Gnome here with an XboxOne review of Dying Light, an open world zombie survival game brought to you by Techland, the creators of Dead Island. This is supposed to be the more improved version of Dead Island; the game that Dead Island was supposed to be. While I would say that it is superior to its predecessor, it still falls short of being a truly great game.

The main problem with Dying Light is the campaign’s story. The gaming marketplace is so saturated with zombie video games that if you want to stand out in the crowd, you really need to up your story telling and make the audience really care about what they are experiencing. None of the characters in the game really made any impact on me. They are all pretty cliché and I found myself skipping through most of the cut scenes because I just wasn’t that interested in what they had to say. The game begins with the protagonist being air dropped into a zombie infested city, where he immediately becomes infected...pfft, n00b. You are then rescued and taken to the Tower; a safe zone where many citizens of the city have taken refuge. You soon learn that the Tower is in conflict with another group led by a man named Rais, who will be the main protagonist.

This is where the game starts to get boring for me. You spend most of your time as an errand boy for both sides, running around the city collecting items and turning on machines. The side quests where you have to fetch items for different citizens are really irritating. You will run from one side of the map to the other and back again just to be sent all the way to the opposite end of the map for something else. To save time, I found myself picking up side quest items on my way to main quest locations and then returning them when on my way to another main quest point. While this saved me a lot of time, it disconnected me from the side quest itself and I would just skip all the dialog.

All that being said, what matters most in a game is the actual gameplay. It’s here that Dying Light both succeeds and fails. The saving grace for this game is the parkour system. Leaping from building to building and climbing walls Assassin’s Creed style is a lot of fun and never really gets boring. But that’s about where the fun ended for me. The actual interaction with the zombies wasn’t all that great. In the early game, the zombies are just too tough and I found myself running around them most of the time. They weren’t very dangerous, they just took too many hits to kill. The run of the mill zombie would take 3 or 4 hits to kill, and those 3 or 4 hits would drain your stamina and you would have to back off and let it refill. Who runs out of breath after swinging a hammer 4 times?...the guy must be a hardcore smoker. As you level up the combat gets easier and you gain abilities that make it more fun (the drop kick is hilarious), but it’s also a blast to kick the zombies into spike traps or your explosives to defeat them.

Weapon crafting is back, but it’s pretty lackluster. You have your basic fire and electricity mods, but not much else. The weapons themselves are pretty standard. There’s the puny knives that do no damage, the huge two-handed weapons that are slow and drain all your stamina, and the actually useful ones like the clubs and machetes. Guns are also present, and unlike in Dead Island, they are actually useful. One thing I find annoying in most games with RPG elements is that you constantly find weapons in the later part of the game that you were finding at the beginning. “Oh look! A chest! What’s inside? It’s a hammer that does a quarter of the damage as my current weapon. Oh boy! Sure am glad I killed those twenty zombies to get this.”

And that brings me to my next point - the lock picking. Screw the lock picking. It’s so annoying! I would continuously find myself clearing out hordes of zombies so I could safely pick a lock and then not get rewarded for my efforts. “Oooooo, a lead pipe and a bag of coffee”. Yeah the coffee is worth a hundred dollars at the store, but when the weapons at the store cost five thousand dollars and every zombie has about fifty bucks on them, I don’t see the point of selling items. I got so excited when I saw a police van with a “very hard” lock to pick. I thought to myself, this is it. It’s gotta be a gun or grenade or something awesome. It was a knife…… *sigh*.

Now if you’re a completionist like me, you will be looking at the achievements. There’s nothing here that is too difficult to do, but some of them are quite time consuming. Completing all the side quests will probably take you the longest, hence the 100 Gamerscore reward. Everything else is pretty standard: Save survivors. Kill a certain number of a certain enemy. Reach a certain level.

If you don’t have 3 other friends that want to play with you for the co-op achievements there are websites like True Achievements and Xbox Achievements where you can find people to team up with.

All nitpicking aside, Dying Light is a fun game to play, but it just doesn’t stand out enough to be truly great. The graphics are good and the controls are responsive. There are no glitches that I noticed. Like most games with a multiplayer option, it’s much more fun when played with friends. Having other people to talk too and compete with can break up the monotony. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from playing Dying Light, but I would wait for a price drop. I don’t think anyone will be talking about Dying Light in the near future and you’ll be able to pick it up pretty cheap. You will definitely get a lot of content for your money. There are easily over 30 hours of main story and side missions to complete.

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