 24 agility which means you never get tired while running around.
Another DLC list is for doing Bozak horde which is basically your challenge mode. You're put into a scenario with 20 challenges. You have a bomb strapped to your ankle. You have to then complete the 20 challenges in order to win. The trophies on this are a pain in the ass but luckily because I went into the Horde last I was quite OP. I recommend doing the Bolter Liver glitch in The Following DLC to level yourself up to make the Bozak Horde much much easier. It means you can end up punching zombies and they would die in one hit which means you'd be able to finish quicker in turn unlocking stuff you need for trophies. It's basically a big challenge mode where you have to beat 20 challenges. You do have to complete it with a co-op partner for one trophy because you have to down them at the end to kill them to win.
The Following is a continuation of the story and there's a generic DLC list where it asks you to finish the story. Few misc and stuff. That's really easy to do. If you want to get to legend level 250 its highly suggested to have the following and to use the bolter liver glitch. I finished the game legend rank 203 due to it which meant I was ridiculously overpowered.
Overall difficulty: Parkour 4/10 Bozak horde without legend rank 6/10 with 4/10 and following 3/10. Conclusion
The conclusion of this game is that it's a ton of fun to play. It feels stiff at the start but when you finish quests and level up the story gets deeper and you become more agile and stonger it becomes really interesting and a lot of fun to play. I had a great time playing it. Some great characters and voice acting which make it much better. In these types of games you expect nothing but bad VA and boring content (looking at your Dead Island) but this was the opposite. It was even freaky when it needed to be which made it feel more like a horror than just a wooooooooo smash zombies. It sets the tone for how I want my type of Zombie games which follow this formula.
The only thing that annoys me about this game is the continuation of the story on DLC. Don't get me wrong the content is great. It's a brand new huge map and honestly. It's probably my second favourite huge expansion after Blood and Wine from the Witcher. I don't think anything will beat that for quite a while. I just don't like finding stuff out behind a paywall. Like there's a serious question when I saw all of the Dying Light 2 stuff and was wondering why we don't play as Kyle. I'll say why in the spoiler as to why it annoys me.
That's the reason I hate content behind a paywall especially important story. Other than that it's a great game that should be played. They regularly update it and do community events from time to time. We recently just did the Halloween one and got a nice brand new costume. (Which as of this is currently bugged because it doesn't load) They also released a raid recently as well I think which should hold people over until Dying Light 2 hits the shelves.