Dying Light Game Review. You've got to be nimble if you don't want to become a zombie's dinner during an undead apocalypse. Dead Island developer Techland understands this, and lets players become zombie-dodging parkour masters in this first-person openworld adventure.
During a recent hands-on session with Dying Light, I got a sense for how players become more capable urban runners throughout the game. Early on, your character can slowly but surely mount high ledges, leap across gaps, and slide under narrow openings. Jumping forward in the story, movement speed becomes more fluid and allows you to flee faster and more elegantly move through the city. Killing zombies and completing missions lets you level up and choose new skills, like a jump kick or side dodge.
Exploring the tropical setting and scavenging scrap also lets players craft and modify devastating melee weapons. Guns like pistols and machineguns are available, but custom implements of destruction like flaming machetes and electrified axes do the trick with pizazz. These brutal melee weapons feel similar to how they did in Dead Island, but with added visceral impact and gore only possible on the most powerful hardware.
Dying Light plays well and looks stunning in these short hands-on previews, but we won't know its full potential until we're able to survive sunset to sunrise with three other zombie killers . At this point in development, Techland appears to be applying lessons from the buggybut-fun Dead Island to make a more polished apocalypse.
Platform: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC
Style: 1-Player Action (4-Player Online)
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive
Developer: Techland
Release: 2015
