The Therapist Gamer

Dying Light takes place at the very beginning of a zombie apocalypse - no one is really sure what's going on and an entire region of the world has been quarantined.  Your character parachutes into the area to assist with developing a cure. It's an open world game that involves free-climbing in a first-person perspective.  You don't really have any weapons to fight the zombies so you have to find whatever will work and craft things together.  You can, of course, get into fights with the zombies but there are so many of them that a better tactic is to try to avoid them.

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Dying Light occupies a strange place - it's both intriguing and uninteresting, both engaging and boring.  It's hard to explain.  All of the parts of a good game seem to be there, but something is just missing.  It's like every part of the game falls just shy of being great.  

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The gameplay can be pretty fun.  You run around a city overwhelmed with zombies and you can climb anywhere you want.  There's some sense of reward in finding new and better weapons, and luring a bunch of zombies with fireworks and then throwing a Molotov Cocktail on them is fun every time.  Every act of climbing or combat gives you experience points and you gain new abilities as you level up.  But after a while things feel pretty empty.  The combat with the zombies usually boils down to smacking them with a bat (or whatever) and then they drop a bit of money.  If you get hit then you can just back away and heal up.  At night some super-zombies roam around and they're scary, but you can just sleep during the night time.  Before long it dawns on the player that they really are better off just avoiding everything - and that's not very exciting.  There are some good survival/horror sections of the game that were genuinely creepy, so props to whoever put those in there.

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Well, a game with an unsatisfying gameplay loop can often be fine as long as the story is engaging.  In a general sense I think the world the developers created is interesting and intriguing, but I thought the story was bland and forgettable.  I couldn't tell you what the story was about.  It was all standard fare - warring factions, betrayal, and a bad guy that's just gotta go.  I'm not saying I could write something better, but it didn't really keep my attention - I finished the game because, well, that's what you do with a game.

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There's a saying in media that you should "show, not tell."  For example, here are two ways to convey to the audience that someone is frugal: 1) Someone says "You know Jerry, he's such a tightwad!" or 2) We see Jerry eat dinner on paper plates, and then wash the plates and put them in a dish rack so he can use them again tomorrow.  The second way of doing things is much more engaging and effective.  Dying Light mostly does "telling."  You're told someone is smart.  You're told the bad guys are bad.  You're told some guy has a rough exterior but a good heart.  But they don't show you enough, and the story loses a lot of impact because of it.

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Even though the game looks nice and has a lot of production value, overall it's just strikingly average.  The game features co-op play and I imagine that adds quite a bit to the fun.  But playing it solo just wasn't for me​.

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Oddly, the first DLC for the game, The Following (which was included in my copy of the game), is probably better than the original game.  Rather than being set in the middle of a large urban area, the game takes place in a rural farmland with lots of rolling hills and open space.  I don't know if they should have made the main game that way, but it was just such a refreshing change of pace.  In the original game you enter a new section of the city about halfway through, but I think they should have put in a wide open area instead - just like the DLC.  

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In The Following, it comes to light that there are some people who are immune to the zombie virus.  Your character is interested because they could probably be used to find a cure.  But there are (of course) different obstacles in getting these people to cooperate with you.  There's also a religious cult that I thought was much more interesting that the villains in the main game.

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Gameplay-wise, The Following has a major addition - you can drive a dune buggy around the countryside!  It feels so liberating after spending so many hours in the claustrophobic city.  You find and develop upgrades for the buggy that feel genuinely impactful (unlike a lot of the other upgrades in the game).  For example, you can rig your buggy with a flamethrower so you can burn up any zombies you missed while trying to run them over.  As a general rule I'd say DLC is usually not nearly as good as the core game, but The Following is one instance where the DLC is better than the core game.

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The DLC gives me some hope that the game developers know what they're doing and can come out with some good stuff in the future.  Though I wasn't thrilled with Dying Light, I'm still pretty interested to see what they come out with next.