Being thrust into the visually gorgeous, yet rundown city of Harran in Dying Light, I couldn’t help but feel initially disappointed. The game play in Dying Light seemed exactly the same as Dead Island, but the more one gets hurled through the story, the more one begins to realize that the two games are not exactly the same.
Dying Light is everything Dead Island strived to be.
Though similar, the game evolves as one begins bludgeoning and slashing through zombies, parkouring your way from building to building to avoid the undead, completing the main quests and the surprisingly compelling side quests, which all elevate the game to a whole different caliber.
We are thrown into the game as Kyle Crane, a Global Relief Effort, or GRE, operative, who has been injected into Harran, a fictional Middle Eastern city that has been quarantined from the rest of the world.
While Dying Light may not have the best graphics ever, they are definitely not the worst quality. The city of Harran is a diverse, beautiful city, which changes scenery the more you explore. With the parkour mechanics of the game, you can scale buildings or freeways to reach amazing viewpoints and see the vegetation between the buildings and bodies of water around it.
Although Harran maybe a fictional city, most Middle Eastern cities in fact don’t look monotone and barren as most video games and movies tend to portray the city. The colors change from area to area, the night and day cycles gave different shades and tones to the game, and the attention to detail was just incredible in certain parts. The gory nature of the game is also accurate and atomically correct.
In the game, the player’s orders are to retrieve files that could have information on a cure. Unfortunately, these files are in the hands of a psychopath named Suleiman, who went ballistic after his brother’s death during the outbreak. But when the player arrives, he or she is wedged into a battle between two local forces striving for complete control of the city.
One of the most refreshing parts about the game is the charming and rage-inducing main and secondary characters, which make all the side quests so much more fun and interesting than the rushed generic side quests most games throw in to brag about the extra hours of gameplay.
My favorite of all characters in the game is Gazi, an insane grown man who speaks in third person, and makes the player run errands to please his mother in exchange for necessities. Gazi’s mother has long been a walking brain-eater, but his crazy mind has left him blissfully ignorant. He’ll also leave you with one of the best quotes in the game, which is pretty solid advice: “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy!”
In Dying Light, there is a clock that changes the timing of the day. Although it may not be so scary to explore in the daylight, at night everything changes. The player’s vision is greatly decreased, the zombies are definitely more active and a special kind of undead chases you through the night with extreme speed and strength. This mixed with constantly breaking weapons the player has to repair make a lot of moments in the game nerve-racking and add a nice thrill that gets your blood pumping.
Throw in references to Legend of Zelda, The Last of Us and Batman’s Dark Knight for little surprises, there is so much to explore in this world. So how does the game hold up? Though it may not be at the caliber of The Last of Us story-wise, it was still a game worth playing! With good graphics, fun mechanics and hours of game play, this game easily deserves an 8/10.
The tale of Harran is a story that will grip player’s minds and have the audience rethinking whether they would actually survive in a real zombie apocalypse or not.