For once in a first-person game, parkour is a pleasure. And while, as in any parkour game, you’ll sometimes fluff your jump or struggle to do what you meant to, the controls work fine 90 per cent of the time and actually get better with practice. You’ll be surprised just how much of Harran is scalable, and how many routes you can discover from place to place. Angling your view towards the next grapple point and tapping the right bumper will grab the ledge in view and pull you up to it, even at speed, or help you jump gaps from a standing or sprinting start. No, this is a game of getting from A to B with speed, grace and daring, using routes above the roofline where you can, and sheer momentum where you can’t. Aggressive, upfront assault is not the way to play. Your hero starts off weak and takes a while to become much of a badass, and you’re constrained by a stamina gauge that runs out of puff after a few miserable hits, leaving you tired, slow to attack and worse to defend. Take on more than a handful of brain-hungry biters at once and you’ll soon be overwhelmed. This isn’t a game of crowd control or man vs zombie horde splatter. We already knew Techland could deliver scrappy, zombie skull-smashing melee combat and fun custom weapons, but who would have thought parkour was their thing? The big surprise is that it’s not just well executed, but seems such a natural part of the action that you wonder how zombie action games have been doing without it for so long. Luckily, Dying Light doesn’t need to rely on innovation or a plot for entertainment, because its mechanics, its world and its minute-to-minute gameplay are more than good enough. Still, at least we’re spared the downright woeful plotting and slapstick gore of the Dead Island games. From its railroaded, no-choice moral choices to its philosophy-spouting nutjobs, Dying Light takes its characterisation and plot twists direct from the Far Cry playbook, and you’ll spend a large chunk of the early game wondering how long your hero will keep taking orders from people who are clearly up to no good. However, you’re also forced get involved with a brutal gang of thugs, led by a psychotic warlord. Your job is to retrieve mysterious files, and you soon find yourself under cover with an organised group of survivors, working together to maintain some kind of order and keep the few remaining citizens alive. You’re the agent for some shifty global aid organisation, parachuted into Harran, a Turkish city in the grip of a zombie pandemic. Like TequilaWork’s Deadlight, it recognises the zombie’s biggest weakness – it’s lack of acrobatic prowess and speed – and turns it to your advantage.ĭon’t get too excited about the plot, either. On top of this, Dying Light adds parkour, with more than a nod to Mirror’s Edge and Assassin’s Creed. Structurally and narratively, it owes a lot to the Ubisoft school of open world game design, and particularly Far Cry 2 and Far Cry 3. Like Dead Island and its sequel, it’s a first-person, zombie apocalypse survival sim that’s packed full of scavenging for supplies, crafting offensive weaponry and putting it to good use on the shambling, rotting dead. Dead Island became a sizeable hit despite its numerous faults. Yet there’s a polish here and a coherence of tone that we’ve never seen in Techland’s games before. Sure, its storyline is uninteresting and it has problems with pacing and flow. Yes, it’s a mish-mash of clichés and smart ideas shamelessly appropriated from other games. OK, that’s not saying that much for a studio best known for patchy, bug-ridden adolescent zombie apocalypse fantasies (Dead Island) and good but not quite great Western shooters (the Call of Juarez series), but Dying Light is genuinely impressive. With Dying Light, Techland has made the best game of its career. Available on Xbox One (version tested), PS4, PC
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